The Belief Prison: 11 limiting beliefs that keep solopreneurs trapped
You built a business for freedom—then realized you feel more trapped than ever.
Welcome to How Solos Scale. Each week, we share a new framework, concept, or example of how solopreneurs are scaling from $25,000 to $50,000+ per month.
Hey there,
A solopreneur we coach recently opened our eyes.
One Tuesday afternoon, during a call, sitting at her desk with 27 unread Slack’s, three client deliverables overdue, and a mounting sense of dread she couldn’t name, she asked us a question that broke everything open:
“When will I feel like I’ve made it?”
We sat with that question for a moment.
Because here was someone who, by every external metric, had made it. She was making significantly more money than she was at her corporate job. She had autonomy over her schedule. She was doing work she was genuinely good at.
But she was also working twice the hours, feeling exactly zero freedom, and wondering if the whole thing was a mistake.
The math didn’t math.
She’d put having another kid on hold to build her business. She was missing dinners with her family. She woke up every morning to a flooded Slack from clients in different time zones—anxiety spiking her system before she even got out of bed.
The worst part?
She thought, “This is just how it works.”
That freedom required struggle. That entrepreneurship is exhausting. That if she just pushed a little harder, optimized a little more, systematized a little better, then she’d finally feel free.
She was convinced she needed:
A better offer structure
More efficient systems
Stronger marketing
Sure, those things have helped. They’re important tactical necessities for any growing business.
But they didn’t solve the deeper, core problem.
Two weeks later, she sent us a Slack message we’ll never forget:
“I’m pausing everything. I need a break from my business. Working with you two is the only reason I’ve made it this long. You’ve been so helpful, but I just need to rest for a minute. I’m burned out.”
She’d reached the point of no return.
This is the moment when success stops hiding the cracks in your foundation and starts exposing them. When the beliefs you’ve been running on since day one (beliefs you didn’t even know you had) become impossible to ignore.
Success, ironically, reveals the problem.
The Limiting Belief Pattern We’re Seeing
This solopreneur isn’t alone.
Over the past two years, we’ve watched a similar story play out with solopreneurs across different industries, with different offers, under different circumstances.
Ask any solopreneur why they left their W2, and what they want from their business, and the majority say some variation of “freedom.”
Yet most share the limiting beliefs that prevent it, which keep them playing small.
The underlying problem? The invisible psychological patterns that’ve been running in the background since day one. The beliefs you signed up for without realizing it. The “invisible contracts” you agreed to that say (and act like):
“If I rest, everything falls apart.”
“I’m only valuable when I’m bleeding for clients.”
“My worth is determined by how quickly I respond to messages.”
These beliefs don’t emerge at a specific revenue milestone. They reveal themselves when you hit an inflection point:
Either you’re not getting enough demand (even though your offer is strong) so you start questioning everything.
Or you’re drowning in too much demand and realize you can’t possibly scale beyond what you’re already doing.
Even though they’re not directly connected to a revenue milestone, we do see patterns across revenue bands.
At ~$3K months, you can often hustle through these beliefs. At ~$15K months, they feel noble because they “prove” you’re “doing it right.” At ~$30K+ months, they become a stranglehold.
Your business is an extension of you. If you’re trapped by limiting beliefs, your business will be too.
This is why some solopreneurs attract clients effortlessly while others struggle.
One person can charge $25K for a project while another can barely get $5K.
Same expertise, different beliefs about their worth.
Another person can build businesses that expand their lives, while others build businesses that consume them.
Same opportunity, different internal operating system.
This is why you can’t strategy your way out of a belief problem, yet that’s what most solopreneurs try to do.
They add another system, launch another offer, hire another contractor, post more content. These tactics only expose the cracks in their foundation. All while the real problems (the beliefs running in the background) grow louder with every dollar of revenue.
Alas, success doesn’t cure limiting beliefs—it magnifies them.
Left to run rampant, these can turn your dream of freedom into a cage.
We call this the Belief Prison.
The Belief Prison is the collection of invisible contracts you’re following that keep you small, stressed, and stuck (even as your revenue grows).
Think of it like this:
When you’re doing $3K months, the belief “I’m not enough” shows up as mild anxiety about whether clients will renew. It’s annoying, but manageable.
When you’re doing $20K months, that same belief shows up as chronic overdelivery, inability to set boundaries, panic when a client churns, and a nagging feeling that you’re one mistake away from being exposed as a fraud.
These beliefs aren’t new. They’ve been with you from the beginning. Success just turned up the volume until you couldn’t ignore them anymore.
After running our own businesses and coaching solopreneurs over the past three years, we’ve noticed 11 recurring beliefs that keep people trapped.
