In 2018, I spoke at Trajectify LIVE about the impact of fear on your business. In that speech, I talked about the dangers of letting fear run the show — either stagnation or impulsivity. And I advised the entrepreneurs in attendance to let go of their fear, to recognize it as an emotion, and to make their business decisions based on reason and strategic plans.

I still believe that’s good advice. And...it doesn’t go far enough.

Fear is sneaky. It hides in places we’re not expecting it. It motivates actions without our awareness.

I can tell a roomful of entrepreneurs to let go of their fear, but what if they don’t even know it’s there?

Before we can move past our fear, we have to become detectives. We have to find our fear. Identifying our limiting beliefs is one of the most effective ways to figure out where the fear lives and then flush it out.

A few months ago we did a workshop with Elizabeth Nader, a mindset coach and entrepreneur, at a leadership retreat we held for Trajectify clients. Her lesson on limiting beliefs prompted great conversations and discovery for all of us about how limiting beliefs are holding us back.

We see five limiting beliefs again and again. So we talked with some of our clients and partners to find out how limiting beliefs show up in their businesses, and we checked in again with Elizabeth to learn more about how to push through limiting beliefs and keep them from coming back.

“I’m not enough” — Imposter syndrome

It’s hard to find anyone — especially any entrepreneur — nowadays who doesn’t connect on some level with the concept of imposter syndrome.

As Christopher Wink, the cofounder and CEO of Technically Media, puts it, “Inevitably entrepreneurship is an act of invention. By its nature, your vision of it is always ahead of where it is in reality. So if you have any grounding in reality, how could you not question the legitimacy of you and that vision?”

The problem comes when you have proven your legitimacy, and you’re still battling a belief that you’re not enough.

“At some point, I’d been doing it long enough, I’d built up genuine subject matter expertise,” says Chris. “But I was still acting like I was that 23-year-old that didn’t know what he was doing.”

Dom Farnan, the founder of recruiting agency DotConnect, had a similar experience when she started her company. She was working as a solopreneur with a heavy client roster.

“I had to do some soul searching and figure out how do I scale myself out?” says Dom. “I was really scared, and that’s when my imposter syndrome kicked in. I thought, ‘I can’t do this, who do I think I am? I’m not that good.’ But clearly I was if I had nine clients that I was running myself and accomplishing all their goals.”

Moving out of your comfort zone is scary — even when you have the skills you need to do it.

“It’s not good enough” — Perfectionism

Dom saw her imposter syndrome combine with perfectionism in difficult ways in the early days of DotConnect. “My perfectionism got the best of me and I was really hard on everyone, and I expected them to do things exactly the way I’d outlined. I’d fly off the handle if I didn’t see that,” says Dom. “It got toxic.”

She built awareness of its impact from team feedback, and it was hard to hear. They were scared of her. They felt like they had to walk on eggshells. “In my head, I was super invested in them, but they didn’t see it that way,” says Dom. “My intention was to help them unlock their own potential and level up, but it wasn’t landing.”

She also held back on launching new services. She nitpicked and pushed deadlines out again and again. “Perfectionism is just a way to hide behind things and not get anything done,” she says and admits that she’s guilty of it.

Working with a coach helped Dom see how perfectionism was limiting her company’s capacity for success. She’s worked hard to calm her own reactivity and develop self-awareness. Now she’s a different type of leader.

She delegates a lot more to her team, trusting they can handle what she’s sending their way, understanding there is more than one way to reach goals. When she knows her perfectionism is going to get in the way, she steps back and enrolls her team more to mitigate that tendency.

“It’s just not enough” — Hyper achievement

Hyper achievers often look like they’re on top of the world. They’re doing all the things we praise — reaching goal after goal.

The problem is that they’re dependent on that constant performance and achievement for self-validation. They’re so driven to meet their goals that they barely notice their success before they’ve moved onto the next goal. Their workaholic tendencies are unsustainable.

I struggle with hyper achievement myself, and I’ve seen clients suffering from intense burn out due to it. They’re trying to achieve something that isn’t achievable.

Why? It’s not because they’re incapable. It’s because every time they get there, they want something else. It’s never enough.

And worse, the process starves them of the time they should be spending prioritizing their relationships and their own emotions.

Because hyper achievers are on a hamster wheel, it’s hard for them to break themselves out of cycle. They often need intervention from a psychologist or a coach. Someone has to stop the merry-go-round so they can get off. We need to train mindfulness so that the journey can be as satisfying as the destination.

Once you have the self-awareness to see what’s happening, you can take that second to pause and tap into the better parts of your judgment.

“There isn’t enough” — Scarcity

A client recently told me that their team was lacking engagement. When I asked if the team had enough work to do, the client replied that maybe they had too much. Maybe they were maxed out.

Except the team members weren’t complaining about having too much work. So where did my client’s conclusion that their lack of engagement was the result of too much work come from?

A scarcity model. They’ve given all they can, and I can’t push them anymore.

As Elizabeth tells us, “Scarcity is a lie.”

People tell me all the time that there just aren’t enough developers out there. The problem with that story is that there are lots of companies that do have enough developers.

When someone tells me there aren’t enough developers, what I hear is that they believe they’re not good enough to get the developers that are out there. They often don’t realize it, but they’re expressing a limiting belief. Once they get past it, they can begin thinking creatively about how to recruit the team they need.

Not surprisingly, scarcity often comes up around money. Entrepreneurs don’t make that $10,000 investment in their business because they’re scared the next $10,000 won’t show up.

