Normally we think of our competitors as other companies in direct competition for customers with our own but your inner competitor can be even more dangerous.

In my last post, I explored 5 ways that your values determine the success of your startup. Your inner competitor will undermine your success, creating negativity in everything you do, potentially even destroying your business.

What do I mean by inner competitor? Sometimes called the saboteur or inner critic, your inner competitor is the voice in the middle of the night, with the lose mentality, telling you you’re not good enough, to retreat from your vision, your success and your values, that your plan for success is stupid, too-risky, or without hope.

Your inner competitor is the dark side. As you give in to your inner competitor, following its suggested course of action, retreating from your vision, it grows ever more powerful, distorting a grain of truth, perhaps a minor risk, into a mountain of potential failure.

WWYS (what would Yoda say)? Fear not the dark side, for it is within all of us. Fear will continue to feed its power.

There are 2 strategies to stop your inner competitor from winning: face it or bypass it.

1 Face it

• Personify it. What does this voice sound like? What might he, she, or it look like?Create a clear image of your internal competitor so you can always recognize its presence and know that it’s mostly full of shit.
• Turn up the volume. 10x everything your internal competitor is saying about you and your company. When we amplify our fears, we see how destructive and how ridiculous they really are.
• Cut it down to size. Find the 2% of truth that’s masquerading as a problem 50x it’s real size.
• Look it in the face and tell it to fuck off. That always feels good

2 Bypass it

• Focus on your values, what’s important to you. Your internal competitor is the opposite of who you really are and what your company needs to be.
• Listen to your internal CEO and management team instead (more on this in my next post). What have they got to say?

What else do you do to stop your inner competitor from leading you to the dark side?