Each one gets heavier as you scale, but each one can be dismantled once you see it clearly.
Here are the 11 most common limiting beliefs holding solos back:
“I’m Not Enough” - The belief that you must constantly prove your value through overdelivery and perfectionism.
“I Have to Struggle to Be Successful” - The conviction that ease equals laziness and real success requires suffering.
“If I Rest, Everything Falls Apart” - The fear that stepping away for even a moment will cause your business to collapse.
“Success Should Look Different Than This” - The chronic dissatisfaction that comes from chasing someone else’s definition of success.
“I Can’t Trust Others to Do This Work” - The refusal to delegate because no one can do it as well as you can.
“I’m Responsible for Everyone Else’s Feelings and Outcomes” - The weight of carrying your clients’ emotions and results as your own.
“I Have to Choose Between Business Success and Personal Life” - The belief that you can’t have both, so something has to be sacrificed.
“There’s Not Enough” - The scarcity mindset that keeps you in panic mode no matter how much you’re making.
“Who I Am Isn’t Enough” - The identity crisis that comes from building a business as someone you think you should be, not who you are.
“I Can’t Change This Without Blowing Everything Up” - The fear that any change will destroy what you’ve built.
“My Worth Is Determined by External Validation” - The addiction to client praise, LinkedIn engagement, and constant approval.
We’ll walk through each of these beliefs in detail. You’ll see how they show up, what they sound like, and most importantly, how to begin letting them go.
Before we begin, know this work is voluntary.
Nobody is forcing you to look at your beliefs. Nobody is making you question the rules you’ve been following. But the question is: Are you open to change?
Because the prison you’re in, you didn’t build it on purpose.
But you’re the only one who can tear it down.
Why This Matters Now
We’re at an interesting moment in the solopreneur economy.
More people than ever are going out on their own—by choice or by force. The barriers to starting a business have never been lower. The opportunities have never been more abundant.
Yet, the failure rate hasn’t changed.
Skill isn’t the problem here. Everyone we work with is highly talented and capable. They fail because they’re running an outdated operating system. They’re trying to build a freedom-based business on a foundation of beliefs that were designed to keep you trapped in corporate survival mode:
Never show weakness
Struggle equals success
Rest is earned, not required
Prove your value every single day
Your worth is determined by your output
These beliefs are programmed into you as an employee. Someone else sets the boundaries, defines success, and tells you when you’ve done enough.
When you run your own business, these beliefs become a prison. And the weight is 10x heavier because you’re the only one who can change it.
If you’re like most solopreneurs, you don’t even know you’re carrying them. You just know something feels off. You’re making more money but feeling less free. You’re hitting your goals but moving the goalposts. You’re successful on paper but suffocating in practice.
Limiting beliefs cost you money, stress, and sanity.
There are the obvious costs:
Underpricing your services: If you don’t believe you’re worth $15K, you’ll charge $5K. The math is simple.
Overdelivering to compensate: You’re giving $15K worth of value for $5K because you’re trying to prove you’re worth keeping around.
Chronic exhaustion: When you’re constantly trying to prove yourself, rest feels like giving up.
Client attraction problems: Clients who value you properly can sense your lack of confidence. They move on to someone who knows their worth.
There are also underlying costs:
Inability to set boundaries: If you’re not enough, who are you to say no?
Resentment buildup: You’re giving everything and still feeling like it’s not landing.
Strategic blindness: You can’t see opportunities that require confidence to pursue.
Decision paralysis: Every choice becomes weighted with “what will they think of me?”
To break free, you need to reprogram these beliefs. Not tweak them. Not manage them. Completely replace them with empowering ones that actually serve who you’re becoming.
But you can’t reprogram what you can’t see, so let’s name and confront the scary monsters in our heads.
Limiting Belief #1: “I’m Not Enough”
One of our clients was doing $18K months and working 60-hour weeks.
When we mapped out her actual deliverables against her contracts, we realized she was bringing in approximately $35K worth of work per month and giving away $17K of it for free. Not because clients asked, but because she didn’t believe the contracted scope was enough to prove her value.
She was literally working for free half the time, and calling it “client service.”
This is what “I’m not enough” looks like in practice.
It shows up as:
Apologizing or caveating before you share your ideas
Answering messages at 11 PM to prove you’re responsive
Inability to raise your rates even when you’re booked solid
Including three bonus deliverables that weren’t in the scope
Constant comparison to competitors who “seem to have it figured out”
Over-explaining your methodology because surely they need more convincing
Saying yes to scope creep because saying no might make people think you’re difficult
What makes this so exhausting is that your clients are happy. They’re getting real value. But you’re so stuck in the belief that you’re not doing enough, you can’t even see it.
“I’m not enough” isn’t about what clients think. It’s about what you believe about yourself.
