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“Someone with a scarcity mindset is one that focuses on the lack of things,” said Marian Valenza, a self-described manifestation coach, and speaker. “This mindset can be crippling and can hold one back financially because they focus on the money, they don’t have instead of seeing the endless opportunities around them.”
Marsha was a life coach who wanted to help women. But she hadn’t narrowed down who she wanted to help so her marketing and website were bland. She thought that simply helping all women would be enough to attract the clients she wanted. As a result, she struggled to build her coaching practice and she was just about to give up on it when a friend suggested that she try choosing a specific audience to market her services to.
She dug deep and discovered she wanted to help empty nesters, women who were past the age of caring what others thought. With this in mind, she redesigned her website and updated her marketing strategy. Suddenly, her brand was bold and audacious.
Within just a few weeks, Marsha was attracting the type of clients she’d always dreamed of working with. Three months later, she turned in her notice to her boss because she had enough clients to work full-time doing what she truly loved.
Marsha’s problem wasn’t her marketing or her website. It was her scarcity mindset. By believing she had to scrounge for any client that came her way, she stayed broke and unhappy with her business.
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Scarcity Mindset Clues
A scarcity mindset is an idea or belief that there’s not enough to go around. This keeps you playing small and prevents you from achieving the success you crave. If you suspect mindset issues are holding your business hostage, here are a few clues to look out for.
Your Marketing Is Bland
With a scarcity mindset, you’re afraid of repelling clients. This means you’re trying to appeal to every demographic, so your marketing becomes bland and ineffective. You’re afraid to take bold stands and make loud declarations.
But with an abundance mindset, you already know that the right clients are out there, just waiting for you to find them. You’re not afraid to choose an audience and boldly serve them, regardless of what others think.
You’re Afraid to Take Risks
With a scarcity mindset, the idea of taking risks sounds completely overwhelming. You’re afraid to try new things because you don’t want to mess up what you already have in place. For example, you might be afraid to raise your rates because you’re worried that existing clients will be angry with you and you’ll lose their business.
Another way this fear of taking risks shows up is you’re afraid to change your existing packages to better reflect what you do. Instead, you stay stuck and you continue to offer services that aren’t a great fit for you or your clients.
You’re Isolated from Others
Sometimes, a scarcity mindset manifests itself as social isolation. It keeps you from reaching out to other professionals and networking with them for fear of having your big ideas stolen. Other times, you might worry that someone within your niche will steal your clients away from you.
The problem with this kind of thinking is that it assumes that everyone is out to get you and that there’s only so much to go around. The truth is there are plenty of warm, caring professionals like you who want others around you to succeed. It’s also important to remember that resources are not limited as you believe they are. There are an unlimited number of clients and therefore an unlimited earning potential for you when you embrace the abundance mindset.
You’re Unable to Trust Your Team
With a scarcity mindset at the forefront of running your business, you tend to dominate and control everyone around you. You operate from a place of fear and mistrust. You find it hard to let others lead and trust their judgment because you’re so worried about what could go wrong.
One way that this shows up in your business is that you have difficulty trusting your team. For example, you hire a virtual assistant and spend all of your time managing her. You’re constantly checking up on your VA and reviewing their work obsessively. While it’s normal to go through an adjustment period, you should not have to constantly look over a team member’s shoulder. If this has happened, either you have failed to train your VA well, you have failed to communicate what you want, or you are operating from a place of scarcity.
It’s essential to take the time to discern the true cause when you find yourself always micro-managing the people around you. Typically, this is a control issue that comes from a lack of abundance.
Your Ideas Are Always Stolen
You were just about to launch an amazing new program or design a group coaching program that was sure to resonate with your audience. But then you log on to Facebook one morning and you see another coach has already beaten you to the punch. At first, you stare at the screen in disbelief and then the anger starts. You can’t believe that your idea was stolen right out from under you.