For Chris Wink, scarcity showed up for him as a ‘survive versus thrive’ mindset. He started a digital media news organization in the wake of the great recession, and the weight of that industry’s collapse was heavy on his shoulders. “I felt like, ‘I just have to survive. I just have to make payroll.’ I made a lot of limiting decisions because I was just trying to survive.”

As Chris has built the organization and made bigger bets, he’s moved toward thriving rather than surviving.

“I’m not ready” — Fear of success

It’s not one must of us think about, but Elizabeth says it’s actually one of the most common limiting beliefs.

“It’s people who will self-sabotage or get themselves to a point and then not push any further,” says Elizabeth. “The fears they have about success end up making them play small. They may claim to be more conservative or that they’re not risk takers, but the truth is, it’s a fear.”

In order to address the fear, Elizabeth advises entrepreneurs to figure out how they define success. She sees two main issues come up for her clients.

First, they may see success as associated with negative messages they’ve internalized. For instance, their father was very successful when they were a kid and was never home. So they see success as mutually exclusive with having a loving relationship with their children. Or they’ve received the message that people who are financially successful are misers or morally deficient.

Until they tackle those negative messages, they may see themselves as continually striving for success but always coming up against a resistance that they don’t fully understand.

Second, they may see success as a gateway to increased visibility and scrutiny. Elizabeth sees this especially in introverts that enjoy their relative anonymity.

I see this concern frequently both with early stage companies and with companies that are about to exit. Founders that haven’t done a full launch may tell me, “I have to build these 20 other features because if I’m really successful, people will want them.” Going from anonymous to in the public eye can create a lot of fear. There’s an element of perfectionism in it as well.

With companies that are about to sell, there’s the anxiety about the due diligence process. Someone is going to find and point out all your warts. Again, that transition from somewhat anonymous to being under scrutiny can be uncomfortable. Of course, it’s also a necessary part of growth.

Elizabeth Nader talks about the fear of success

Where do limiting beliefs come from?

It can be helpful to understand how you got a particular limiting belief.

Elizabeth explains how insidious these limiting beliefs can be and how quickly they can form. “When you’re in a situation where you’re exposed to a voice of influence or you have an experience that you feel like is telling you something about yourself, you can form a limiting belief like that,” Elizabeth says.

According to Elizabeth, it’s very easy to form limiting beliefs in childhood because we don’t understand the faculties we’ll need when we’re older. But we can also form limiting beliefs as adults. “Let’s say you go bankrupt, and then you say to yourself, ‘I’ll never have anything’ or ‘I suck at managing money.’ Or you get a divorce and say, ‘I don’t deserve love.’” People form limiting beliefs like this all the time.

We all have negative thoughts, fears, and doubts. The difference is whether you see those thoughts and emotions as moments of learning or you allow them to become a belief that controls our actions.

How to heal your limiting beliefs

If we all have limiting beliefs (and we do), then the question is how to move through them.

Elizabeth identifies two pieces to focus on. “Healing your limiting beliefs is dealing with what you already have and preventing more,” she says.

So where do you start?

“It’s important to admit to the limiting belief,” says Elizabeth. “If you see a series of struggles in your life, you’ll see a theme. It takes talking to someone to identify the limiting belief that’s behind that. If you listen to the words that you say and the thoughts that you think, you’ll find it. It doesn’t hide.”

Once you identify the source of that limiting belief, you may find that the belief breaks. You’re able to see that it’s based on something that’s not relevant anymore. “And then we start the process of challenging ourselves,” says Elizabeth. “‘Is this really true? What could my life look like if I chose not to believe that?’”

“We can choose to challenge the thought or replace it. Going forward, when you experience a failure or a difficulty or a fear, you can arrest that thought in the moment. ‘I’m not going to allow that in.’”

Chris, for example, challenges imposter syndrome and scarcity mindset by getting clear on his goals and revisiting them more often in times of uncertainty:

“I try to use the Why question a lot. Personally, I have a tradition of my year-end doing a lot of resolution setting and review. Where was I? Where did I go? What is giving me joy? Am I optimizing for my happiness? What used to be an annual tradition has become a weekly or monthly one. I think all or many limiting beliefs come from a kind of indecision. If we, ourselves, are unsure what our motives are, what our goals are… we couch them in all these different ways. So when I’ve had moments of having a clear mindset of what I was trying to do, limiting beliefs were less pervasive.”

While Dom has mostly arrested imposter syndrome, she curbs perfectionism through continuous inner work for not only herself, but also her team:

“If I can take five minutes in the morning to do some meditation or breathwork then I feel like I’m much more able to see clearly the things that need to be done and receive feedback without getting emotional. As a leader, emotional regulation is a superpower. I’m still in the midst of being a reactionary person. I’m grateful I have awareness around that now. If you go at it alone and you don’t have a support system or people who can hold you accountable it’s really hard to [build awareness]. I have Masterminds I’m in, coaches I leverage, and a big network. Even the leaders on my team are in a group coaching program so that we are all foundationally and consciously aligned.”

Final thoughts

As an entrepreneur and a coach, I have an interesting view into limiting beliefs. I’ve seen them at work in my clients, identified them, and helped clients move through and past them. I’ve also grappled with them myself. I’m a perfectionist and a hyper achiever, and I’ve worked to understand the beliefs underlying those tendencies.

I know Elizabeth is right — this work is best done with others, people you can be honest with and who will be honest with you in return.