Human beings have been hardwired to expect scarcity since early civilization. In this interview, you’ll learn how to overcome this harmful instinct and evolve into an abundance mindset.
Over the past few posts, I’ve been sharing some insights from my conversations with my pal Mike McHenry – from how to manage strong teams to building a thriving business. But there’s another piece to the puzzle that has nothing to do with conventional business wisdom – and everything to do with developing the right mindset for success.
In this video, I explain how I view abundance and what it takes to adopt a mindset that allows your efforts to grow and become truly successful. The truth is, over the years, I’ve had to learn how to cultivate an abundance mindset. Like most people, I started out in life always worried about not having enough. It’s only through meeting and really listening to the right people that I’ve learned how to reframe my mindset from a place of fear and anxiety into one of love and teamwork. Let me explain.
The truth is, as a species, we’ve been hardwired to believe in scarcity.
It’s in our DNA. Early in human civilization, when we were just cavemen hunting and gathering every meal, a scarcity mindset was what kept us alive. If we didn’t jealously guard our food and resources, another caveman would simply knock us out and steal them. In a way, a scarcity mindset became a survival skill, and in some extreme situations, it’s still valuable.
For most of us, though, it’s become a mental block that holds us back from success. If you’re watching this on your computer, you probably don’t live in the jungle. You live in a house, have the internet and modern technology. You don’t have to go out and hunt for your food every day. You go to the supermarket and pick the ingredients up, prepackaged and ready to prepare.
Since we don’t have to keep other cavemen from stealing our food, we turn our fears of scarcity toward other targets. What this often means is we jealously guard our work, our business, and refuse to collaborate with others out of fear that they’ll cause us to lose what matters to us.
In the modern world, the only way to grow and evolve is to share.
It may seem obvious when I say it like this, but when you team up with other people, you can achieve big goals that you just can’t make happen individually. We don’t all have the same skills or talents. And that's a good thing.
When you team up with people you can make bigger and better things happen, make more money (or, in the case of cavemen, gather more food), and in turn, you can share your success with even more people.
This is what I mean when I talk about an abundance mindset. When you let go of the fear that others will simply take from you, you can connect with other people and you’ll find there’s more than enough resources to go around.
An abundance mindset requires daily focus.
Abundance is a mindset. Every day, you need to honestly ask yourself: What can I achieve on my own? What can I achieve as part a team? When you do this, you have to make yourself vulnerable.
You need to admit your weaknesses, so you can find someone with the ability to help fill those gaps. But this also gives you the opportunity to offer your skills to help others.
It can be scary, especially in business. Men in particular, can struggle with this in the working world. We no longer have to hunt for food, but we really tend to cling to this instinct to bring home the bacon and protect our resources from everyone else.
How can you keep yourself from slipping back into a mindset of scarcity?
Try these three steps I use every day to develop an abundance mentality:
- Work every day on adjusting your mindset. If you don’t remind yourself of why it’s important, it’s easy to slip into “survival mode” again.
- Be vulnerable and open to skill sharing. Work with others and be willing to admit when they can help you, and how you can help them in return.
- Use blogs, podcasts, self-talk and the right people. Surround yourself with messages of abundance, and it will be easier to integrate into your daily life.
I'd love to hear how you train your mind to focus on the abundance mindset and let go of the negative scarcity thoughts. Let me know if you've adopted any effective strategies in the comments below.