“Ed charges 10x what I charge and clients just pay him. I’m every bit as good as him, but I can’t charge that.”
This is a quote from another one of our clients.
She’d been in business for three years and had a proven track record. Her clients loved her. But she was stuck charging $5K per project while watching someone in her industry charge $50K for similar work.
When we asked why she couldn’t charge more, she couldn’t give us a real answer.
It was just... a feeling. A knowing. A belief that he could charge that much, but she couldn’t.
She’d made it up. Or more accurately, she’d heard it from a parent, a teacher, a former client, or society at large and blindly accepted it as truth.
“I’m not enough” isn’t a thought you have once.
It’s a story you tell yourself on repeat. It’s the background hum of your business. The voice that never quite goes away.
“I’m not enough” is rarely about your business.
It’s about the story you’ve been telling yourself since long before you became a solopreneur.
Maybe you grew up in a household where love was conditional on performance. Being good wasn’t good enough. You had to be the best.
Maybe you learned early that the way to be safe was to be useful and indispensable so people wouldn’t leave.
Maybe you were told (explicitly or implicitly) that people like you don’t get to charge premium rates or be confident without being labeled arrogant.
Or maybe you just picked it up from the water we all swim in. The cultural message that says you have to earn your place, and you’re only as valuable as your results.
Whatever the origin, you came to believe that your worth was variable, so you had to constantly prove you were deserving of [insert your favorite limiting reason].
Then, you started a business.
That “I’m not enough” came with you. It shaped everything: Your boundaries, client relationships, and ability to rest.
A simple way to check this is to look at your pricing.
Most people think it’s a reflection of your worth, but it’s actually a reflection of your belief about your worth. That person charging 10x what you charge is not necessarily better. They just believe they’re worth it. Because they believe it, they act like it. They don’t apologize for their rates. They don’t overdeliver to compensate.
They show up as if they’re already enough, and clients respond accordingly.
You create value just by being you.
Your value isn’t in the hustle.
It’s in the expertise, the perspective, the problem-solving ability you bring to every engagement.
If your clients haven’t told you your work is bad, where is this “not enough” feeling actually coming from?
Not from them. From you.
You’re trying to prove something that doesn’t need proving.
When you break this belief, you stop proving and become the version of yourself who is enough.
You show up with the quiet confidence that comes from knowing your value isn’t conditional. A huge upside is that your clients feel the difference immediately because confidence is magnetic.
So next time you catch yourself overdelivering, over-explaining, or overcompensating, ask:
“If I already knew I was enough, what would I do differently right now?”
Would you add that bonus deliverable? Would you apologize for your rate? Would you check Slack for the 135th time today?
Probably not.
You’d operate as if you’re already enough, because you are.
Limiting Belief #2: “I Have to Struggle to Be Successful”
You just wrapped a project for a client in four hours instead of twelve. Everything clicked. The work was excellent.
Instead of celebrating, you feel guilty.
That was too easy. Did I even earn this?
So you spend another six hours creating bonus deliverables nobody asked for because you need to feel like you suffered enough to deserve the payment.
“I have to struggle” is the belief that ease equals laziness.
That if work doesn’t feel hard, you’re probably doing it wrong. Real success requires bleeding.
It shows up as:
Feeling guilty when projects go smoothly
Wearing exhaustion as a badge of honor
Equating hours worked with value created
Refusing to systematize because “that’s taking shortcuts”
Notice the underlying belief?
Struggle = Virtue.
Ease = Cheating.
As a society, we celebrate struggle and are suspicious of ease.
Think about how we talk about success:
“She’s a self-made millionaire” (translation: she suffered alone, which makes it legitimate)
“He worked his way up from nothing” (translation: the struggle is the story)
“They’re an overnight success” (translation: suspicion, disbelief, looking for the catch, yet simultaneously being jealous of the success)
When you start a business, this belief comes with you and shapes everything. You price based on hours, not value. You equate exhaustion with productivity. You feel guilty when work feels good.
You build a business that requires you to suffer in order to feel legitimate.
Struggle is not the price of success. It’s a sign of misalignment.
When you’re working in your zone of genius, things flow. When you’re solving problems you’re built to solve, for people you’re meant to serve, it doesn’t feel like grinding. That doesn’t mean it’s always easy. It means it’s right.
When work feels right, you don’t need to manufacture struggle to feel legitimate.
You’re worth a lot of money because you’re good at the thing.
That project that took you four hours instead of twelve? That’s evidence you’re excellent at what you do. Good clients don’t care if it took you four hours or forty hours. They care that it works.
