A lot of agency owners I speak with often ask me what it will take for them to reach the next stage. For some, it’s $20K/month, for others $100K/month. The number doesn’t really matter.
But it sounds absurd when I respond that it takes more self-belief… after all, the reaction of most people, upon hearing this, is that they already know that. Or they already have it.
But knowing something, and being it are two very different things. Ask yourself these questions…
Do you ever feel negative? Do you ever procrastinate? Do you ever have to fight internal battles? If you could add up all the time that you wasted being angry, upset, frustrated, afraid, or negative, where would you be today? What if you had no fear – of nothing, man, beast, animal, humiliation?
The truth is that all these happenings are slowing you down, and if you add all of them up, it’s a massive drag on your success. For most agency owners, this is what’s holding them back from their dreams of financial freedom. It’s pretty much impossible to run a marathon if you’re tied to a 300kg rock!
Below I’ll explore 4 reasons why self-belief is key to success (and reveal which one is the most important one!), and 6 ways to increase your self-belief.
4 Reasons Why Self-Belief Helps You Make More Money
1. Self-Belief Eliminates the Drag of Negativity
Negativity has a strong impact on productivity. All the time you’re feeling negative represents time when you’re not maximizing your effectiveness. The reason is simple: negativity is just internal division.
Part of you wants to do something, and another part wants to do something else. That leads to conflict, which you experience as negativity. Self-belief is actually a process of unification. The more you believe in yourself, the clearer your purpose is, and the more of your energy you can use to move in the desired direction, and the less energy spent fighting yourself.
Think of negativity as a big boulder that you’re carrying on your back while running a race. Now imagine that boulder is taken off your back. What would happen? You’d surge ahead with such speed and ease that you could never have imagined beforehand. That’s what self-belief can do for you.
2. Self-Belief Leads to Consistent & Constructive Use of Your Energy
If you take one step forward and two steps backwards, you’re never going to get anywhere. Success requires consistency in taking actions that lead to constructive results.
People with high self-belief are able to use all their energy and powers consistently towards constructive purposes. And while others may take a step forward, only to be swung two back, they are consistently moving ahead.
Self-belief is the governor that decides how much of your potential you’re able to access in any given undertaking. If self-belief is low, then you can only use a limited amount of your potential. Think of self-belief as your ability to effectively use all the resources you have. Low self-belief means low ability.
Just imagine how much farther ahead you’d be if all your energy, 100% of the time, was directed in a productive manner.
3. Self-Belief Gets You to Take Risks You Otherwise Wouldn’t
And finally – making money and scaling your agency involves risk. It requires that you take on projects that you’re not sure you can deliver on. Because if you’re sure you can deliver on them, you’re not aiming high enough. It requires that you consistently go after bigger and larger clients, and help them solve bigger and more complex problems.
All this requires that you’re open, consistently, to taking risk. And self-belief is what enables you to take the leap in the dark, knowing that inside of yourself you have the resources you’ll need to cope with the challenges and come out ahead.
Are there any productive risks that you could take and you’re not? Perhaps there is a prospective client you could reach out to, but you’ve never worked with a client that big. You’re afraid. You delay it. Self-belief is what would help you overcome such an obstacle and send a proposal.
4. Self-Belief is the Secret to Hypnotic Levels of Persuasion
This is the most powerful reason why self-belief can make you a lot of money. If you look at history’s greatest persuaders, they were not the most intelligent of men. Very often they hadn’t even read one book on influence and persuasion in their entire life. Consider for a moment people like John R. Brinkley (who sold goat testicle replacement surgery as a cure for troubles in bed without ever being a real doctor, becoming the richest “doctor” in America in the process).
With virtually no education, having never read a book on persuasion, he built a huge fortune selling a procedure that didn’t work, with flimsy or non-existent qualifications. I’m not saying that that’s what you should be doing, but it’s worth considering what allowed him to do that.
Or consider David Ogilvy himself. A fry cook and door-to-door salesman who in his lifetime built the biggest ad agency in the world, which still exists to this day.
What makes YOU different from those people? You are likely better educated, have access to better technology, and have a lot more going for you. So why can’t YOU do it? The answer is self-belief (or the lack of it).
You see, when you look at the world’s greatest persuaders, take for example Adolf Hitler, you will see that they aren’t the ones who studied everything about persuasion. In fact, most of them have never studied persuasion, and had little to no technique. They were basically savages. But what they had going for them was CONVICTION and SELF-BELIEF to such a degree that it transferred over naturally to everyone they spoke with.
You can have the same conviction if you work on your self-belief.
5 Things You Can Do to Increase Your Self-Belief
So you know self-belief is important, and you’re convinced that, despite knowing about it, you need a lot more of it to be successful. What can you do?
1. Choose Your Mission
Every person of high self-belief chose to dedicate their life to a purpose higher than themselves. Self-belief comes from the very pursuit of a vision that is ultimately more important than your ego. It’s what allows you to keep believing when no one else does, and what allows you to accept risks that no one else will.
