Jay Shetty & Leila Hormozi ON Building Confidence Through Competence

While you wait to become confident enough to start, someone else is building skill, which gives them the confidence they need to persevere.

In this On Purpose episode, Jay Shetty sits down with Leila Hormozi, a self-made entrepreneur and investor who has built and scaled companies worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Known for her ability to help others increase their income and raise their standards without losing their core values, Hormozi provided a leadership blueprint that prioritizes psychological stability, rigorous systems, and a counterintuitive approach to building a competent life.

Competence Builds Confidence

Hormozi doesn’t believe that you need to feel confident before taking action; on the contrary, she believes that confidence is an output, not an input. She explained to Jay Shetty that confidence comes from competence in a certain area, and the only way to get there is by building a body of evidence for yourself: you must first do the things and learn from your mistakes.

When Hormozi was 19, she was insecure, overweight, and struggling with substance abuse. Yet she understood that the only way out of a vicious cycle and toward a healthier life and self-image was by taking action. So she moved across the country with only $5,000 to learn sales and marketing, which she saw as essential to building a business. She believed that, once you become competent through repeated action, confidence follows naturally.

Hormozi initially tried to change her life by using mirror affirmations, but they felt weird to her; they sounded untrue because she lacked the underlying evidence to support those beliefs about herself. Before becoming good at something and proving to yourself that you can do it, you must be humble enough to admit that you start out as bad and that you must take risks along the way toward your goal. It’s a process that will build competence in various areas and eventually make you feel confident in your own skin.

Successful Business Owners Welcome Challenges

According to Leila Hormozi, the primary reason why businesses fail is the founder’s inability to manage their mind and emotions. She shared with Jay Shetty the story of a company that grew from $2 million to $90 million in three years but collapsed because the founder could not handle the stress of a lawsuit. Even though the company won the lawsuit, the founder’s emotional instability led her to shut down the business. In her opinion, it’s not the market that puts a company out of business, but rather the founders themselves.

If you are a business owner or want to become an entrepreneur, you need to build frustration tolerance. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Hormozi witnessed many business owners give up because they were unable to cope with uncertainty and unpredictability. She told Jay Shetty that becoming good at managing your anxiety and frustration will differentiate you from the rest and will likely turn you into a winner.

Recovery Isn’t Optional

Leila Hormozi explained that she relies on strict self-care practices to manage work stress. She wakes up at 4:30 AM to journal, walk, and meditate; this provides a stable routine that grounds her amid business uncertainty. To her, self-care doesn’t have to be soft because winning isn’t; if you want to be a winner, you must build strong foundations to stand on.

For Leila Hormozi, business is like athletic work; you must prioritize recovery as much as output, to avoid burnout. She told Jay Shetty that high performers must learn when to reset and take care of their mindset, rather than pushing through challenges. Moreover, you don’t have to do everything yourself; it’s essential to build a support network that includes therapists, mentors, and friends. She argued that the only thing that will stop a high performer is wearing themselves out, so it’s crucial to learn to recover when necessary.

You Can Learn Discipline

Hormozi told Jay Shetty that, to her, discipline is a system rather than a character trait. She believes it doesn’t come easily to people because of a lack of desire, but because their environment is full of triggers that work against their goals. The easiest way to stay consistent, she argued, is to make desired actions easy and create friction around the ones that you’re trying to get rid of. For example, she stopped her drinking habit by moving out of the flat where her roommates drank, and lost weight by deleting food delivery apps.

Jay Shetty agrees that changing your systems is a powerful strategy in getting closer to your goals; while some people see their lack of discipline as a personal failure, he emphasized that it’s often simply a matter of creating a better system.

However, relying only on memory to change a habit may be insufficient. Hormozi shared that memory is a liability, so she uses technology and environmental prompts as reminders throughout the day, such as meditation notifications. In her view, people are already disciplined in behaviors that don’t serve them, like eating ice cream every night, so by actively and purposefully changing your environment to serve your goals, discipline will automatically follow.

What Do You Love About Your Job?

When discussing work-life balance, Leila Hormozi explained that, in her view, it's a concept often sought by those who associate work with pain. A study on job crafting among hospital cleaners showed that some workers saw themselves as healers because their work restored patients’ dignity.¹ Therefore, it’s a matter of mental framing rather than the job itself.