One of our clients put it perfectly after working through this belief:
“I realized I was addicted to the struggle. It didn’t necessarily feel good, but it felt familiar. Who am I if I’m not the person who works harder than everyone else? Turns out, I’m the person who gets results, and that’s enough.”
She’s now making 40% more revenue while working 30% fewer hours.
Next time you catch yourself creating unnecessary struggle, ask:
“What would this look like if I gave myself permission to be excellent?”
Would you add those extra hours? Would you feel guilty about the flow state? Would you apologize for how quickly you solved the problem? Would you manufacture complexity?
No.
You’d own your expertise, trust your process, and build systems that work.
You’d let it be easy.
Limiting Belief #3: “If I Rest, Everything Falls Apart”
This is the belief that you’re the only thing holding your business together.
Stepping away for even a moment will cause everything to collapse because your value is directly tied to your constant availability.
It shows up as:
Checking Slack before coffee
Inability to take real time off without anxiety
Responding to non-urgent messages within minutes
Burnout cycles followed by forced collapse
Micromanaging every client interaction
A solopreneur we know can’t go on vacation without his laptop. He couldn’t handle the anxiety of being unavailable for 72 hours.
“I can’t take time off. What if a client needs something? What if they find someone else?”
Another client would wake up at 5 AM to check emails before her family woke up. Then check again at 10 PM after they went to bed. She was available 17 hours a day, seven days a week.
(If this kind of schedule works for you, that’s great. But this particular person felt like she always needed to be “on,” which wasn’t serving her.)
Her clients learned to expect instant responses because her boundaries were nonexistent.
She created a prison with 24/7 visiting hours.
Rest won’t break your business. A lack of systems will.
Your clients don’t need you 17 hours a day, 7 days a week. They need clear expectations, reliable processes, and consistent communication. (None of which require you to be tethered to email at all hours.)
If you struggle with this limiting belief, ask yourself:
“If your best client took a week-long vacation and was completely unreachable, would you think less of them? Would you fire them?”
You’d respect their boundaries and wait for them to return.
Your clients feel the same way about you.
Write this on a sticky note and put it on your desk: stress, anxiety, and burnout are warning signs, not badges of honor.
Limiting Belief #4: “Success Should Look Different Than This”
Most solopreneurs we work with make more money than they did at W2 jobs.
But some of them put in twice the hours, which makes them feel trapped and resentful. Sooner or later, they start to wonder if having their own business is worth it.
“I’ve made all these sacrifices to build this business, and it doesn’t feel like it’s paying off.”
Sound familiar?
This belief shows up when you’ve painted a picture of what success is supposed to feel like, and the reality doesn’t match.
It shows up as:
Chronic dissatisfaction despite hitting revenue goals
Moving goalposts (”I’ll be happy when I hit $50K”)
Comparison spirals on LinkedIn
Resentment toward the business you built
The haunting question: “Was this worth it?”
At Duo, we recently ran headfirst into this limiting belief ourselves. We hit revenue milestones in our business that we’d been working toward for years (before we teamed up). We celebrated and were grateful.
Then, nothing changed.
We didn’t feel different, and there was no long-term relief. The goalpost just moved, and we started chasing a new revenue milestone. We’d tied success to a number, and numbers never feel like enough.
We had to stop and ask ourselves: What feeling are we actually chasing?
Success is a feeling. If you don’t know what feeling you’re chasing, you’ll keep moving the goalpost forever.
At $10K months, you’ll think freedom comes at $20K.
At $20K, you’ll think it comes at $50K.
At $50K, you’ll realize the number was never the point.
The problem is you never defined what success actually looks like for you. What do you want your days to feel like? Who do you want to be with? What do you want to say no to? What do you want to protect?
Instead, you adopted someone else’s vision:
Miss your kids’ childhood now so you can “be there” later
Sacrifice your health and relationships for a business because it’s “freedom”
Work hard for 30 years, then retire and play golf into the sunset
These are invisible contracts you signed without realizing it.
Erica was confronted with this limiting belief head-on when she had kids.
She was grinding away at a 9-to-5 that she liked, but something felt off. Having kids brought the vision into sharp focus. She had a successful side hustle. One that was working, bringing in money, making an impact. And suddenly she couldn’t stop wondering: Is this my sign? Can I turn this into a real business?
Where she was in life suddenly felt misaligned with where she wanted to be. So, naturally, she made the most logical decision possible: build a business while raising infants 😅
The alternative? Never feeling at peace. Never reaching her potential. Feeling perenially uninspired because she was pouring energy into a job that wasn’t bringing her closer to the vision she’d imagined for her life.
So she took the leap. But it wasn’t easy.
It took years. Lots of stop-starts. Lots of failures. Lots of pivoting and figuring out what she actually liked doing. Eventually, she realized: if she was ever going to build the business that made her feel good, she had to confront these limiting beliefs head-on.
