4 Ways to Cultivate Abundance
Paula wants us to know that the abundance mindset is not about pie-eyed optimism. It is about how we approach a problem, and if we immediately go to a scarcity mindset, this can condition our thinking.
We all have a tendency to jump into certain patterns of thinking, even if we consider ourselves very positive people. In this episode, Paula shares a personal story about packing her daughter's car for a move and how her daughter's reminder to adopt an abundance mindset was the catalyst to start focusing on her own patterns of thinking. Despite her optimistic nature, Paula caught herself slipping into scarcity thinking, which shifted her focus to actively choosing the abundance mindset.
Listen in to learn four ways we can cultivate an abundance mindset in our lives, (and why it matters)!
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Episode Transcript:
4 Ways to Cultivate an Abundance Mindset
:: This transcript was generated automatically - please forgive typos. ::
[00:00:00] Paula: Welcome to today's episode of Beyond Neutral. So topic of the day today, I want to talk about mindset. You know, I've discussed this in the past in terms of having a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset, which is really driven by curiosity and how important that is. And there's been ample research done on the fact that mindset Is an absolute critical component of success and to overall happiness, as well as [00:01:00] longevity, by the way.
[00:01:01] What I want to talk about today is a little bit of a twist on that, and that is the concept of a positive mindset or a abundance mindset versus a scarcity mindset, a negative mindset. and how important that is and how that can impact us in so many ways in, both our personal relationships and our work lives and every, everywhere that that kind of comes up.
[00:01:26] So one of the things that's driven me to want to talk about this or has kind of brought this to light for me is I, I got. accredited in,an assessment that I use in coaching called a WEI profile. And one of the things that measure measures is an individual's orientation towards positive versus negative thinking, under stress in a relationship in the moment.
[00:01:48] And it's so interesting how often we'll look at that and it looks to find a ratio of those thoughts, right? This is not about pie eyed optimism that I'm talking about here. This is [00:02:00] about, This is about what you most easily access and how often you access positive thinking versus negative thinking and so many times I will go through this assessment with somebody and it will turn out that their ratio is.
[00:02:14] is more towards the negative than they might have imagined. And immediately they will say, well, but I'm a very optimistic person. And I get that. This is not about optimism. This is about whether or not you think about possibility and you think about abundance or you immediately go to risk. you immediately go to challenges and, and I had, what kind of started me down this path and really thinking about this was not only this work I've been doing around this assessment, but also just recently some observations I've had about myself, which I am an incredibly optimistic person.
[00:02:52] I always see the glass half full. Okay. But I noticed I had this particular situation where my [00:03:00] daughter had actually pointed out a couple times where I kind of was thinking from a scarcity perspective, and we were trying to pack her car because she was shipping it to the West Coast. She was moving there and we're shipping her car and we wanted to
[00:03:13] pack as much stuff in it as you can. And you can only pack up until the windows, right? You have to be able to look at the car and not see anything in it. So she had all her stuff laid out in the living room and I come in and I'm like, Oh my God, that's never going to fit. And you know, she looks at me, she goes, mom.
[00:03:30] Abundance mindset. And I'm like, Oh, geez, you're right. You know, and by the way, it all fit and it fit fine, but it was an example of seeing a situation, right? And rather than looking at it and saying, okay, wow, we're going to have to get creative about how we think about this, or let's figure out, what the most efficient way to plan this out is rather than going to that and going to.
[00:03:55] to approaching a problem from a perspective of possibility. I [00:04:00] immediately approached a problem from the perspective of scarcity, and I am an optimistic person. So I really started observing this, not only in myself, but in other people. And I realized how often, in spite of how optimistic you are, okay, this concept of limited resources, this immediate connection to scarcity comes into thinking and how incredibly limiting That is for everybody, right?
[00:04:27] So I mean, where does that come from? You know, if you're in the corporate world or even our society as a whole, a lot of times, we're set up that, that there's Limited resources. Okay. And that if you get some, then I'm going to get less. and we approach a lot of things From that perspective.
[00:04:48] And yes, in corporations, there's limited budgets. There's limited, there's limited bonuses to give out. There's only so many promotions. Yes, that's true. There are certain things that are finite [00:05:00] and that can condition our thinking. And the challenge is to really work on orienting yourself in a different way.
