When Do You Stop Believing in Yourself and Your Business? [My 3 Bold Steps]

When do you stop believing in yourself and your business? Today I will share my experience – personal as a founder and as a business psychologist consulting for over 15 years, because there are too many founders who need to hear that they matter and that they are doing something important and meaningful.

One of the hardest tasks facing founders is to stay true to themselves and believe in the value of their products and services on the days when their business is at a standstill. If you recognize yourself in the following lines – you are not alone! And all the paths you are yet to walk will still lead back to you.

Resource Crisis or Identity Crisis?

Most of the leaders I work with go through a natural stage of development where they feel like they are losing the ground beneath their feet: their revenue might decrease, and new opportunities might be lacking. They might feel fatigue from everything they have been doing for years. They might feel a quiet anger for all the sacrifices, regardless of their results.

Whatever deficits a person experiences, they are felt like holes in our very core. When a day comes in an entrepreneur’s life where the crisis is larger, the resources to cope diminish quickly and decisively. And unfortunately, there isn’t always a place to draw new strength and self-confidence from.

In such moments, I meet a large portion of my clients – struggling to understand themselves, their efforts, their results. How do we distinguish between a resource crisis and a personality crisis? In one case, we know who we are, what we are, and we realize that we lack time, energy, strength, visibility, and money to achieve our goals. In the other case, nothing of what we do brings us a sense of personal meaning.

Being Your Own Vacuum

It is very uncomfortable to feel the emptiness inside yourself and to force yourself to be a productive person. It is frightening to stop even for a moment in a world where competition is a cult and success is predominantly quantitative.

In such a moment, choosing to stop and take as much time as you need to rediscover yourself is invaluable. But also frightening. If you stay there too long, you get stuck and then you can’t gain momentum. It takes courage to stop for a moment, to listen to your inner resistance and “NO,” and to find the courage to take the next step.

The people I work with find me right at this moment – during an inner storm, in search of clarity, purpose, and direction. And before we start talking, thinking, and setting goals, I know how important it is to manage to give yourself time to experience all your thoughts and emotions and arrange them so that you can see the path ahead of you.

The feeling is like a vacuum and weightlessness. Loss.

You Stop Seeing Results, You Stop Believing in Yourself

Our society is structured in such a way that we measure our personality with all kinds of measures and weights – money, meters, kilograms, number of followers, sales volume – everything can be turned into a number.

A number that becomes the center of our personality. A center that pulls us with a gravity stronger than morality, existential meaning, and satisfaction.

We stop feeling joyful that we exist and that we are capable. Because the facts, i.e., the numbers, do NOT testify that we truly can. Numbers change, and if we allow ourselves to tie our worth as a human being to our temporary states, then over time we become such a walking number. And the problem with these metrics is that someone is always more, better, top.

People rarely actually want me to improve their numbers – more sales, more visibility, more satisfied and motivated employees. In fact, we most often dedicate the first 4 weeks of work to rebuilding the connection with ourselves so they can feel confident again. I have been through this too, and I remember how painful it was to hear others’ judgments and mocking comments – if there are no numbers, there is no point.

To Be Productive, You Must Be Proactive

When a person loses confidence in themselves, it is much harder for them afterward to take bold actions to make the necessary corrections in their business. Personally, in such moments, it helps me to ground myself and think about the quick wins I can achieve. When you believe in yourself, your inner Rebel leads you forward and shows you the way.

When, however, you feel powerless and a victim of circumstances, it is much harder to want to take any step forward at all.

Confidence after a feeling of loss comes with time, with effort, and with small, bold steps.

What makes us unconfident in business? Sometimes I think that the numbers themselves do not discourage us when we love our activity and it is fun and interesting for us to be active. We stop when we get bored, fed up, or are in a situation where we cannot experience joy. We stop when the next step seems distant, difficult, and meaningless. We stop making business decisions because we stop being ourselves.

How to Regain Your Confidence?

There are days when we feel an uplift, and right then it is good to try to regain control over life and business. Here are my 3 bold steps to bring you back to yourself:

1. Give yourself time to process how you feel and what thoughts are truly running through your head – simply accept that there is no fast track here, and if you don’t dedicate the necessary time to listen to your chaos, it will catch up with you again at a later moment.
2. Distance yourself from negative thinking patterns – dark thoughts and feelings do not exhaust your whole personality, because you are much more than your numbers and achievements or lack thereof. Identify with your efforts and think about what you know about yourself and what you see behind your actions.
3. Set goals that you feel energize you rather than drain you – now is not the time to conquer Everest. When you regain your confidence, your goals will grow too. Today is the day to plan structured, small steps that will help you solve your crises one by one.

These three small inner steps require immense strength and mental energy because they impose control over our entire essence, all our past bitter memories, and all unfulfilled dreams. And this sometimes weighs so much that we lose confidence in whether we will be able to bear it again, for one more day.

I believe that you can and that you, and everything you do, matter.

Change. Adapt. Evolve.
Juls =)