Welcome back to another episode of the podcast. There may never be a perfect time to take action to start your business or to grow your business. The only thing that we know for sure is that by taking massive action today, you're going to be further along tomorrow than you would be if you didn't do it.
Today's topic is all about scarcity versus abundance. This is a topic that is near and dear to my heart because I have worked with so many women and I have experienced the shift from scarcity to abundance myself, whether that be in money or time and relationships and love. Today I want to dive into this topic from the lens of being a new entrepreneur. As you embark on building your business and putting yourself out there and doing things that you've never done before your brain can have a little bit of a freakout, and that's okay because it's there to protect us.
We want to be equipped with tools that can help us navigate the freakout so that we don't make it mean that we should quit or that we should pack up and go home. Scarcity is living and operating out of this mindset that there's not enough whereas abundance is operating from a place of more than enough. You can tell you're in scarcity mode by just how you feel if you're tense if you're in a fight or flight. If your focus narrows, if you might find yourself on edge, that can easily be an indication that you're in a scarcity mindset. An abundant mindset can feel light; it's joyful, you're inspired, you're at ease, you're open, you are looking forward to all of these opportunities.
Being in a scarcity versus abundance state is really determined by our level of awareness when it comes to our thinking. As it relates to money specifically, this is something that is really key.
The biggest pitfall that I see in the beginning stages of building a business is getting into a state of scarcity and not being able to get out because it's a closed loop of scarcity. As a new business owner, putting yourself out there, doing your first launch thinking you're going to enroll 10 people into your program, and instead you get maybe one, or even zero...so your brain freaks out. It thinks, ‘Oh my gosh, like, Are you kidding me? I spent all this time energy I put myself out there. No one wants my offer. No one wants to work with me.’
We end up attaching a meaning to that result, which doesn't serve us and we start to close up, tense up, freak out, and get emotional. We make it mean that maybe we're not cut out to do this, maybe I need to make a different offer. Maybe someone else should be doing this not me. It puts us in this state of scarcity so that every time we go to take action beyond that launch we take action from a place of doubt and a place from uncertainty and trepidation. We spiral out in a closed thought loop of scarcity as to why things are not working. What's dangerous about this is that if we do this enough, over time we start to really create this habit within ourselves of operating from scarcity.
What I want to offer up today is 1) how we change our thoughts so that we don’t go into that scarcity closed loop, and 2) if you do find yourself in this scarcity closed loop, a way to think about it so that you can start to shift out of scarcity and into abundance.
I can speak to this because I spent the first two years of my online business in a state of trying everything in anything. Every time something didn't work I would make it mean that I wasn't supposed to be doing it. So I wasted so much time and energy, thinking about how I wasn't supposed to be doing that, that nobody wanted my offers, where if I just changed the way that I looked at it. If I would have changed the way I thought about it, I would have been able to be in a position today, potentially further along, because I would have taken massive action from a place of being inspired, rather than defeated or frustrated.
First let’s talk a little bit about Brooke Castillo's the model, so she's the founder of The Life Coach School. It's very similar to Think & Grow Rich, the book by Napoleon Hill, where our thoughts create our feelings that produce an action and or that create an action that produces a result. What Brooke Brooke has done with her model is that she's actually added on top of the circumstance. We all have circumstances in our life, whether it’s how much we make, our family, where we live, circumstances are facts.
It's one thing to say, ‘I'm unhealthy’. You think that thought to yourself, making it subjective, because healthy to you has a different definition than healthy to another person. But if you say ‘I weigh XYZ’, what you weigh is a circumstance. It is a fact. So now I want to bring this into a real life example of being a new business owner. Take for example going into a launch and having these expectations that you are going to do your launch, and you're going to enroll 10 students and you're going to make $10,000. When you go through your launch and you end up enrolling one student.
The fact is that you set a goal for 10 and you enrolled 1. You can choose to think an abundant thought, or a scarcity thought. If you choose to think a scarcity thought, it might sound something like this, ‘why isn't this working? Only one person enrolled, I spent so much time and now only one person liked this is not worth my time’. That's the scarcity thought.