[00:05:10] Okay. And the reason that is important is several things. First of all, we are what we think there is a fantastic, quote, and I don't even remember who did it about you, you become what your mind is. Right? I think that's how it goes. Something like that. Anyway. and so approaching something from the concept that you have a limited resource, and that's the very first thing you're anchoring in, Okay.
[00:05:35] Narrows your focus because our brains can only really focus on so many things at once. So if you're focusing on the narrow resource, what you're not focusing on are the possibilities and sometimes you miss opportunity right in front of you because you're focused specifically on what's limited.
[00:05:54] Right? Think about it as, you have 12 people over for dinner [00:06:00] and there's one pie and you look at the pie and you go, Oh my God, there's only one pie for 12 people. usually a pie goes into eight pieces, right? And you immediately think I'm going to get a small piece of pie as opposed to, Oh wow, that looks like a fantastic pie.
[00:06:13] There's 12 of us. We just cut them small and we'll each get a taste of this fantastic pie abundance, right? It's focusing on what you actually have. Not on what you're missing extremely important nuance, and one that can be very valuable. So how does that show up sometimes? And what's the impact of that?
[00:06:34] It shows up in a couple of ways. And I've been watching it show up recently. I mentioned my own situation, but where I've also been watching that show up a little bit more. Is, in a couple of coaching situations that I have in a couple of search situations, job search. I see it a lot. Okay.
[00:06:52] I see the scarcity mentality come up a lot. And 1st of all, I want to acknowledge that I [00:07:00] recognize for sure that if you're. Suddenly unemployed. You're suddenly in a situation that you didn't expect yourself to be in because of a layoff or you're incredibly frustrated in your role and you're looking for a new job.
[00:07:12] You're not necessarily coming from the most positive perspective, but how you think about the experience that you've had matters significantly in the way that you approach solving that problem. And I had a call with, a candidate a couple of weeks ago, and they were talking about the challenges of their past role.
[00:07:31] You know, I, I went in there thinking I'd have this amount of budget and I only had this amount of budget. And so we couldn't do this and we couldn't do that. and they literally spent the first 10 minutes of our call telling me about all the things they were unable to accomplish. Okay. Not how you want to go into a job search.
[00:07:50] When I asked the question and I said, you know what? I hear you talking a lot about what you didn't do or what you didn't have or what you couldn't do. To me, it sounds like you had [00:08:00] some limited resources. Tell me what you were able to accomplish and what you were able to do in spite of those limited resources.
[00:08:09] How were you able to leverage the things that you had and have an impact as a result of that? And it was like this eye opening moment for this individual to go, Oh, Okay, well yeah, I did, and started raveling off. what you were able to do. By the way, it's going to be far more compelling when you go into a job interview to talk about all the incredible things you were able to do with the resources that you had rather than all the things that you would have liked to have done had you only had more.
[00:08:42] Okay. It's a mentality. This is just a mindset shift and a perspective. It's similar to, you know, I have these skills and this is where I've applied them. And so that's the only place I can apply them right now. I have these skills. I've [00:09:00] done this research. Here's all of these other places where these skills really matter and are important.
[00:09:04] So I'm going to apply them in that way. Okay. those are two examples of where a scarcity mindset Can really stop you from moving forward and stop you from realizing your goals. I see it in team coaching situations when, you know, teams get stuck in what they know, right? They get stuck in, well, we can't do this and we can't do that.
[00:09:27] Well, how are you guys going to work together differently? Well, we can't do it this way because immediately. Okay. Well, we don't have resources. Well, we've only got. Immediately goes into it. Ask the question. If you had all the resources in the world and all the time in the world, what would you want to do?
[00:09:44] What would you want to do with it. And start imagining? It doesn't mean you can do all of those, but what you can start doing by taking the perspective of abundance, right? By looking at the world as having just so many [00:10:00] possibilities available to you. You are far more creative and you start coming up with solutions.
[00:10:05] You start coming up with big ideas that then you're able to channel into something that can actually be executed. But you're so much better off starting with the big idea, starting With more and then funneling it down to what's realistic in the time that you have in the resources you have. Okay.
[00:10:25] How are you going to leverage what you do have in order to accomplish that? That's something that you may not have thought about. If you thought about it from the other perspective, approaching things from a mindset of abundance, a mindset of positivity. That doesn't mean. Being a pie eyed optimist. It doesn't mean forgetting risk.