I still remember that video of Elon Musk, when asked why he started SpaceX if he thought that the chance of failure was greater than 90%, and he said that when you think something is important, then you do it, even if there’s a high likelihood of failure. Elon is a man on a mission, and despite his social awkwardness and lack of what’s generally known as charisma, he is very persuasive because he has a mission and a ton of self-belief.
Everyone who is aimless thirsts for a mission. A mission is often what gives you belief in yourself. So pick yours. Pick something that inspires and motivates you. Something that’s so important that you’d do it even if you knew you were going to fail.
2. Affirmations
Affirmations are a way to communicate with your subconscious mind, which is the source of your self-belief. Your self-belief, actually, simply IS what your subconscious mind thinks of you. By thinking affirmations, you are trying to rewire, over time, what your subconscious mind thinks of you.
As such, affirmations are present-tense sentences containing the words “I AM” along with emotionally charged content. For example “I am ecstatic that I am crossing $40K/mo in revenue”. It’s good to repeat your affirmations in the morning and in the evening to remind your subconscious mind that you can achieve these things. Over time, it will change the way you think.
3. Visualize Success
Along with affirmations, self-belief can be cultivated by visualizing success. Most people have a lot of experience with visualization. We visualize all the dangers we could face, all the things that make us upset and angry. People who have self-belief simply turn that around. Instead of visualizing failure, they visualize success.
To practice visualization simply sit somewhere quiet where you won’t be interrupted. And then start seeing in your mind’s eye the things that you most desire, and experiencing how you will feel once you have them. It’s very important that you recreate the exact emotions and sensations you would experience when having them.
This is a powerful exercise, and aside from self-belief and confidence, it can also be highly motivating, if you happen to be in a time when you’ve felt down or depressed.
4. Think Positively
Our mind, for survival reasons, has been trained to always look out for danger. So you need to educate your mind to do the opposite – think positively, and look for solutions. As an agency owner, you don’t just need to find solutions for yourself. You also need to find them for your clients.
If you practice thinking positively throughout the day (whenever you remember it), you’ll become more creative, and you’ll start believing in yourself much more. This will lead to improved problem-solving abilities, greater optimism, as well as happiness and peace of mind. It provides more fuel to your subconscious mind that can be converted into self-belief.
5. Take Action
Funnily enough, taking action itself builds self-belief. When you take action, you prove to yourself that you’re the kind of person who gets things done, which builds your self-belief. You’re basically proving to yourself that you can do it.
It’s important that you DO take action. If you do everything else, but you don’t take action, you’re actually destroying your self-belief by creating incongruity… meaning you think one way, but act another. What will your subconscious mind trust more in this case? Your thoughts, or your actions? It’s your actions.
So train yourself to think positively, visualize success, use affirmations, and then take action, and actually pursue your mission relentlessly. This is what will build and compound your self-belief over time.
TL;DR
Self-belief is a critical factor when it comes to growing your agency, achieving freedom, and making millions for yourself and your family. It will help you release the breaks that your negativity is putting on your productivity, consistently take constructive action, take meaningful risks, and significantly increase your salesmanship and persuasion abilities.
If you want to cultivate self-belief, remember to consistently use the following 5 practices: choose and work on your mission, use affirmations daily, visualize success, think positively, and take massive action!
Looking to Grow Your Agency to 7-Figures?
Hey, thanks for reading this article, I hope you got great value out of it. My name is Tudor Dumitrescu (click to follow me on LinkedIn) and I've made my mission in life to help 25,000 owners build the agencies of the future, connect with their dream clients through LinkedIn and scale to 7-figures.
If that sounds like you, there are 3 ways for me to help:
1. Download Our Outbound Sales LinkedIn Playbook™
You can access my entire LinkedIn strategy for free. I've used these tactics to bring in as many as 24 new clients in a single month for our agency, and the 800+ agencies who have tried it were impressed by the results. Get it here.
2. Attend One of Our Free Workshops
Every month I run one of two workshops. One for beginners, which I define as agencies making less than $10K/mo and one for more advanced agencies who are already making $10K/mo and looking to take it to $100K/mo.
The Agency Ascendancy™ Workshop is for agencies making less than $10K/mo who want to lay up a 7-figure foundation for their business. You will get worksheets and you will work together with me to apply the NPOT Methodology™ to choosing your niche, crafting your offer, defining your positioning, and working on your pricing & guarantee strategy.
The N³ Agency Growth Model™ Workshop is for agencies making more than $10K/mo who want to install a marketing system that will take them to $100K/mo. You will get worksheets and you will work together with me to apply the growth model into your business by refinining your Network Expansion, Nurturing and Negotiation processes to close big deals even during recessions.
3. 15-min Agency Growth Audit
If you want to go really fast and get big results ASAP, then the fastest path is our N³ Agency Growth Service™. It starts with a super short 15-min call, where I will help you identify the major bottlenecks slowing your growth and help you get clear on the action steps you need to move forward. If you like the plan, then we can explore it further on another call.
You can book your agency growth audit here:
