5 Mindset Tactics of a Billionaire (Sara Blakely’s Secrets)

True or false: Success starts in your head. This may sound a bit woo woo, but I’m a firm believer that mindset plays a major role in building a successful business. I’m also breaking down the 5 most powerful mindset tactics that I’ve adopted from Sara Blakely, CEO of Spanx, and I can’t wait for you to hear how she was able to turn $5,000 in her savings account into a billion dollar business! You may even be surprised at how mindset is a crucial factor in helping her get to where she is today.

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I have a lot of entrepreneurial icons that I look up to, but probably the biggest is Sarah Blakely, founder of SPANX, which she just sold a majority stake of, and it’s evaluated at $1.2 billion. And she was named the youngest self-made woman on Forbes billionaires list in 2012. But the thing that I love most about her and have learned the most from her is that her success all started in her head.

I learned early on about manifesting, law of attraction, not caring what other people think about you, which is a really big one for an entrepreneur, or in life really.

In this video, I’m going to share the five most powerful mindset tactics that I’ve adopted from Sarah Blakely and that helped her go from $5,000 in her savings account to building a billion-dollar brand. 

I’ve been an entrepreneur for over a decade, but in the last five years, things have really skyrocketed for me. And part of my obsession with this channel is to help reverse engineer my growth and success to help you create your own. And part of what I’ve started doing recently is also reverse engineering the success of the people that I look up to the most, which is what I’m doing today with Sarah Blakely.

Now, the whole mission behind this channel is to make entrepreneurship available to everyone, because I believe that entrepreneurship is a vehicle to freedom and that freedom affords us the ability to make the unique impact that we’re meant to make in the world. We’ve also created an incredible community off of YouTube for all of you. If you want to be a part of that sacred space, click this link to join us. 

Number one, don’t undermine your problems. I always say this, that oftentimes your best business idea comes from your own frustration, challenge, or problem that you’re experiencing. Sarah Blakely, when she was getting started, she had no experience in fashion, she had no experience in the pantyhose industry, but what she did have was a problem. She was getting ready for a dinner party and she had this white pair of pants that she wanted to wear. And if you have ever worn white pants, you know exactly where this is headed. Sometimes they’re not the most flattering. And so she realized, “I don’t really like the way these look on me.” She used a pair of scissors, took a pair of panty hose, cut off the bottoms of them, and SPANX was created. She put them on underneath her white pants, it smoothed everything out. She loved the way it looked, and there you go, a business was born. But if she just had that moment and moved on from it and didn’t think anything of it, there would never be this billion-dollar business. So don’t undermine your challenges and be very aware of them on a daily basis and open to receiving that this could be your billion-dollar idea, as small as it might sound.

The second tactic is embrace ignorance. That might sound so strange to you, but a big key to how I’ve been able to grow my business is I had no idea what I was doing when I got started. I actually had a blog back in the day, and I would pound the pavement walking door to door trying to sell ad space on my blog. I know that makes me sound ancient, but it’s the truth. And when I came to Sarah’s story, same thing sort of applies. She realized that not knowing anything about the fashion or the undergarment industry, which was a billion-dollar industry at the time with all of these huge companies that she was going into competition with, gave her a huge asset and advantage. The reason is if you go into a business trying to be like everybody else, you end up blending in and getting lost in the sea of competition instead of doing things your own way. The only way to really do things in a completely new and unique way is to have an element of complete and utter ignorance. So use that to your advantage. I always like to say that curiosity leads to cash flow, and it’s something that Sarah talks about often.

I did it very differently, and it was because I didn’t know how it was supposed to be done. So honor that in yourself. Don’t second guess yourself and let that beat yourself up. Turn to it and go, “This is cool. This is an asset.”

