3 Psychological Tricks to stop beating yourself up as a business owner

What is up? Today what I want to talk about is how I stopped beating myself up despite my mistakes and failures while building my business. And this came from a question that somebody asked in, I think it was like an Instagram poll. And they basically said, you know, how do you keep moving forward without beating yourself up when you've made so many mistakes? And this wasn't directed towards me, though I've made countless mistakes, but it was really directed about themselves. And this is a question that I've gotten time and time again. And I kind of had to put more thought towards it because I could regurgitate what some other YouTube person or podcast has told you, but it wouldn't be the truth. And so I really had to dissect like my mental framework for how I stopped doing this to myself. And I'll start with the premise, which is I think that anyone who is driven towards success and who is ambitious, a lot of the times they— the other side of that ambition or the other side of that success is that that person tends to be very hard on themselves. And so a lot of the times the beliefs that come with that are beliefs like, well, I don't know if I could be successful if I didn't beat myself up, if I wasn't so hard on myself, et cetera, et cetera. And I don't believe this to be true. It was a belief that I held for a very long time, which was if I'm not hard on myself and I'm not extremely judgmental and critical of myself, then I'm not going to have this drive to succeed. But what it actually is, is that it's one, it's a reframing. Okay. And then two, it's an understanding of the energy source that fuels your success. And so what I want to talk about today is the reframing, and then I'll talk next time more about the energy source and where you get that momentum for success from. The first piece of it is that I came to the realization that mistakes and failures are honestly just the prerequisite for success. And so honestly, I remember the first time I had that thought. And it was after reading the book Pour Your Heart Into It by Howard Schultz. And he talked about his success. And he talked about when he stepped out of Starbucks and how Starbucks flopped and how he had to come back into Starbucks. And the irony of it was that they, they basically fired him the first time because he wasn't doing good for the company because they didn't think that he was the right person to grow it to where it needed to grow to, right? And I remember thinking to myself when I read that, I was like, I still get chills thinking about it. I was like, man, even at that level, you can still fuck up that badly, right? Like where your whole board of directors is like, get out, you're not the right person, right? And then, you know, ironically, like 7 or 9 years later, they brought him back in. But I remember thinking to myself like, wow, if the biggest companies in the world and the most noteworthy CEOs in the world still experience mistakes and failures, then I am not immune. Like I am still going to experience those mistakes and failures. It's just a matter of how I deal with them and what my expectations are about them. Another good example of that is just, you know, Steve Jobs and how they kind of kicked him out and then brought him back in as well. Right. And how Apple didn't grow for years. I think that we have to take those things into consideration because for some reason it's easy for us to stomach it when we see someone else and we hear about someone else's mistakes and failures, but we're not able to do it once ourselves. And it's very interesting to me because those people are also known for being insanely successful. Yet their failures were huge. You know, they failed for years and years on end. And so I look at it like the more success you want, typically the more mistakes and failure is required because that's typically how people learn. Now, I would like to think that we can learn without the mistakes and failure, but I think that our most powerful learnings do come from the mistakes and failures. And for myself, I think that I have a lot of different things that I could beat myself up for, right? And in the past, I really think that I did that. All the time. And it was, um, a lot of people say like, well, do you think that that would have changed how the business went if you hadn't beat yourself up so much, if you hadn't been so hard on yourself? But I'm like, no, absolutely not, because I think it was really unproductive. So I'll give you an example, which was in 2019, I decided that I was going to delegate, you know, basically salary and pay. And so I said, this is, you know, I think we've got it down, I'm going to delegate it, it doesn't need to get passed through me anymore. And I didn't have the best system in place. Like I thought I did, but I did not. Um, and looking back on it now, I think that with a few small tweaks, it could have been, um, prevented, but instead, you know, I passed it off and I kind of just didn't look at it. Right. And that's, you know, if you look at my video on delegation, that's one of the pieces I should have been checking it. And I passed it off. And then one day, um, one of my teammates, uh, slacks me and she's like, Layla, I just got a $7,000 raise. And I was like, what? Because she was my direct report. And I'm like, what are you talking about? You got a $7,000 raise? I didn't give you a raise. Like, I'm sorry, I just gave you a raise a few months ago. Like, I'm kind of confused. What do you mean? And she's like, oh, well, you know, there was a decision that, you know, because of where I lived or something like that, it was, you know, looking at medium incomes and such where people live, we're going to, you know, just adjust everyone's income based on where they live and based on how that may have changed in the last year. And I was like, what? I'm like, we're a virtual company. What are you talking about? I didn't approve this. So I went in, I'm all stompy and I'm like, what's happened? And within an instant I was like, this is completely my fault. And they had, um, you know, the, the people that were deciding this had decided to basically give, you know, I want to say about 12 different people in the company raises without asking me, without telling their managers. I mean, it was just a complete mess. And those people were confused. They didn't understand. At the same time, they're like, I'm not going to say no, it's money. And that was a not fun mess to clean up. And I beat myself up for a long time over that. I remember sitting on a couch with Alex and I was telling him, he was just like, why are you— I was telling him, I just feel like I'm in a funk. I feel like it's something, blah, blah. He was like, why do you keep beating yourself up over this? He's like, I've made tons of mistakes in the business. And I was like, right, but this was mine. Like, I am solely responsible for this. I passed it off too soon. I didn't quality check it. Like, what the hell? And he was like, well, you know, worrying about it, beating yourself up isn't going to do anything. And I was like, fuck, he's