Levels of Confidence in Entrepreneurship

Tune in or read the blog version below!

I listened to an amazing podcast episode a few weeks ago by Alex Hormozi. He is the founder of Skool and owns many successful businesses.

I took so many notes and I want to share what resonated with me.

I have three amazing new Start Your Business Intensive clients starting this month and mindset is something huge that we tackle. It is something I iterate in the beginning of any entrepreneurship journey.

And if you are a seasoned business owner. This will also apply to you.

How confident are you in yourself in entrepreneurship and in your life?

So very high level to start, Alex says, there are five levels of confidence:

• Positive active
• Positive passive
• Neutral passive
• Negative passive
• Negative active.

As I go through all of these, I would love for you to think about where you rank on these levels. 

Positive Active

If you have a Positive Active confidence level, you have the mindset that no one has proven that it can’t be done, so that it must mean you are able to do it.

If you have a positive active mindset, you ask others to prove that you can’t do it.

For example, the first person that ran the four minute mile, they were like, no one has physically proved that I can’t do this. So I am able to.

People with this mindset, they come from all backgrounds, right? It’s not like you need to have a certain level of privilege to adopt this mindset.

This is where the power is in the student and not the teacher. In every school system, in any kind of broken school system or private school system, there’s always going to be students that excel through it all, despite the teaching and despite the teacher.

Wnners come from this mindset of I can do it and I am going to take action. They’re usually the first to do what they do. They think innovatively.

They think of new ideas and they take action on it because they inherently know and believe that they can.

Positive Passive

These people have the mentality of if they did it, so can I.

Others have paved the path and have proven that it can be done. So I am going to follow these steps and I am going to do them too – inherently knowing that if they follow the same exact steps, they are going to get there.

Alex calls these the A minus students, and this is a great place to be.

You have the inner confidence. You’re just looking for the roadmap, right? You are looking for a way to reach where you want to go, simply by following someone else who has proven that they have done it. And so you can too.

These people have a positive outlook and they are somewhat passive in their ways because they are following what’s already created.

I personally identify with this level of confidence, and many of my clients do too. They have the belief that they know how to and they want to get to where I am or where their mentors are.

Let me know if this is where you are too!

Neutral Passive

People in this category or who have this level of confidence, they think it works for other people.

“Let’s see if it will work for me. We’ll see if it works. It might not. It might I’m not really entirely convinced. I might not go out of my way to make it work.”

It’s a very neutral and passive way of approaching business and entrepreneurship or in any other area of life, honestly.

You can sway either way. It’s not like you go out of your way to make it work. 

Negative Passive

These are the people who think it probably won’t work for me, it works for other people and I see it, but it probably won’t.

These people have a lower level of confidence.

It may be from past trauma or past times in their lives that they’ve failed and believe that they are destined for failure and they don’t see in themselves that they can make it happen.

If you think differently, you act differently. Your thoughts influence your feelings, which influence your actions, which influence your results.

So if you are coming from a mindset where you want to get to that point B and you think you’re not capable of getting there, most likely you’re not going to get there.

Whether you think you can or cannot, you are right.

So if you find yourself identifying with any of the negative ones, then I encourage you to revisit mindset because shifting your mindset is something totally within your control and it’s going to bring about incredible results.

Negative Active

These are the people on the polar opposite spectrum of Positive Active.

They can prove that it works for everyone except themselves. They go out of their way and actively prove that it’s not going to work.

They can take a million courses and they will actively prove that the courses don’t work. They can learn from a million mentors and they will find a problem with every single one of them.

They’re going to find a way that they can’t achieve their goals because they’re special.

And the really interesting thing is they are actively proving the wrong thing.

If they just shift all of that energy and all of that proving and all of that action into positive active instead of negative active, instead of going the other way, they have the most potential to jump to level one.

This is usually when you’re going to find the biggest skeptics.

I’ve had so many power calls with skeptical people about building online businesses. They either think it’s a scam. They are trying to find every way that they’re not able to make money authentically in an aligned way, in a very honest way online.

Once they realize, ‘Hey, I am getting in my own way of success because what I believe is completely not true’, then they shift to being positive active.

