We all want a more abundant life, right? We want abundant time, abundant money, and abundant opportunities. Why do some people seem to have all of these and some not? Well, in today’s video I’ll explain why and what you need to do to to have an abundant life (and business!)
Let us know in the comments if you’re making the shift from scarcity to abundance and how you practice gratitude in your life.
“Today we’re going to talk about how to have an abundant life. In order to move towards abundance, you need to move away from scarcity. A scarcity mindset is a natural thing to have. We’re culturally and socially conditioned to think that wealth is finite, and that’s where the scarcity mindset comes from. We might see what others have and think that we can’t have that for ourselves. That’s scarcity. We might see abundance in what others have and think that if they already have an abundant life, then we can’t have an abundant life. That’s the scarcity mindset.
The scarcity mindset is fear-based. It comes from your ego, from the fear of not having enough for yourself. And, as entrepreneurs, we can make a choice to understand that and that scarcity mindset and we can make a choice to change it.
So, in order to get away from scarcity and move towards abundance, you’re going to have to start shifting some of your mindsets, and we’re going to talk about a couple of those here today. This is a huge part of what we do at Femworking, we really believe in abundance and we try a much as we can to give and share and help each other. It’s a huge part of why our community thrives and a huge part of our tribe.
The first example I’ll give you is hoarding. In the same way that someone hoards things, an entrepreneur might hoard opportunities. They might be afraid to say no to opportunities that aren’t right for them, because they fear that they won’t have enough opportunities or won’t get the right opportunities. An abundant mindset will tell you that there’s plenty of opportunities, and they will come to you, and so you need to say no to these opportunities that might not be the right fit for you so that you have more time and more space in your life for those opportunities to come to you.
Another example of hoarding in entrepreneurship is with your clients and who you choose to work with. Do you have a scarcity mindset where you’ll work with anyone and you’ll take anybody that comes through the door? Or do you choose to focus and niche down and really get the best clients for you?
Another example of scarcity is to have a competition mindset. You might think “I win, you lose”. In an abundant mindset, you might say “I win, you win, we all win”, and that’s what we try to have going on in our Femworking community.
Your website is another opportunity to try to get away from a scarcity mindset and move towards an abundant mindset. Your website might be currently designed for you to take any emails and get anyone who might possibly come through your website to be your client, and really compares with a scarcity mindset. On the other hand, an abundant mindset would say “I just want to have the clients that are the best for me”, so you might design a website that would filter out potentially bad clients that would not be a good fit for you.
If you have a scarcity mindset, you might also think that the more you give to others, the more it’s going to cost you. In an abundant mindset you would say that the more you give to others, the more you’ll get back. This is a huge part of Femworking and is called the law of reciprocity. It’s the backbone of Femworking to believe that the more you give and the more you put out there, the more you’re going to get back to you.
Resource constraint is another example of a scarcity mindset. This is thinking that there’s not enough to go around, there’s not enough for me, there’s not enough time, there’s not enough money. In an abundant mindset, you’ll take what you do have and prioritize it better so that you’ll understand that, with time and money, there’s more where that came from. There will be more for you.
People with a scarcity mindset tend to be very stingy. They’ll be stingy in sharing opportunities, they’ll be stingy in sharing contacts and they’ll be stingy in general in what they give. So here we really go for that “the more you give the more you get” type of philosophy and we’re happy to share knowledge, contacts and to share compassion. And there’s plenty of stories here where somebody gave to somebody else, not expecting anything in return, and had the favor repaid to them tenfold months later.
A scarcity mindset resents competition. They think that competition makes their piece of the pie smaller. An abundant mindset understands that we all work together to make the pie bigger. You getting something doesn’t mean that you’re taking something from me.
Lastly, my favorite example is something that I get asked all the time. How can people who are uncomfortable going into a networking event network successfully and be comfortable doing it? The answer that I always give is that you should go into networking events feeling like you want to give the most you can possibly give, thinking “how can I help as many people today as possible?”. Talk to people, build relationships, and when you go in with that mindset, it takes that pressure off of yourself. You go from having that mindset of “Who do I need to meet here? Who to rub elbows with? What are the connections I need to make?”. It makes the whole experience of networking a lot more pleasant, a lot more fun and genuine. And also, bonus points, when you go to an event helping other people, this does raise your value and your profile in their eyes, and it will help you in the long term anyway.
So, when we go into events and into our businesses with an abundant mindset, it helps us to raise our energy levels. We’re able to help people more, we attract more. And a huge part of this is also appreciating our current level of abundance. I’m talking about gratitude. If you don’t currently have a gratitude practice, I want you to start one today. This had been the number one game changer in, not only my business, but also my personal life, and in feeling really happy.
I try as much as possible (I’m not going to lie, I don’t do it every day), to think of ten things that I’m grateful for. And when you make yourself think once a day of ten things that you’re grateful for, you realize pretty quickly that you have a lot to be grateful for. So when you appreciate everything that you have, you’re able to allow more to come into your life, because you’re not stressing so much and you don’t have that scarcity mindset, thinking that you don’t have this or that. You start to realize that you do have a lot and that you can just invite more into your life.
So remember that there’s not a fixed amount of wealth in the world. That there’s opportunities to help others gain wealth, and that if others win, you win, everybody wins. You don’t have to have somebody lose something in order for you to gain it. And wealth building is a team effort, so we can all help each other win!
By practicing gratitude, abundance and by appreciating the abundance you already have in your life, you will grow and see more abundance in your life. By shifting your mindset from scarcity to abundance, time, money and opportunities will find their way to you. So I encourage you to share, give, help and love more, live your life to the fullest, kick that scarcity mindset to the curb, we don’t need it, and let us know in the comments how you’re shifting from scarcity into abundance and how you’re practicing gratitude every day!”