scarcity mindset books Archives - The Law Of Attraction Sceptic

Yes scarcity mindset money! A scarcity mindset can have a powerful impact on your ability to earn money and keep money. If you’ve ever struggled or are struggling with making money, working on yourself is a must! But how can you change a scarcity mindset. I’ve already written about overcoming scarcity mindset in another article. So in this one I’m going to talk more about scarcity mindset in terms of money specifically. It can also effect your relationships and other areas of your life of course; but money is directly affected and is often the biggest problem.

Having a scarcity mindset was something I struggled with for years. I didn’t know it but I was carrying disempowering beliefs about who I was and my place in life. Lack of confidence, poor self image and negative beliefs about yourself or the world can all help build a poor attitude towards money and/or your ability to make it. You need to change it if things are going to improve for you and your finances.

Scarcity Mindset Money – Money Doesn’t Matter

The idea that money doesn’t matter was something I picked up in my teens. I was trying to be all “spiritual” when I was saying this. What I didn’t appreciate was that my parents had their own money worries and because of them, my needs were taken care of; a lack of gratitude!

My 20’s were largely a struggle to fit in and find my way in life. I was directionless and this seemed to make my life very difficult for a number of years. I wasn’t motivated by things and my needs were largely taken care of. However, whatever job I took I was desperately unhappy and over time my debts grew and grew.

Only later did I realise that I had a scarcity mindset about money.

What Creates A Scarcity Mindset Towards Money?

What comes first the lack or the thought of lack? A scarcity mindset often comes from things you have heard as a child growing up and the mindsets and attitudes of your parents or those closest to you. If you’ve ever heard limiting beliefs and ideas which talk about limitation and lack, you’ll know what I mean:

Money doesn’t grow on trees
Life is hard
It’s a struggle
You only need a little/enough
Money isn’t important
Money is the route of all evil
The rich are greedy
and so on..

If you grew up around any of these attitudes you’ve probably picked up at least a few negative attitudes towards money, wealth and abundance. Even if these ideas aren’t things you say consciously, you may have an unconscious behaviour pattern which is based on one or some of them. Think back to your earliest memories around money. Finding an early money related memory is a good way to discover what ideas you are holding on to about it.

Creating New Money Mantras – Changing Old Paradigms

A paradigm is a belief system which controls your thinking, or a set of thought patterns. If you’ve been around a lot of negative thinking about money in your early years, you’ll have picked them up as your own beliefs. As we get older we are more discerning towards the attitudes and beliefs we decide to adopt. But as children, the conscious deliberation mechanism is non existent and you tend to accept those attitudes as gospel; especially if they come from your parents.

Your deep unconscious beliefs may lie dormant. You are mostly unaware of them without closer inspection. You’ll usually only discover them when you’re attempting something new which buffs up against them; such as attempting to make more money!

Goal setting can be a good example too. When setting a lofty goal, you’ll probably feel some internal resistance to it. This is a good thing to do to discover your resistant belief patterns. As you think about what you would like to accomplish relating to your money goals, your mind will kick in with excuses. Listen carefully as they will directly relate to your unconscious beliefs around money, and scarcity.

Here’s another way to discover some of your limiting beliefs. Write down on a piece of paper exactly why you can’t have everything you want.

Why You Can’t Have It?

Once you have your list in front of you, write down some of the reasons for your answers. Delve deeper into your “why’s”.

You should uncover some deeper level beliefs around money. When you do congratulate yourself. In front of you will be a list of your now conscious limiting beliefs about money. They might look something like the list of limiting beliefs above.

Once you have your list you can write down opposing beliefs next to each one. So if your old belief is:

“Money doesn’t grow on trees”, write next to it, “Money comes easily and frequently”.

One is a belief that money is in short supply, the other is that there’s plenty. Which belief would you rather have controlling your life?

Get Conscious About Your Self Talk

These small conversations are happening all the time in our heads. You may even openly say that you don’t have enough, or that money is limited. Learn to notice these little ideas as they pop up and make them more conscious. Then start choosing their opposites: ideas which allow money to flow in abundance rather than ideas which limit its supply.

Some people seem to have everything. Life just works for them! While other struggle almost constantly. Why is this so? Of course a lot has to do with environment and influence. But ultimately we can change our lives by changing our thinking. This doesn’t change overnight because it will have taken years and even decades to manifest your current lifestyle, based on your thoughts and actions. But becoming more conscious of your thinking is the first step towards creating more flow and abundance in your life.

Overcoming a scarcity mindset is something you must absolutely do if you want to change your life in terms of abundance. No matter how hard you work and what you do, a scarcity mindset will always work against you.

So what exactly is a scarcity mindset? Do you ever have thoughts that you’re not enough? Or do you ever feel like there’s something wrong with you? Do you always feel as though you don’t have enough money? Worries, limiting beliefs, past programming and life events can all help to create a scarcity mindset.

If your mind is focused on lack and limitation, whatever you do to improve your financial situation (on the outside) will likely be undone by your limiting thinking working against the creation of abundance.

Overcoming Scarcity Mindset

The first thing you can do to help in overcoming scarcity mindset is to notice your thinking and emotions. If you’re caught up in a poverty mindset, you’ll likely be focused on the negative. You may be thinking about your debt, or pain and suffering from the past. By doing so, you’re re-affirming the negative. To change this you need to shift your focus to higher levels of frequency.