They are like, ‘Oh my God, it is a full world of opportunities and I can’t believe I’ve been self-sabotaging for so long’.

So if you identify with being negative active, and you’re not getting to your goals, again I encourage you to revisit your trains of thought.

Choose Your Confidence Level

So now let me ask you, where are you on this scale?

If you are a business owner or if you want to start an online business, write down where you are on the scale right now.

It is completely your choice where you place yourself.

Of course, there are reasons that you might be at a level two or a level five right now.

Maybe it’s how you were raised, maybe it’s life experiences that you went through and it either increased or decreased your confidence. Maybe it’s the people you surround yourself with.

Whatever it is, if you’re not happy with where you are, you have the power to change your level of confidence.

And from someone who is always looking to eliminate anything that brings me down and only surround myself with the best of the best, I know that it is completely possible to jump from a level five to a level one.

I remember before I started my online business, I was finding every single excuse and every single reason why I wasn’t able to start one, why I had to be in a corporate job.

It was the finances. It was my job, it was my education experience. So many things proving that it wasn’t possible for me.

And now I think back on my conversations that I’ve had with my entrepreneurial friends in 2015 – 2016 when I was working a corporate job.

I was like, I cannot believe I thought I had to stay in corporate forever. And that was just me holding myself back.

Champions create their own success regardless of circumstances.

So if you are finding reasons within yourself or within your circumstances of why you cannot be successful, that is also you holding yourself back and recognizing it is the first step.

Take Action

The next step is to take action towards your goals.

There is no trying to achieve your goals: you are either just going to do it or not going to do it.

The action you take, there’s only two outcomes: whether you do it or whether you don’t, you don’t try. T

he more action you take, the more confident you will become in yourself to be able to create a new better reality.

Then the last thing I would love to share with all of you that I took notes on is that at any certain point, if you are trying a new venture, whether it’s starting a business or whether it’s a part of your business building journey, people come from different skill sets.

When you start a business, there could be a roadmap that outlines A to Z, but maybe you’re not starting from all of the experience that other entrepreneurs or other people come from.

In the beginning, it might not make sense for you, it might not work for you.

But if something fails for you in the past, never blame the thing. Never blame the course or the ebook or the business model or like don’t blame.

Blame your lack of skills at the time and find something that you can take away from it. Learn what not to do. Learn a lesson.

There is always a lesson, and I’ve experienced this because when I was just starting my business, I took a launch course. I wanted to launch a new offer, and I took an entire course on how to launch.

Honestly, I didn’t immediately see a return on investment because I didn’t have an audience yet. So I was trying to launch to essentially like a dead crickets audience.

It wasn’t until I learned other things within entrepreneurship where I was like, oh my gosh, this makes sense now.

And then only at that point was when I could use everything I learned in the course.

But when I went through it the first time and didn’t see a return on investment, I blamed the course.

Was that right for me to do? No, but you can always experience a positive return on investment because you can benefit from it or benefit from the inverse of it. It’s still a win.

Now when I take courses, I am just so focused on being the best version. I wanna be the best testimonial. I want to have the best experience and make it work for me in one way, shape, or form.

Of course, this all comes back to where you are on the scale in terms of levels of confidence.

Because if something doesn’t work for you, are you going to see it as a self-fulfilling prophecy? Like, ‘Hey, you see it didn’t work and I knew it didn’t work’.

Or are you going to say, ‘It might not work for me now, but I am going to learn everything I can so that it does work for me because it’s worked for so many other people’.

This really dictates when you give up and if you give up at all.

Because people with positive, active and positive passive mindsets, they never give up. They know that it’s going to work for them. They’re going to find a way.

If you are listening to this episode and it’s sparked some kind of mindset shift for you, please let me know, if you wanna work through any of these.

I will include some resources in the episode description and let me know, if you would like to work privately, one-on-one in the next few months to start your own online business and shift all of these narratives.

If you’ve enjoyed this episode, it would mean so much if you could leave a review on Apple Podcasts. This helps us spread The Wanderlover mission to those who need a dose of inspiration today.

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