So, she did the work to reframe them. Finally:
She built a business that didn’t require her to abandon herself to be successful.
She created systems that gave her space to breathe.
She’s more intentional and way less reactive.
It’s working.
There’s no point in building a business that checks boxes you never actually cared about.
Freedom is a feeling, and it starts with you.
Struggle isn’t a requirement. You don’t need to sacrifice your life now for some mythical “later” that never comes. Living your life, building your business, and being with your family don’t have to be at odds with each other.
To reconsider what ‘success’ means to you, ask yourself:
“If money were no object and no one was watching, what would your ideal Tuesday look like? Who would be there? What would you be doing? What wouldn’t you be doing?”
Don’t waste time building a business that looks nothing like that.
Limiting Belief #5: “I Can’t Trust Others to Do This Work”
This limiting belief translates to “delegation equals lower quality”.
If you’re not doing it yourself, it won’t be done right. Your business can only grow as far as your personal capacity allows.
It shows up as:
Refusing to hire even when you’re drowning
Redoing work that others completed
Being the blocker on every decision
Saying “it’s faster if I just do it myself”
Treating delegation like a character flaw
We recently worked with a client who was making good revenue but working 70-hour weeks. We helped him clarify his offer, build a repeatable process, and create scalable systems.
Then, we said, “Now let’s delegate the tasks that anyone can do.”
He resisted. Hard.
“But what if they don’t do it right?
What if the quality drops?
What if clients notice?”
So, he kept doing everything himself. Six months later, he was stuck at the same capacity ceiling, turning away clients he wanted to work with.
His refusal to delegate wasn’t protecting his business.
It was preventing it from growing.
Another client finally hired a contractor after months of resistance. She spent the first three weeks micromanaging every task, redoing their work, and creating more work for herself than if she’d just done it alone.
When we asked why, she said, “Because if I don’t control it, it won’t be good enough.”
Control isn’t the same as quality. It’s the enemy of scale.
Delegation means learning to trust a process, not just yourself.
Strong systems allow someone else to do important tasks for you.
The trap is conflating your expertise with the execution. But many parts of your business don’t require your genius. They require consistency, follow-through, and attention to detail.
That client who finally scaled to $55K months didn’t do it by working harder.
He did it by offloading everything that “anyone” could do to trusted contractors. Then, he automated the delegation, QA, and client follow-ups. Within two months, he doubled his capacity—with fewer hours, more predictable clients, and a business that could grow without breaking.
When you refuse to delegate, you’re protecting your identity as “the person who does it all.”
That identity is costing you your freedom.
So if you struggle to trust others and hand off work, consider this possibility:
“What if, six months from now, your business could run without you managing every detail?”
Would that feel like losing control or gaining freedom?
Limiting Belief #6: “I’m Responsible for Everyone’s Feelings and Outcomes”
A client emails you on Friday afternoon saying they want to talk, and your stomach drops.
Before you even open it, your mind is racing: What did I do wrong? Are they unhappy? Did I miss something?
You spend the weekend drafting your response.
Monday morning, you finally hit send, exhausted from 48 hours of anxiety.
They reply, “Thanks! Just had a quick question about the timeline.”
“I’m responsible for everyone’s feelings and outcomes” is the limiting belief that your clients’ emotions, results, and satisfaction are your burden to carry.
That if they’re disappointed, it’s your fault. That if they don’t implement your work, you failed. That somehow, managing their feelings is part of your job description.
It shows up as:
Taking on client emotions as your own
Inability to set boundaries without guilt
Over-functioning to compensate for clients under-functioning
Feeling responsible when clients don’t get results
Carrying the weight of everyone’s success
We worked with a solopreneur who couldn’t say no to scope creep. Every time a client asked for “just one more thing,” she said yes because she was terrified of disappointing them.
She was trying to manage their feelings, not her own boundaries.
She came to resent every client. She dreaded opening her emails. And she worked twice as hard for the same pay because she couldn’t separate her responsibility from theirs.
A lot of the work we did focused on teaching her to stand up for herself.
Our coaching: “You can fire this client. You don’t have to work with them.”
Her response: “The contract ends in December. I don’t think I’m going to renew.”
Our response: “Cancel the contract today.”
When you’re responsible for everyone else’s feelings, you have no room left for your own.
Your client’s success is their responsibility, not yours.
When someone doesn’t implement your recommendations, that’s not a failure on your part. When they’re disappointed by results they didn’t work toward, that’s not your burden to carry. When they email you with a question, it’s just a question, not a referendum on your worth.
The belief that you’re responsible for everyone else’s feelings is rooted in people-pleasing.
People-pleasing is self-abandonment.
