Money mindset is a theme that comes up time and again in podcasts, blogs and articles I pay attention to.
Money mindset is about your relationship with money. How you think about it. What you feel about it Your belief system around it. Also, subconsciously – what you learned about money when you were very young, and how that influences you as an adult.
The two main ideas when talking about money mindset are scarcity mindset and abundance mindset.
Some things about it, I can get my head around.
Like if you believe you have enough, you have enough.
If you believe you don’t – you don’t.
Even some of the more counter-intuitive points I can get behind – like the idea that the more generous you are, the richer you become in all kinds of ways. I do find that to be true.
But a lot of what I hear and read about this, sounds way too much like magical thinking to me. Completely tout-there in woo-woo land. They are all like: “just tell the universe you would like some money, and money shall fall from the sky.”
Urgh. Lame…
Except..
Well..
In a way, it kinda works.
I started working with my own mindset years ago, when I heard this phase in passing on a podcast “you only earn the money that you think you deserve”.
I get that you will never ask for a raise or apply for a high-paying job if you don’t believe that you deserve it. If you run your own business like I do, one of the most obvious way to see what you think you deserve, is in how you set your pricing, or how you compare your self to others in your field.
This idea made me think and got me into taking a good long look at my own mindset.
I did grow up in a family with a scarcity mindset. And I can see how this have affected my decisions around money in so many ways.
I have had years where money has felt like a VERY big problem. Because of outside bad circumstances, my finances got pushed to the limit and over, even though I have always worked hard.
But those experiences also taught me over time, that somehow, it works out. Even when I looked at the numbers month after month and saw in black and white (or red), that the money going out was bigger than the money coming in, and it feels like the worlds is gonna end.
Somehow you don’t die. You figure it out.
This too helped me with moving from scarcity to abundance.
I am sure that if you really unpack this mindset stuff, there is a million small ways in which our own psychology works for or against us – driving our decisions and what opportunities we notice and don’t notice or consider, even if it is staring us in the face. There is probably a million things that affects how we spend, get, and think about money.
But when I look at my own life, I can’t really draw any obvious parallels between cause and effect, when seeing my abundance mindset in action.
I don’t really understand it. All I know is, that after I developed an abundance mindset, money does sort of seem to appear when I need it. It is completely bonkers, and I feel weird writing it. But it is just stopped being a problem.
And no, its not like the stuff just falls from the sky.
More like if something unexpected happens that drain my bank account, then I get a string of higher paying clients and end up at my usual income.
Stuff like that happens time and time again.
All I did was being open to letting the problem fix itself.
Thinking “I could really use a big job right about now”. Poof – client appear. Problem solved.
I am thinking about this concept again these days. The start of 2021 has hit my business extremely hard. Most of my clients cancelled due to lockdown and fear of the new strands of the virus.
And yet, I haven’t been worried, because I know it will work out.
I can’t tell you how grateful I am for this mindset right now.
I could be in complete panic right now, stressing the fuck out as would be the scarcity way.
Instead, I used the downtime to start this blog and dream about walking the Camino when the world opens again. Learning to use a pressure cooker for Indian food and taking long walks in the winter sun.
I even got offered two job opportunities completely out of the blue. (and no, that never happened before). The jobs weren’t right for where I want to go, but still – It does kind of feel like the universe is trying to help me out.
It does feel like magic.
And I just wanted to write that down, in case I ever stray over to the scarcity side of things, and need a little reminder.