At first glance, this might seem like one of those pop psychology ideas that pop up from time to time on one’s radar, and we all sneer and laugh at it.
On further investigation, one realizes that there is overwhelming evidence of the importance of adopting an abundance mindset and moving far away, as much as you can, from the scarcity mindset.
Most times, an often overlooked and derided change in perspective could radically change the way one learns. The resilience in times of trouble and pain and how a person handles stress either from work or just from life, in general, can affect how the immune system functions!
This advantage of the abundance mindset over the scarcity mindset was demonstrated in a study on middle-aged adults by Yale and Miami universities researchers.
The above study showed that middle-aged people who exhibited an abundance mindset lived 7.5 years longer than those who exhibited a scarcity mindset.
The study already finishes the scarcity vs. abundance mindset battle and declares the abundance mindset the ultimate and apparent victor.
The common questions most people ask about the scarcity vs. the abundance mindset war that they face is usually directed towards attaining freedom from the inner battle of the mind.
Questions like “what is the abundance mentality? How do I learn how to have an abundance mindset? What are abundant mindset exercises that I can practice?” You will be delighted to know that you will find the answers to these questions and more in this article.
To better understand how to conquer and end the scarcity vs. abundant mindset conflict in mind, you must know what it means to have an abundance mindset.
What Is An Abundance Mindset?
An abundance mentality or mindset is the worldview that there are enormous resources and successes for everyone to enjoy their heart’s content without stealing and competing against others.
It is the belief that life is not a zero-sum game where one can only succeed if another falls. Instead, the individual with an abundance mentality believes that we all can succeed simultaneously – a win-win situation for everyone.
One of the most direct consequences of this type of inner reality is increased openness and trust between people. And the most immediate consequence of transparency and trust between people is, of course, beneficial cooperation within the environment.
Here are a few abundant mindset examples:
1. Believing that you are in the driver’s seat, i.e, in control of your life rather than being a mere victim or bystander. Feeling empowered, positive, and energized. You energize, encourage, and inspire others.
2. You feel like you’re working on something bigger than yourself. Hence, you are excited about the upcoming challenges and see them as mere stepping stones to your success.
3. You are always eager to learn from others and correct your shortcomings.
4. You are happy for other people’s achievements because you know this doesn’t mean you can’t achieve the same and go beyond.
5. You are open to collaborations and sharing what you have and know with others.
6. You are grateful and appreciative for new things, either large or small.
7. You are willing to accept your mistakes and recognize opportunities for growth and improvement.
What Is A Scarcity Mindset?
On the other hand, the scarcity mindset is the very debilitating belief that there can never be enough in the world for one to take advantage of or use.
A mental approach like the above believes that the world is a game where only the strong survive and succeed, and one person has to lose for another to ascend.
In this case, the person believes that everyone cannot succeed simultaneously. A mindset like this above fosters low trust, self-centeredness, micromanagement, and reluctance to share resources, information, and time.
All of which culminates into a worldview that hampers cooperation with others. And if there’s anything responsible for humanity’s success, it is our ability to cooperate on a large scale.
Here are also a few scarcity mindset examples:
1. You are always reluctant to share resourceful information with others because you believe that doing this would off your chances of success.
2. You are not so happy about other people’s successes and achievements due to the belief that it has limited your chances of succeeding.
3. Believe that you have all the answers and don’t need other people’s input—the fabled one-person island.
4. Rather than promote and encourage other people’s achievements, you would instead promote yourself alone and your achievements.
How To Develop An Abundance Mindset
When you get an overview of the scarcity vs. abundance mindset, you realize that there are some inner states, languages, and beliefs that clearly distinguish the two from each other.
Therefore, to transition from one to the other, you must take on all that characterizes the particular mindset. Every time a scarcity vs. abundance mindset clashes, the person with the abundance mindset is bound to be victorious.
In this article, I will show you how to have an abundance mindset and overcome a scarcity mindset in this section. Here are a few steps to cultivating an abundance mindset.