The next mindset tactic is vitally important: focus on your strength, but don’t be realistic. Okay, so little exercise here. I want you to grab a pen and a piece of paper, and I want you to write down the word strength. Underneath it, I just want you to start jotting down all of the things that you know you’re really good at. This is something that Sarah Blakely did before she even had the idea for SPANX. She wrote down a list of all of the things she was good at. One of those was sales, because she had actually been selling fax machines, yes, fax machines, door to door for seven years prior to getting this idea. So she wrote down her strengths, and she wrote down an intention, and the intention just said, “I’m going to create something that I can sell to millions of people.” And this is where the not being realistic comes into play, because when you’re realistic about an idea or you’re realistic about what you can create, you’re grounded in only what you know to be true in your reality right now.

Sarah Blakely at the time had $5,000 in her savings account. I don’t think at that point in her life she thought she would ever become a billionaire. So, she had to be open to any challenge that came her way that she knew she could solve. And the same goes for you. So focus on what you’re good at, focus on your strengths, that’s going to build the foundation of how you’re going to be able to be a successful entrepreneur and grow a business. But also, be open to the fact that any challenge you are currently facing, any little hiccup that comes up in your day, anything that really grinds your gears or makes angry or a problem you want to solve potentially could be the business for you. You match your strengths with a problem that you can solve, you got to good business.

Celebrate failure. I talk about this a lot, and I talked about it in last week’s video, but one of my life mottos is test, fail, learn, grow, repeat. As a recovering perfectionist and understanding that perfectionism is just pretty procrastination and a way of protecting myself, I had to learn that it’s not meant to be perfect. Nothing you do is meant to be perfect. Everything is an experiment, and everything can evolve with time. So test fast and evolve with time. And the more that you can celebrate failure and reframe it in your head, the faster you’re going to be able to grow and create your success. There is no success without failure. You learn nothing from success. You learn a lot from your mistakes, your failures, and your Ls. And come to learn that that is something that Sarah Blakely has been selling since she was a kid.

Growing up, my father used to ask my brother and me what we had failed at at the dinner table, which was so interesting, and he’d celebrate it. He’d actually be disappointed if I didn’t have something that I failed at that week. I can remember saying, “Dad, dad, I tried out for this, and I was horrible,” and he would actually high five me and say, “Congratulations, way to go.”

Failure simply means that you’re doing something and you’re actually trying. If you test long enough and you try long enough, inevitably, you’re going to find the thing that works.

Number five, a motto I live by again, generosity equals abundance. What I mean by that is that the more that you can give of your time, energy, resources, and knowledge, the more that you’re ultimately going to receive in return. It’s just the law of the universe. And what I respect and admire so much about Sarah Blakely is that, yes, she’s this billionaire, yes, she’s built this massive brand, but she’s never forgotten the value of giving back. And she’s never not been grounded in her bigger vision and mission behind SPANX. Yes, SPANX is an undergarment, but at the end of the day, the purpose behind it is so much bigger than that.

It’s all about empowering women. She wants to see more female entrepreneurs. She wants to see more female leaders and more female voices so we can actually create more equality in gender. And one of the things she’s done to actually stand behind that is her Red Backpack Foundation which supports nonprofits and businesses run by women-identifying people. Recently, with her company, she sold a majority stake in her company and to celebrate, it wasn’t just about, “Yay, look at all the money I’ve made,” it was about, “How can I support the people who have supported me in getting here because is it’s not a one-woman show.” She gave away $10,000 and tickets to anywhere in the world to her employees. So I think the big lesson from her, and maybe you’re thinking, “I don’t have that kind of stuff to give away,” what I will tell you is it can start with anything. Anything that you can find generosity in from yourself is going to create more for you to receive.

So think about that. Do you have knowledge to share? Do you have advice you can give? Do you have people that you can mentor? Is there somebody out there who needs to hear your story? I know there is, so find ways to be generous. Because by being generous, you’re seen by more people, you’re heard by more people, and you’re creating a lot of reciprocity to receive more in return.

These five tactics have played a major role in being able to grow my business to eight figures in the last five years. 

-S

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