At first this may take some time. Shifting your vibration from a low energy level such as grief, straight to joy just isn’t realistic; especially if you’ve already spent a lot of time there.

Instead you’ll need to slowly shift your emotional state going up the scale of emotions. Here’s an excerpt from the book above Ask and It Is Given – Esther & Jerry Hicks.

To move up the scale of emotions, you need only shift a small step at a time. Look for better feeling thoughts which help shift you out of the lower levels of vibration and into more pleasing emotions.

Overcoming Scarcity Mindset – What To Say To Yourself

One of the reasons you could be trapped in a scarcity mindset is the story you tell yourself in your head. Often a feeling of scarcity comes from your history or your self identity. If you have associated yourself with someone who is “just like that”, it can work against you until you tell it something different.

So one of the best strategies to switch your inner dialogue is to learn to notice your thoughts. Meditation can help with this (or simply sitting still and observing your mind). At first you’ll probably fall into the habit of becoming your thinking. Your mind will distract you and you’ll enter into talking to yourself. Once you notice this, you can go back to observing your thoughts without attachment. This is a powerful exercise which will help you detach yourself slightly and identify less with your thinking processes as the real “you”.

Start with a few minutes each day and build up over time.

When you start to see the stories which go on in your head, you’ll see that some of them relate to scarcity. Perhaps you’ll make excuses as to why your life is the way it is. You might relive situations and circumstances too. Once you realise that what you’re saying is controlling your paradigm around money and scarcity, you’ll want to look for better feeling thoughts.

Choose thoughts which are empowering not belittling. Notice especially those thoughts which relate to how much you earn, how you feel about yourself and emotional pain and/or trauma from the past.

Overcoming Scarcity – Self Image

It’s important to create a positive self image which allows you to grow and develop. If you think of yourself as a failure, it will be so much more difficult to attract the circumstances of success, whatever that means for you.

Self image is an important barometer for someone’s self worth and a poor self image typically goes hand in hand with scarcity.

You can work on your self image by learning to speak to yourself in a different way (see above). Most of what you believe about yourself is what goes on inside. No matter how many people tell you how much you are loved and appreciated, it always comes down to you to believe it or not!

Think about how you treat yourself. Does this reflect a poor self image or a positive one?

Clearing Negativity

To shift a negative scarcity mindset, you want to move through the emotional scale all the way up to abundance. When your mind is chattering away and you’ve got a negative voice in your head, this can be very difficult. To help clear the way it can be useful to focus on a mantra which distracts your mind and stops the dialogue of negativity from running the show.

One mantra I’ve found useful is the Ho’oponopono one. Ho’oponopono is the ancient Hawaiian practice of forgiveness. By reciting four phrases, you alter your mental chatter and direct the subconscious mind in another direction. This can be very powerful give the time, especially if you’ve been reciting negativity to yourself for a while before.

The four phrases you repeat are:

“I love you”

“Please forgive me”

“Thankyou”

“I love you”

Repeat these four phrases over and over in your mind. This helps you focus on something which stops your mind chattering about whatever it was chattering about before!

Worried About Money?

If you’re coming from a scarcity mindset you’re probably worried about money. This is a self fulfilling feedback loop from which you need to escape. The worry comes from a scarcity mindset which keeps telling you to worry about money. Therefore you create more money worries. You can’t escape the situation with a mindset which is focused on worry and scarcity.

Coming from an abundance paradigm, you would have a different thinking process about money.

A good way to start the shift from scarcity to abundance is to practice gratitude. Gratitude is a completely different vibration and emotion to worry. You can’t do both simultaneously! Try being worried and grateful at the same time! It’s impossible! So learn to practice gratitude to shift your energy around worry and scarcity.

Start by writing a gratitude diary every day and focus on all the things you’re grateful for in your life already.

the abundance paradigm - overcoming scarcity mindset

Negative Beliefs About Money

Money doesn’t grow on trees. Rich people are greedy. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. I shall not want. Money is the root of all evil. Money is not important. I don’t want money. The rich get richer the poor get poorer. Money is limited. Money doesn’t bring happiness. An on and on it goes. It’s very difficult not to have picked up some limiting beliefs about money in your life.

The beliefs about you, and your worthiness, are also linked to your ability to earn money. Rest assured the negative beliefs are keeping you in poverty. Your beliefs about money are most definitely a factor in your ability and desire to earn and keep it. So if any of these ideas about money rings a bell for you, you should weed it out if you want to attract more abundance into your life.

Weeding Out negative Beliefs

When you catch yourself talking against abundance, or money is any way, you should stop and pay attention. You are halting the growth of wealth and abundance in your life by speaking against it.

When you start to notice your self talk and speech about how you relate to money, you can do something about it. Until then, you’re beliefs will remain unconscious and you’ll carry on as you always have.

C.G. Jung — ‘Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.’

Once you have found some negative ideas around money, you can see what beliefs your scarcity mindset is built on and begin dismantling the foundations. Observe them and then stop giving the the same attention. Use mantras which promote abundance, not poverty. See money mantra to become rich.

Money mantras are things like:

“Money comes easily and frequently”

“I get paid for being me”

“Money comes to me in increasing amounts through multiple sources on a continual basis”

So when you catch yourself thinking or talking against abundance, repeat a positive mantra instead. Over time you’ll reprogram your subconscious mind to look for money opportunities and welcome money, rather than repelling it.