[00:10:49] It doesn't mean negating obstacles. What it does mean is balancing possibility from a far greater and measuring that from [00:11:00] a far, far greater perspective.
[00:11:06] limits than being limited by it. Okay. Critical, very critical. Where else does it come in? It can really be a big factor. And when it comes to conflict or resolving conflict, or, you know, having differing opinions, if you're in a conversation with somebody and you're having differing opinions, we tend to believe in our society.
[00:11:27] And this is happening every day, whether it's, political issues or work issues or whatever. we tend to take on this, If somebody wins, somebody else loses mentality. That is very much an abundance versus scarcity thinking, right? If you win, I lose. Well, no. How about if we look at a situation and we try to find a way where we both get to win a little bit, that's what the result of an abundance mindset is.
[00:11:58] Problem solving. You have a [00:12:00] challenge in your business. You're faced with a new issue. Okay. Approach it from a possibility perspective, in your relationships, approach it from a possibility. What's possible for us to accomplish together. How can we get out of this, that we both feel good.
[00:12:17] All right. So how do you do that? What are some ways you do that? Number one, pay attention to what your inputs are.
[00:12:23] So when I say pay attention to your inputs and the people around you, sometimes if we can tune our mind and our ears to how other people are approaching situations, right, , we can become attuned to this scarcity language, the scarcity mindset, and becoming attuned to that in others. We in turn can become attuned to that in ourselves.
[00:12:51] And we can, you can start to see why that's limiting. You can kind of see it before your eyes. by the way, on an aside to that, [00:13:00] if you are noticing that you have a lot of people around you who have scarcity mindsets, then get rid of them. I mean, change it out a little bit. I actually do recall a particular relationship that I had that, that every single time I came up with a, with something, hey, I'd like to do X, Y, Z, the response was, well, the problem with that is.
[00:13:21] And it, it drove me nuts. I stopped that relationship, but that's a whole other story and a whole other topic. Anyway, just start tuning your brain to, uh, how others approach it. And in turn, how you think about it. What are you bringing to the conversation? How often are you tuning into, to scarcity? Right?
[00:13:42] And within that, as you're starting to really Think about this. Pay way more attention to what you have in any situation, not what you don't have. What you have leads to possibilities, right? So think of the things that you have as [00:14:00] assets. All right? Stop looking at the liabilities initially.
[00:14:04] Once again, it's not pie eyed optimism. You're mitigating risk, but you're looking at the risk After you're looking at the possibilities. the other thing too, and so within doing that, you're really training your brain to start thinking about possibilities. A great way to do that is to force yourself to brainstorm, not 3 ideas.
[00:14:25] But 10 ideas because the top three that come to your mind are always easy. The best thinking is idea number four or five or six or seven or eight. And they might be crazy and they might be wild, but often those solutions and often those ideas are just there. They're the roots the germination of something great.
[00:14:46] Okay. So start training yourself to be more expansive and possibilities. And start thinking from a, it's possible. I think that what happens to us as we go through life [00:15:00] is, life kind of takes over and you start, and I do think aging does this also. You start thinking from a risk perspective, start thinking from a possibility perspective.
[00:15:10] The funny thing about the story with my daughter and the car is, Two years ago, I had packed my son up to go somewhere and I'm his car needed packing and I looked at that and I was like, all right, I used to believe I had like a PhD in technology and I thought of myself as an incredibly good car packer And I looked at his car when I had to pack his and I was all about finding room and figuring out how it all could and looking at it as a puzzle piece.
[00:15:41] I don't know what happened over the last 2 years that in that particular situation. And then that particular moment, I looked at her situation from a scarcity mindset, but I was so grateful for her for having reminded me that. Taking things from an abundance [00:16:00] perspective often is what gives you the solutions to your challenges.
[00:16:04] So that's the story of the day. That's what I really wanted to talk about today. abundance. It is a gift and we all have it. And the only thing that's stopping us from seeing opportunity and seeing possibility is our own thinking. So don't let that be yours, right? Don't let that be the thing that stops you.
[00:16:23] Allow yourself to have an abundance mindset. And if you'd like to talk further about this or any other topic that you would find interesting, I would love to do that. Reach out. And in the meantime, keep driving. Don't get stuck by negativity. And thanks for joining today. Take care. [00:17:00]
This podcast was produced by The Willoughby Co.