1. Realize How Powerful Your Thoughts Are
If you haven’t heard this before, listen to it now; your thoughts are potent. The ideas you have of yourself could be the very thing holding you back from achieving your goals and objectives.
Pay attention to the words and thoughts you use to refer to yourself. Do they reflect a scarcity mindset or an abundance mindset? Do you feel that you can’t succeed at a thing because of far better people than you?
Do you think your chances of success have been cut short because someone else has already taken all available opportunities? Then you’re “suffering” from a scarcity mindset.
These kinds of thoughts can never help you move forward in life. The only purpose is to keep you in the dark, sullen, bitter, and angry little corner of the world complaining about how life is unfair.
When you think such thoughts shun them instantly and do not let them procreate like viruses. Instead of being stomped because someone is already better than you are at something, use that opportunity to learn from them.
Use their success as a blueprint for your success. In other words, think abundantly. Their success does not imply the impossibility of yours, after all.
2. Become Aware Of The Numerous Possibilities Available To You
When you look at the scarcity vs abundant mindset, you realize that those who practice the abundant mindset see more possibilities around them than those who do not.
When you believe there are no more possibilities, you start to see the improbable rather than the possible and will not achieve your objectives.
Henceforth, please make it a conscious decision always to seek the possibilities. You would realize that when you think there are no chances for you, numerous opportunities to spread your wings are still there.
3. Build Your Passion
Don’t be scared to discover and unleash all of your passion in all its full glory. Find something you are very good at and love doing and wholeheartedly devote yourself to it.
When you do this, you will be eager to learn more, share what you have accomplished so far with other people, relate with other people who love the same thing, and even share what you know and have with others.
When you have these inclinations, you have already begun the journey of replacing the thoughts of scarcity with abundance and wholehearted devotion to the object of your passion.
These thoughts are what you need to push yourself to the pinnacle of success you desire. This, amongst other reasons, is why, in the scarcity vs. abundance mindset debate, having the abundance mindset brutally stomps and declares itself the best of all great perspectives.
4. Cultivate A Healthy And More Confident Personality
The truth is that underneath all those thoughts of scarcity clouding your mind is a severe case of your inability to make way for yourself without doing so at someone else’s expense.
Therefore, if you want to build and cultivate an abundance mindset, you should be confident in yourself, your abilities, and your capacity to succeed and do great things.
A genuinely confident individual does not need to fear someone being better than them at the moment. Instead, they believe this doesn’t stop them from being just as good and, perhaps, even better.
Challenges don’t stop them on their track; it spurs them on instead. Challenges become mere whetting stones. Only there to sharpen them and make them stronger.
It becomes easier for you to be happy for others when they do something great. You become open to collaboration, willing to share information and resources, and inspire others when one is confident in one’s abilities and self.
Hence, here is why you must grow healthy confidence in yourself if ever you hope to have the supreme abundance mindset.
5. Speak Wisely
It’s not only your thoughts that could determine which mindset (scarcity vs. abundance mindset) you would be marinated in.
The very words you speak to yourself and the people around you are also critical in developing a scarcity or abundance mindset.
When you catch yourself speaking of things you desire very much in a way that suggests that you can’t have them, correct that statement. Instead, declare to your mind and environment that you will get what you desire, and nothing will stop it!
Yes, the power of consciously spoken affirmations exists and creates results, and you can experience it too! Here are a few affirmations that you can consistently use to make your mind conscious of abundance and positivity. Read up on “I am” affirmations for daily motivation here.
Sometimes, positive statements can look so insignificant. Yet, it might be all you need to push your mind into a more abundant reality when used strategically.
Yes, positive affirmations would also help you boost your confidence, and you know what they say – a shot of confidence a day keeps the scarce away.
6. Inculcate A Growth Mindset Into Your Lifestyle
The growth mindset was popularized through Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, written by the psychologist Carol Dweck.
In this book, Carol defines what it means to have a growth mindset, how to cultivate the growth mindset, and how doing this can affect one’s chances of success positively.