This is a common scenario when you struggle with a scarcity mindset. You look around and all you can see are how other people are implementing your great ideas. You often feel like you’re falling behind and that others have already taken all the really great angles for serving clients. As a result, you can easily slip into a funk or even depression as you feel like you have nothing to offer your clients.
But an abundance mindset allows you to understand that while others may have similar ideas, this is actually a good thing. Because first, it shows that the market is ready and willing to pay for those services. Second, because there are millions of clients in the world and you can’t possibly serve them all yourself. It’s a good thing to have a healthy amount of competition and a business owner with a good mindset recognizes this.
You’re Convinced There’s Never Enough
A hallmark of a scarcity mindset is the belief that there’s just never enough. You might believe that there are never enough clients, never enough money, or never enough time to do all of your marketing tasks. As a result, you constantly feel stressed out and overwhelmed because you’re operating from a place of lack.
Learning to flip the script and think abundant thoughts does take time and effort. But if you truly believe that there is enough of what you need you can will it into existence and make it so. For example, you might tell yourself that you don’t have enough time but if you challenge yourself with a positive mindset, you will quickly begin looking for solutions that will allow you to have the time you need. This might mean outsourcing to others, delegating certain tasks, or even removing them from your to-do list completely.
Mentally Moving from Scarcity to Abundance
Spending a lifetime learning about scarcity from every single teacher, from your math teacher to your social studies teacher, it’s hard to rid your mind of that lesson to overcome the blocks this can put in your way.
Scarcity involves the idea that there is a shortage of something. It could be anything from food to water to money. It involves the idea that when it comes to some things, some people will get a lot and some people will get less or nothing. You were taught it throughout your education that some things were finite, and that list included gold, diamonds, money, food, water, and land. All these things can easily be seen as limited, especially land, which helps further the myth of scarcity.
Scarcity Isn’t True
First, the truth is, for the most part, scarcity isn’t true. It may be true that there are fresh, clean drinking water shortages in places, but most of the time there is still a solution to that water shortage if only we have the will to find the solution and to implement it – such as how they use sea water in Israel to fight drought conditions.
So, when you think about how one of the things you know for sure, water shortage, isn’t even true, how does that make you feel? It should excite you. Because scarcity is truly just a solution that hasn’t been discovered yet. That’s exciting when you think about all the things you thought were limited. Like money.
Deep down, a person with a scarcity mindset thinks that the more money they have the less money someone else has. Like what happens in the game of Monopoly. For some people, this makes earning money too hard for them, so they push it away. They feel guilty when they have and someone else doesn’t. But what if you learn and believe that it’s not a game of who can get the most by taking from others? There is enough money that everyone can have more than enough.
Manifest Abundance in Your Business
It may take you some time to retrain your brain to look at abundance and scarcity differently. Remember, scarcity is just a problem that needs to be solved. When you come to a problem with that idea in mind, it’s easier to realize it’s true. You can always make more money. When you really start believing that and acting in that belief, you’re going to see phenomenal growth in your business.
But it may take some baby steps. Notice that you’re having (for example) the fear or making excuses about something to do with money. Analyze the situation. Study the numbers. Understand the data. Try out some solutions and ideas to find out if they work for you. Tip your toe in and just give it a try.
As you experience success, your confidence will build, and your belief will grow. As your belief in abundance grows and your skepticism about scarcity grows, you start to tune into a whole new paradigm. The only way you can experience it is by moving forward with the idea of it – even if you’re not sure – to test out the concept.
Final Thoughts
A scarcity mindset is one of the biggest obstacles to your business and the reason for that is that many people don’t even realize they’re tripping over their own thoughts. This might be the case for you and that scarcity mindset can leave you feeling trapped and like you’ll never hit the next level. But there is hope.
You can begin working on a new mindset and manifest abundance in such a big way that a year from now, you won’t even recognize your business as being the same one. I’ll teach you how to do this in my new upcoming workbook ‘How To Manifest Abundance In Your Business.’ Click here to download it today.