Every time you overdeliver to manage someone’s emotions, you’re saying: “Your comfort is more important than my boundaries.”
Every time you take responsibility for their outcomes, you’re saying: “I don’t trust you to handle your own business.”
Setting boundaries is the highest form of respect you can grant yourself and your clients.
After some coaching, our client finally told her difficult client, “I don’t think this relationship is working. Let’s part ways.” She was terrified. She thought they’d be angry and would badmouth her.
None of that happened.
The client said, “I appreciate your honesty. Let’s wrap this up professionally.”
The next time you feel responsible for someone’s emotions, ask yourself:
“If you stopped worrying about your client’s feelings, what would you have energy for?”
Limiting Belief #7: “I Have to Choose Between Business Success and Personal Life”
Imagine this: Your kid’s school play is at 2 PM on Tuesday.
Your biggest client wants a call at the same time.
Do you choose the call or the play?
“I have to choose between business success and personal life” is the belief that you can’t have both.
It shows up as:
Missing family events and milestones
Believing sacrifice now = freedom later
Resentment building in the background
All-or-nothing thinking about work and life
Putting major life decisions on hold (kids, moving, travel)
Erica recognized this belief in herself when she had twins. As a parent, she summed up the struggle perfectly:
“I just don’t believe in missing all of my kids’ childhood so I can work my ass off to then sit around and do what? I’d rather build freedom into my life now and then keep it.”
But most solopreneurs don’t think that way.
They’ve accepted the rules of business handed to them: Your work life and your “life life” are separate things that need to be balanced.
Except balance is a lie.
You’re not supposed to balance work and life like they’re opposing forces. They’re integrated. It’s all just your life.
Sometimes you have energy to work. Sometimes you don’t. Sometimes a great idea hits you on Saturday afternoon while you’re in the backyard with your kids, and you take 10 minutes to explore it. Sometimes, Tuesday at 2 PM is when you need to stop working and go to your kid’s school play.
There are no rules except the ones you’ve agreed to without realizing it.
One client told us she felt guilty working on weekends—like she was “supposed to” rest, and breaking that boundary meant she was “bad” somehow. But she loved working Saturday mornings when the house was quiet.
The guilt came from an invisible contract that said: “You work 9-5 Monday through Friday, and anything outside of that is either overtime or laziness.”
She’d signed that contract without reading it.
Living your life, building your business, and being with your family don’t have to be at odds with each other.
In fact, they shouldn’t be.
That doesn’t mean things can’t be difficult at times. But at the end of the day, none of these things should be in constant friction with each other.
The idea that you have to choose is based on someone else’s definition of what work looks like.
Someone else’s schedule. Someone else’s priorities.
You can stop working whenever the hell you want and go hang out with your kids for 20 minutes. You can work on Sunday afternoon if you feel like it. You can take Wednesday morning off to go to the gym. You can build a business that expands around your life instead of consuming it.
You just have to stop forcing yourself into invisible contracts about when work is “supposed” to happen.
The goal isn’t work-life balance. It’s integration. It’s about building a life where you follow your energy rather than an obligation to hours that don’t make sense for you.
If you’re constantly choosing between work and life, ask yourself:
“What invisible rule are you following about when you’re “allowed” to work or rest?”
Who made that rule, and why are you still following it?
Limiting Belief #8: “There’s Not Enough”
Think back to the solopreneur who struggled to let go of difficult clients, even though they were draining her, because she was terrified she wouldn’t be able to replace them.
The anxiety of letting a client go spiraled into: “I have to replace that revenue, or I have to give myself enough runway.”
She was operating from scarcity, and scarcity was running her business.
“There’s not enough” is the belief that resources (clients, money, opportunities) are limited.
If you lose one client, there might not be another. If you raise your rates, everyone will leave. You have to hold onto everything tightly because letting go means losing.
It shows up as:
Panic when a client churns
Competing instead of collaborating
Saying yes to bad-fit clients out of fear
Hoarding opportunities instead of referring out
Anxiety about money, no matter how much you’re making
We know someone who hits $50K months consistently. He fires clients freely, charges whatever he wants, and has almost no online presence. When we asked how he does it, the answer was simple: He has no limiting beliefs about money.
No scarcity. No urgency. No fear.
He just knows there will be more clients and more money. He doesn’t care if someone leaves because he trusts more will come. (They always do.)
Compare that to most solopreneurs we know.
They’re making good money—$20K, $30K months—but they feel like their business could evaporate overnight. One slow season and they’re in chaos.
The difference is mindset.
Scarcity is a mindset, not a reality.
When you remove scarcity and urgency around money and your business’s health, everything changes. You attract the right people, make better decisions, and operate from a place of knowing instead of fear.