People with the growth mindset believe in their ability to grow endlessly and improve themselves. The above means acknowledging that you can still grow to whatever length you have envisioned, no matter your current level of power.
Therefore, the individual with the growth mindset has to have an endless love for learning and the resilience to stick to it no matter how difficult it becomes.
Apart from being essential to developing an abundance mindset, these traits are necessary if one ever hopes to achieve anything substantial in this world.
So, don’t be discouraged by the subsistence of other people better than you are. Instead, let their existence be the fuel that pushes you into greater heights that will make the stars your starting point.
For more mindset hacks to improve your life, read this article on how to develop a growth mindset here.
7. Be Creative; Think Outside The Box
What could be more of a hallmark of the scarcity mindset than an inability to think outside the box?
No outside-the-box thinking could happen in such a mind when one doesn’t believe in their ability to succeed just because someone already has.
It is vital for a mind that wants to cultivate an abundant mindset against a scarcity mindset to do as much as possible to be creative. You might protest this, saying that creativity is inborn, but that’s not true.
One can increase one’s imagination by being open to new experiences, available to growth, and being positive. A positive mind that believes in the numerous possibilities that abound in the universe is creative.
A creative mind is a function of an abundance of experiences. So, resist the urge to constrain yourself to any tiny little box.
Instead, let your thoughts run around an infinite space, unfettered and unchained. Let them flow and blend into each other seamlessly and without restraint.
Then, at that point in space and time, you would discover the nigh inexhaustible creative juices that have always been at your disposal.
8. Give Yourself More Exposure
If you take a deep dive into the scarcity vs. abundant mindset, you will discover that the person with the abundant attitude prioritizes meeting new people, doing new things, and taking up new challenges.
Previously, we discussed how important it is to think outside the box. The most effective way to get those creative juices seeping in is to become more open-minded and get more exposure in your life.
Meet new people, become curious about them and their experiences, and encourage them to say more about themselves, their aspirations, and life.
Make it a ritual to get to know people, travel to new places, eat new foods, experience new cultures, and learn another language.
Then as you grow in knowledge and experiences, learn from these experiences, and reflect on your own beliefs. Then it becomes easier to build an abundant mindset.
9. Become More Grateful And Optimistic
Practicing gratitude is one of the most potent weapons in your arsenal if you want to develop an abundance mindset and let go of all thoughts of scarcity.
Don’t sit around and mope about all the things you don’t have or can’t do at the moment. Instead, practice the art of gratitude. Take a deep look at all you have right now, and then list all the things that make you feel grateful.
They don’t have to be great. They could be the simple things like having food to eat, having a house to lay your head on, etc.
When you are grateful for even these little things, you get a boost of confidence and feed your mind with abundance. For a bit of exercise as regards this, get a little journal.
Anytime you feel yourself succumbing to the scarcity mindset, pick it up, then write down all the things you are grateful for in your life. Ensure you list at least ten items.
Or you can choose to meditate on quotes or texts that say more about gratitude. An excellent example of such is the article, 500+ gratitude quotes to inspire thankfulness, and you can read it here.
10. Do And Implement What You Learn Daily
Just as Rome wasn’t built in a day, you can’t develop an abundance mindset in just one day. You have to make the conscious decision to keep at it every day without relenting.
The truth is, it is much harder to build things than it is to break them. So, it is much harder to create an abundance mindset. And sometimes, all it takes is just a single moment of weakness, a single indulgence of scarcity thoughts, to break all the effort you had previously made.
Therefore, you must implement all of the steps listed above daily. Doing this might be challenging initially, but it becomes second nature over time.
Then, you begin to correct any scarcity thoughts that you might occasionally have without even trying to.
Abundant Mindset Exercises
Now we have evaluated the scarcity vs. abundant mindset battle and how the abundant mindset wins.
We have also covered the abundant and scarcity mindset, examples of an abundant and scarcity mindset, and shown you ten ways to shift your mindset from scarcity to abundance.