Hormozi and Jay Shetty agree that work can be enjoyable if engineered correctly; it’s not what you do for work that makes you happy, but how you feel about it. Many people seek status or fame instead of following their calling; this is why Hormozi designed her company around enjoyable activities and people, so that she can work long hours without wanting to stop.

Moreover, she believes that a negative mindset can hinder personal growth; it’s after doing the tedious task that you become more skilled and resilient, not before. Hormozi encouraged Jay Shetty’s audience to find work they enjoy or change their internal narrative about the work they currently have.

A CEO’s Leadership Role

Hormozi defines the role of a CEO as influencing everyone in the company so they act effectively, even when the leader is not in the room. She broke it down into three pillars for Jay Shetty:

1. People – ensuring the right vendors, partners, and employees are in place.
2. Vision – defining the desired superior state of the company in three or five years from now.
3. Cash – setting the macro-level allocation of resources to ensure growth.

As a leader, Hormozi believes it’s important to be hands-on in certain areas. She admitted she still personally reviews resumes for certain high-level roles; being CEO means solving the most difficult challenges that come her way while maintaining a long-term ethos. Hormozi loves the challenge of assembling the right team to build a company recognized for its excellence rather than the name of its founder.

No More AI-Generated Resumes

Hormozi told Jay Shetty that nowadays most resumes are AI-generated; therefore, it’s essential to showcase your skills to set yourself apart. She believes the best candidates provide observable behaviors and free work samples rather than just listing skills on paper. Hormozi argues that a resume should showcase your story, who you are, starting with a hook and ending with a call to action.

During interviews, Hormozi uses sincere candor to test a candidate’s values; she often reads red flags back to them to see if they become defensive or are self-aware. She also looks for people who seek excellence over simply a higher salary. Hormozi told Jay Shetty that how a candidate negotiates or responds to emails says more about their character than any answer to a standard question.

Good Leaders Care

Leaders are often thought to be loud or wild; however, Hormozi has had the opposite experience: many great leaders are quiet individuals who give credit to others and take the blame themselves. She believes that a leader will inevitably be loved, respected, and feared because they hold power over other people’s lives, too.

Leila Hormozi admitted to Jay Shetty that she uses a different language when speaking with people from different departments, from sales to creative. When giving feedback, she anchors it in the employee’s personal goals. Instead of telling them what to improve, she highlights the gap between their current behavior and their ultimate career goal; this way, the conversation turns into constructive critique rather than an insult.

As a CEO herself, Hormozi believes that a good leader must check their intentions: do they want the other person to feel bad, or to improve? Jay Shetty agrees that people respond better to someone telling them what they should start doing rather than what is going badly at the moment. It’s a source of motivation instead of shame.

Real Success Takes a Village

To Leila Hormozi, hyper-independence in business is a lie fed to women in leadership. She told Jay Shetty that trying to do everything alone leads to misery and health issues. Real power doesn’t come from exhausting yourself; it comes from choosing to depend on others. Additionally, labeling someone as self-made is unhealthy because it overlooks the many people who contributed to one’s success and reinforces the misconception that one achieves greatness on one’s own.

Despite her success, Leila Hormozi stays grounded and true to her values. She makes decisions aligned with her core principles; success is about living in accordance with those values, even when decisions don’t seem right from the outside. Similarly, Jay Shetty admitted that he needed to reframe his own relationship with money and understand that a person can be both good and successful. Hormozi concluded that a truly successful life is one where you enjoy the journey rather than focusing solely on the goal.

More From Jay Shetty

Listen to the entire On Purpose with Jay Shetty podcast episode “Leila Hormozi: Feel Like You’re Working Hard but Not Getting Ahead? (Use THIS Simple Filter to Focus on What ACTUALLY Makes You Money)” now in the iTunes store or on Spotify. For more inspirational stories and messages like this, check out Jay’s website at jayshetty.me.

¹Wrzesniewski, Amy, and Jane E. Dutton. “Crafting a Job: Revisioning Employees as Active Crafters of Their Work.” The Academy of Management Review 26, no. 2 (2001): 179–201. https://doi.org/10.2307/259118.

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