When you operate from scarcity, you:
Work with clients you resent
Undercharge because you’re afraid to lose them
Burn out trying to do everything yourself
Build a business that feels like a constant scramble
You could have all the money in the world in your bank account, but if you believe there will be no more money, you’ll still operate like you’re broke.
But when you operate from abundance, from a knowing that there’s enough, you:
Fire bad-fit clients confidently
Make decisions based on what’s right, not what’s safe
Refer work to others because you trust there’s more coming
The shift is about trusting yourself to handle whatever comes and knowing that no matter what happens, you’ll figure it out.
Our client who finally fired her bad client? She thought revenue would tank. Instead, she freed up space and, within two weeks, a better-fit client reached out. Her stress levels dropped immediately.
The scarcity was costing her more than the client ever brought in.
If you struggle with scarcity, ask yourself:
“What would you do differently if you knew—really knew—that there would always be more clients, more money, more opportunities?”
Consider what you’re holding onto out of fear, because it might be blocking what you want.
Limiting Belief #9: “Who I Am Isn’t Enough”
Imagine you’re scrolling LinkedIn and someone in your space announces a big win.
They’re using language you’d never use. Doing things you’d never do. Building a business that looks nothing like yours.
Still, you think: Maybe I should be more like them.
“Who I am isn’t enough” is the belief that you need to be someone else to be successful.
You believe your natural way of working, thinking, and showing up isn’t “right” for business. That you need to adopt someone else’s playbook, personality, or process to make it work.
It shows up as:
Building a business based on who you think you should be
Copying others’ strategies without questioning fit
Feeling like a fraud even when clients love your work
Constantly pivoting because nothing feels right
Exhaustion from performing a version of yourself
Erica worked through this “exhaustion from performing a version of yourself” belief after she teamed up with Nick and formed Duo.
She had a bit of an identity crisis because she’d always been known as a content person. But serving clients as Duo made her realize she was growing beyond her content-only persona. She wanted to talk about business problems as a whole and how content ties into the wider business ecosystem.
She’d built a reputation around one thing, but she’d grown beyond it and was struggling to reconcile old vs. new.
So after a few months of feeling weird, she finally sent an email to her newsletter subscribers and confronted the elephant in the room:
The exhaustion disappeared the second she hit send.
One insight we keep coming back to: If you’re building a business based on limiting beliefs about who you are, it’s going to fall apart eventually. Because you’re going to be exhausted from being that person.
Your business will hit a point where you either quit or change.
As Will Rogers said: “Too many people spend money they haven’t earned, to buy things they don’t want, to impress people they don’t like.”
The same is true for business.
Too many solopreneurs build businesses based on doing work they don’t like for people they don’t enjoy serving.
Then they’re confused about why success doesn’t feel good.
If you build your business as anyone other than yourself, it’s exhausting by design.
When you let go of the guilt, the urgency, the scarcity, and the limiting beliefs that keep you small, you learn to show up with an unshakeable posture. You stop self-abandoning. You build a business that reflects who you truly are, not who you think you need to be.
This work doesn’t make you a different person.
It makes you more yourself than you’ve ever been.
All those beliefs you’ve been carrying: “I’m too much,” “I’m not professional enough,” “I need to be more serious,” “I need to tone it down”. They’re suffocating you.
When you’re operating as yourself, everything clicks.
Next time you change who you are for a client, ask yourself:
“What would your business look like if you stopped trying to be who you think you should be and just showed up as yourself?”
You’re in charge of your business, so let yourself lead.
Limiting Belief #10: “I Can’t Change This Without Blowing Everything Up”
This is the belief that making any significant change will destroy what you’ve built.
You’re trapped by your own choices, pivoting means admitting failure, and letting go of what’s not working means losing everything.
It shows up as:
Staying in situations you hate because you’ve “already invested so much”
Fear of pivoting or firing bad clients
Sunk cost fallacy running your business
Paralysis around making changes
Believing you’re trapped by decisions you made in the past
The anxiety of letting a client go is worse than the daily misery of working with them.
Often, solopreneurs stay in bad client situations because they’re paralyzed by the fear of change.
Every month you wait is another month of resentment building. Every client you don’t fire is taking up space that could have gone to someone better.
Staying in the wrong situation costs more than changing it.
You’re not trapped. You’re choosing to stay.
That sounds harsh, but it’s also freeing.
If you’re choosing to stay, you can also choose to leave.
The belief that you can’t change without blowing everything up is rooted in sunk cost fallacy. You’ve already put so much time, energy, and money into this thing, so how could you possibly walk away from it now?
That’s an unhelpful way to think about it.
The time and energy you’ve already spent are gone. You can’t get it back.