But, if all of that was not enough, here are abundant mindset exercises and tricks to help you develop the abundance mindset.
1. Tear-away Calendar Trick
The Tear-away calendar trick is a particularly effective method you can use throughout the year. The trick is to get one of those rip-away, one-a-day calendars.
Every day tear the last days, page away and then write three things you are grateful for that day. And as I mentioned earlier, they don’t have to be enormous things.
It could be the little things that delight you and make you grateful, like waking a little earlier or hitting a target for the day. Do this every day till it becomes a habit.
Don’t throw the torn-away pages for the previous days, though. Please keep them somewhere and then go through them every six months.
2. Find Solutions With What You Have Now
One of the many constraints that prevent most people from achieving anything they set out to is that they can’t do it due to some constraints or shortcomings.
No one is ever perfectly ready or prepared for anything they are about to do. If you let these shortcomings stop you from achieving your aims, you are setting yourself up for failure and hence, thoughts of scarcity.
Look around you and see how you can solve your problem with what you already have. To practice this even more effectively, do these:
- Take a piece of paper and a pen.
- Demarcate the paper into three columns; one labeled situation, the other marked if only I had, and the last tagged how to move forward from here.
- In the situation section, write down your current situation, i.e., the goals you find hard to achieve.
- In this “If only I had…” section, pen down each resource you think is stopping you from solving the problem and necessary for solving them.
- In the “How to move forward from here” part, try to create solutions to counter the immediate problem without the resources you feel you need.
- Think and write down the resources you currently have at your disposal and how they could help you overcome the problem.
- Think of them as things you can use to substitute for whatever you don’t have in the “If only I had…” section.
3. Clean Your Environment
Cleanliness is next to godliness, right? Well, it turns out it is also next to the abundant mentality.
Being in a clean and sparkling environment could give you the mood boost and confidence to banish all thoughts of “I can’t do this. I can’t do that” from your subconscious.
So, take the necessary and clean your room, wash your car, clear your purse, just clean. This would help you kill two birds with one stone.
First, by doing this, you would be taking your mind off any thoughts of scarcity and inadequacy that you might have.
Secondly, take a comprehensive look at how better your environment looks now when you’re done.
You would suddenly be filled with confidence and be empowered to do, even more, take action, and solve whatever problem you face.
4. Change Your Environment
We talked about trying new things. Well, add this to it. Sometimes you might need a slight change in your backdrop. Don’t be scared to change the layout of your house, the colors, etc.
And if you cannot do that, you can pick up your phone and Google your area and see what pops up. There could be a festival, carnival, or even a restaurant that you haven’t tried and think would be interesting.
Doing this is also an excellent way to get exposure, make fun memories, and sometimes meet interesting new people who could benefit you.
5. Practice Self-evaluation And Assessment
Yes, consistent self-reflection can be an effective tool in building an abundant mindset. Often, we give room for scarcity when we live with a poor self-image.
Practicing self-reflection can help you gain clarity and improve the quality of your decisions. Learn to examine yourself daily carefully.
You can start by deciding to carefully explore and meditate on the events of your day during your free time in the evenings.
Doing that will help you recognize your mistakes and spot opportunities or other vital details that you might not have noticed earlier.
Over time, you will see that you have become open-minded, peaceful, and optimistic, which are signs that you are gradually becoming more abundantly minded!
Conclusion
This article on scarcity vs. abundance mindset aims to show you just how impactful both perspectives can be, their effects and how you can work towards living a more satisfying life.
Choosing to build your mind into a hub of positivity and productivity is one of the wisest decisions you can make. By reading this article, I am glad that you are making that decision.
For more ways to hack developing a better mindset for success, read this article here.
To help you progress your journey toward self-improvement, I have made an extraordinary resource available for you – 7 Days To A Better You.
You can access it using this link here. I know you will find it very helpful. I will leave you with a quote that I have found very helpful.
“Abundance is not something we acquire. It is something we tune into.” —Wayne Dyer.
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