How developing meaningful Self Trust will make you immune to entrepreneur burn out
Entrepreneurs think about trust in all the right ways but one.
Increasing customer trust. Trusting your partners. Trusting your suppliers. Your staff. Your investors. Your Advisors.
Savvy business owners intuitively understand that trust, and specifically keeping promises, is the foundation of business itself. Books are written about the philosophy of overdelivering on promises to customers. It’s a proven recipe for success.
Keeping the promises you make to your investors — implicit in a pitch deck or financial forecast — is the same thing.
Well-kept promises create trust. Trust is a form of social capital with extraordinary liquidity. Trust is the easiest thing for an entrepreneur to transform into money.
That’s why the entrepreneurs who keep promises, win.
What’s missing is self trust: The promises you make to yourself
Entrepreneurial success is a long journey.
It’s a rollercoaster filled with highs and lows. Your execution ability powers you through by constantly keeping you moving. Execution is everything. It guarantees that the lowest lows and the highest highs all grow higher.
The ups and downs never quite go away because even when you’re winning new, higher order challenges emerge. Successful entrepreneurs, buoyant with confidence, approach new opportunities to take things to the next level.
New opportunities make beginners of us all. Then, things get hard again. You take action. Learn. Gain mastery. Then hit the highs of success.
Then you find something new. Again.
Extraordinarily successful entrepreneurs don’t seek to escape this cycle.
Instead they upgrade it, trading up. Working on bigger and bigger things.
The one thing you can do to guarantee you’ll keep leveling up? Stay in the game. Keep executing no matter what.
There’s just one problem…
Catastrophic burnout takes entrepreneurs out of the game
Burnout happens when productive, focused entrepreneurs — who correctly believe that Execution is Everything — relentlessly push themselves through the cycle described above. They deliver on huge promises to others. Tirelessly.
Burnout happens because something critical is missing.
People get into entrepreneurship for personal reasons.
Business owners want Freedom. They want wealth. They want incredible lifestyle. Recognition and respect.
They often want to make a “dent in the universe” impact too, but any entrepreneur who claims totally selfless motivation is drowning in self deception.
You must keep the promises you make to yourself
You must remember why you started. You must stay connected to what matters to you personally. You must remain connected to your internal, private ambition. To that inner child part of you that wanted to take over the world so it could party, spend time with family or buy a really fast car… or just lay by the pool.
Two entrepreneur tendencies get in the way of keeping the promises you make to yourself:
1. You tend to set dumb goals when you’re young, which you inevitably discover won’t actually fulfill you.
2. Everyone starts out hoping that entrepreneurship will be easy. The response to discovering the truth — that it’s tough as hell — is to train/condition yourself to be more focused and productive than you ever thought possible.
This is why experienced entrepreneurs who’ve succeeded at creating real impact and value… get burnt out.
They get burnt out because these two tendencies ^^^ rob their day-to-day lives of meaningful fulfillment.
I talk to so many entrepreneurs who got started because they wanted wealth and freedom. Location independence and a fast car. Fame and its trappings. Four hour work weeks… Or at the least, four hour work days. Whatever their personal dream was.
They grow experienced enough to figure out that the materialist goals don’t really matter to them. They also figure out that overdelivering on promises to customers requires that they work. A ton. Usually from an office. They also condition themselves to love that hustle.
This is all good. But they haven’t figured out what replaces those things they originally wanted, at that personal level.
They have no vision for their own life. They don’t know what success meaningfully creates for them in their private, watching-Netflix-to-relax, downtime. They don’t know because their whole life has been eaten alive by the success of the entrepreneurial journey.
They started their entrepreneurial career by making a promise to themselves: To delay gratification in service of a bigger, longer term vision of success.
When that gratification never really properly arrives… the promise gets broken.
When you break promises to yourself, you shatter your Self Trust
When you break the promises you make to yourself, the unconscious part of your mind — that controls your passion and motivation — gets fed up. Your inner fire for your new projects and ideas gets tainted by suspicion. By lack of self trust.
What’s it all for? How can I know this’ll mean something?
Somewhere inside of every entrepreneur is a seven year old. (Or at least a teenager or college student.)
That kid thought that entrepreneurship would create the most awesome life ever.
He or she agreed to buckle down and focus — to set aside all your short term hedonistic desires — to pursue a bigger vision.
Have you kept your promise to that part of yourself?
If you break promises to yourself, you’ll burn out.
Your motivation to work on delayed gratification projects will vanish the second you stop trusting that the gratification will actually arrive.
This is why at Commit Action, we don’t just train our Executive Effectiveness Aides to hold their business owner clients accountable to their highest leverage plans. We also track our client’s wellbeing and fulfillment.
We codify this as an integral “pillar” of our methodology. We’ve investigated the scientific literature that demonstrates that this pillar makes entrepreneurs smarter, stimulates their creativity and invigorates their motivational drive.
If you want to succeed in business, you need to keep — or overdeliver on — the promises you make to your customers, your staff, your investors. Most of all though, you need to keep the promises you make to yourself.
Thanks for reading! If what I’ve said here opened your eyes, hitting the 👏 button (a bunch of times, ideally) will help other people discover this piece.