so right. And I, you know, that's something that I like to observe in other people, which is, you know, I think that until that point, until I really experienced that, where I had like a couple of weeks where I was in a funk and I wasn't showing up well for my team, I used to think it was productive to beat myself up and be hard on myself. I'm like, well, that's why I'm a high performer, right? That's why I'm so successful. It's like, no, that's bullshit. But it's a good story to tell yourself. And so the 3 conclusions I kind of came to out of that, because that was probably the depths of my self-deprecation, was after that mistake, because I just felt like it was public. Everyone saw there was not an easy way to correct it, and it created long-term, you know, issues down the road because people were actually being overpaid for things that they were doing. And so I had to deal with it for a really long time and the repercussions of it. And so it kept reminding me and reminding me of that mistake. And so from that, I kind of wrote down the things that I learned and I wanted to use it as an opportunity to then say, next time something like this happens, I'm not going to beat myself up. I'm instead going to be productive. Okay. And so that was the first shift that I kind of came up with, which is I realized that when something happens, which you may label as a mistake or a failure, right? It's an experience. When an experience happens, we tend to have a lot of, if we think it didn't go our way, negative energy around it. And beating yourself up is really a way of, I think I wanna say like getting out that negative energy. It's a way of utilizing the negative energy. And so what I kind of thought to myself was, well, the energy is there and whether I use it to beat myself up or learn from it and do something more productive with my time is up to me, right? The energy is still there. So it's my responsibility to take that negative energy and turn it into positive energy. And so now when I make a mistake, I'm immediately, I'm like, you don't get to beat yourself up today. No, we're not going to indulge in that. Instead, we're going to say, you know, how can I use this to be more productive? How can I take this energy and make it into something that is going to push me forward and make me excited to wake up tomorrow? Right? Because beating yourself up isn't going to, like, there's no magical ideas that are going to come from that. You're not going to do something amazing for people on your team after you're beating yourself up for weeks and weeks on end. Right? It's usually that, um, it almost feels good for you to be mean to yourself. And so you just kind of indulge in that and for some reason you think it's productive, right? So that was the first thing is learning how to switch the energy. The second one is a question I ask myself, which is what helpful lesson can I learn from this experience? And it's really key to say helpful lesson because a lot of the times what we do is we make conclusions from mistakes that are not useful. And this is because humans like to make associations about things. And so we like to say, well, this was here and this was here and then the mistake happened. So it must be these two things. When in reality, a lot of the times it's more nuanced than that. It's, it's like something tiny in the details. It's not any of the things you've been looking at. And so a lot of the times what happens instead is that we, we tend to correlate something that didn't even cause the mistake. So we might say something like, now I've just learned I don't trust anybody. You know, now I just know that I just can't delegate this again. Now I just know that nobody can really do it like me. Like really nobody ever can. And we come up with all these like grandiose ideas that are terrible and really suffocating, um, that prevent us from ever moving forward or learning from that mistake again. When in reality it might just be that you didn't do the interview screening process as thoroughly as you could have. Um, you delegated something too soon and it was actually on you. It's not on them. It's not that somebody else can't do the job, right? Or it could be that you didn't train someone well to do the job. And so, um, that was the second thing that I realized is I need to ask myself, what helpful lesson can I learn? Because humans have the tendency to err towards the negative, and I want to train myself to go towards the positive and say, what can I positively take away from this experience? Right. And the third thing, which is I now expect myself to make mistakes. Building a business plan, a personal plan, a path to a goal that does not anticipate and expect mistakes is setting yourself up for disappointment. Right. And that's because we tend to, for some reason, understand that other people can make mistakes. Right. It's acceptable. We see that. We see these iconic figures who make mistakes. And yet for some reason, we think that we are beyond that and that we should know better. Right. And we say, well, I should have known better. I should have done this differently. Like, I can't believe this happened. All these unproductive thoughts when in reality, if you understand that most of the time, even if you make a fantastic plan, and you really try and you're really trying your best to be a great CEO or leader, you're going to mess up like 20% of the time, right? I would say minimum 20% of the time. Sometimes I feel like I'm messing up 50% of the time, but I'd say minimum 20%. And so that's the third piece is you have to expect yourself to make mistakes. Just as I would never expect that I could bring someone new into my team and then make zero mistakes, right? I wouldn't expect myself to make zero mistakes. Okay. Okay, so instead, take that expectation and put it on how you react to the mistake and say, I will, instead of not expecting myself to make mistakes, I will expect myself to try and react more positively every time I do. And so that is how I have learned to mitigate. I've not eliminated beating myself up, but I have definitely mitigated it and lessened it by doing those three things, by understanding that there's energy under that act of beating yourself up. And I can take that energy and continue to indulge in beating myself up, or I can take it and put it into something productive. The second one is asking for the right questions, right? Which is understanding is, you know, what can I get from this lesson that is helpful for me to move forward rather than looking at things that don't actually add up and kind of making these grandiose assumptions. And then lastly is just expecting mistakes. Remembering that you're human and just because you now have the title of CEO and you own a business doesn't mean you are not going to make mistakes. You're still the same human you were before and no matter how hard you try and how hard you study, you're going to make mistakes. Mistakes. And I would beg you to also not say the word mistake or failure, instead say experience. And so if this video is useful, uh, go ahead, hit subscribe, and hopefully I will see you on the next one.