When you realize you can fire a client today, pivot your offer tomorrow, or completely change direction next week (and that none of those things will destroy your business), you get your power back.
If you’re afraid change will blow up your business, ask yourself:
“What if the explosion you’re afraid of is actually the breakthrough you need?”
Consider what you want to do going forward and how change can make it happen.
Limiting Belief #11: “My Worth Is Determined by External Validation”
You post something on LinkedIn.
Within the first hour, it gets 10 likes.
Your mood sinks. Nobody cares about this. I must not be saying anything valuable.
Three hours later, it picks up traction. 50 likes. A few comments. Someone shares it.
Suddenly, you feel better. Maybe I am good at this.
Your worth just went up and down based on LinkedIn engagement.
This is the belief that you’re only as valuable as the last piece of feedback you received.
Your mood, confidence, and sense of self depend on what clients say, how many likes you get, or whether someone praised you today.
It shows up as:
Fishing for compliments
Basing your mood on client feedback
Checking email compulsively for client praise
Needing LinkedIn engagement to feel valuable
Tying your identity to your business performance
External validation is an endless hamster wheel. The second you get it, you need more. The high lasts for a moment, and then you’re back to feeling like you need to prove yourself again.
One solopreneur we know would check their email constantly, looking for client responses because they needed reassurance.
“Did they like it? Did I do a good job? Are they happy?”
Their mood was entirely controlled by what showed up in the inbox.
Another client told us he couldn’t post anything without obsessively refreshing to see how it performed. If a post didn’t get immediate traction, he spiraled. If it did well, he felt validated for a few hours until the next post.
He was creating for approval.
That made every piece of work exhausting. Because he wasn’t asking: “Is this valuable? Does this reflect what I believe?” He was asking: “Will people like this? Will this prove I’m worth listening to?”
When your worth is determined by external validation, you lose the ability to trust your own judgment. You second-guess everything. You wait for someone else to tell you if you’re good enough.
You never feel secure because validation is temporary and approval is fleeting.
You could have a thousand people tell you you’re amazing, and if you don’t believe it yourself, it won’t land.
This is why some solopreneurs get glowing testimonials and still feel like frauds. Why you can hit revenue goals and still feel like you’re not doing enough. Why praise doesn’t actually make you feel better for more than a few hours.
But when you anchor your worth in yourself, you stop needing external validation, and as a byproduct, you actually get more of it. People can sense when you’re creating from a place of knowing your value rather than seeking permission to charge for it.
If you rely too heavily on external validation, ask yourself:
“How would you show up differently if your worth wasn’t up for debate every single day?”
The affirmation you’re looking for from clients, from LinkedIn, from anyone won’t stick. External validation can’t fix an internal belief. You have to understand you’re enough, whether “they” say so or not.
“This Is Just How It Is” is the biggest limiting belief of all.
How it is, is not how it has to be.
You don’t have to miss your kids’ childhood to build a successful business. You don’t have to sacrifice your health, your relationships, and your sanity to make money. You don’t have to choose between freedom and revenue.
You don’t have to stay trapped in a business you built with your own hands.
None of these limiting beliefs are real, and you can change your mentality one thought at a time.
When Nick started reframing his own beliefs, he said, “I feel like a totally different person.”
One of his mentors responded: “Actually, you’re more yourself than you’ve ever been. All that shedding, all those layers peeling off—you are finally you, the way you want to be, and the person you always were. You just suppressed it since childhood.”
That’s what this work does.
It reveals who you’ve been all along, underneath the beliefs you’ve been carrying like armor.
We recognized these patterns after working with the solopreneur at the beginning of this mini-book, who hit $20K months and felt more trapped than ever. She burned out. She walked away. We realized too late what was really happening.
That’s when we understood the tactics matter, the offer matters, and the systems matter.
But if the beliefs underneath are keeping you trapped, none of it works.
So we’re building this into our coaching now. Right from the start. Because this work isn’t separate from building a business. It is the foundation.
You can keep living with limiting beliefs, or you can do the work. You can question the beliefs. You can rewrite the contracts. You can dismantle the prison, one bar at a time. The work is voluntary.
The question is:
Do you want to stay in the Belief Prison, or do you want to break free?
On the other side of this work, you don’t find perfection. You find peace.
You build a business that doesn’t require you to be someone you’re not. You choose rest without guilt. You find success that actually feels like success.
You find yourself—more fully than you’ve ever been.
And you change your business to reflect who you truly are.
Cheers,
Nick, Erica, & Katrina
PS: Ready to break free from your belief prisons? Book a call with Nick and Erica.
Have questions? Ask us in a comment below.
What a super valuable article! Thank you for writing all of this at the prefect time for me😀
Love this!