The abundant thought might think, ‘Oh, my gosh, I got one student enrolled. This is amazing. I'm going to deliver so much value and help them achieve the results they're looking for’. Now because you’re thinking that abundant thought, you feel excited and motivated, versus if you are thinking in lag, you feel frustrated and annoyed. If you're frustrated and annoyed, you're probably going to take action from a place of lack and frustration, which again feels heavy. You're going to question everything, you're not going to show up for your one student who did enroll. The result is that you may have asked to deliver the content and now your student doesn't get the results that they had expected. You don't get a great testimonial, again, putting you in this loop. With abundance thinking, you feel excited, motivated and you cannot wait to deliver this. You cannot wait to help them get the results that they're looking for. The action you take is light, it's massive, you show up, you move faster, and your student has massive success in your program, that then he/ she provides you a testimonial, which then goes on your sales page, which then is used in your next launch. It becomes this snowball effect.
Another book I recommend is by Dr. Joe Dispenza, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself. He talks about how we get into this closed loop state of mind breaking that habit of being ourselves. It takes conscientious work and deliberate practice. It takes showing up every single day even though we don't think that things are happening or changing in which they really, truly are. I resonate with that so much because there was a period of time where I was in the scarcity mindset, where I look at my bank account, and I thought, ‘why isn't there more money in it? Oh, my gosh, how am I still here? Oh my gosh, I should be further along’. If you're thinking the ‘shoulds’, or you're looking at your bank account thinking ‘why is there not more money?’ Another tool to shift out of scarcity and lack and into abundance is being grateful for what is. What really changed for me was not looking at my bank account and looking at the debt and freaking out and saying, ‘Why isn't there more money’ or ‘I shouldn't be in debt’. It was deciding ahead of time, who I want it to be in the future and the person who I was in the future wasn't focused on debt, she was focused on growth. She was also very grateful for what she had in the present moment. That changed everything.
Simply just being grateful is one of the things my coach talks about. If you aren’t happy with where you're at, rather than trying to go from a thought of, ‘I don't like my body’ to ‘I love my body’, you go from the thought of ‘I don't like my body’ to ‘I have a body’. If you can't find yourself going from ‘oh my gosh, I'm so frustrated by the amount of money in my account, there should be more’ to the ‘oh my gosh, I love my money’. It's simply finding that intermediate transition thought that allows you to get to that abundant place.
If you take only one or two things away from today's episode, how can I practice more gratitude and be thankful for what I have, and what is, in order to attract more abundance into my world. That's one. The second piece is there is a difference between human value and economic value. As you're starting your business and you're shifting out of being an employee for a corporate company and becoming your own boss, things can get crossed. Human value is that you are already worthy and valuable, because you're a human being you don't need to make more money, you don't need to look a certain way, you don't need to weigh a certain amount, you don't need to do anything, you're already worthy, that's your human value.
The economic value is ‘I'm going to go out and produce something and be of service to the world and in return, I'm going to make money’. The danger is that it can be so easy to wrap the human and the economic value into one so that when we have a failed launch, or when no one signs up for our services, we attach the lack to our value as human beings. If you are out there and you're hustling and you are focused on creating in your business, you're putting yourself out there to be really keenly aware, to not confuse your value as a human, and the economic value of your business and what it is that you offer.
The third thing that I'm going to leave you with is that when we put our first offer out there (I'm certainly guilty of this), go through a launch, have that one person sign up when we expected 10, the habit and the default is ‘oh my gosh, I need to fix this, I need to relaunch the program, I need to change the offer, I need to change the product. Instead, I encourage you to realize that it's probably not the product that needs to be changed. It's probably the marketing that needs to be changed. So before you spend time, energy and thinking that your product is terrible, or that no one wants it, I encourage you to stick with that product. Just change the marketing.
That’s all for this week my friends!
Until next time, keep doing it your way.