Improve Your Horizons by Adopting an Abundance Mindset
This is a challenging time for optimism. Back in March and April – when most people were just beginning to realize the scale of the pandemic – there was still little hope that everything would return to normal by summer. But as we approach the end of the season and there is no end in sight for COVID-19, it seems more appropriate to work in survival mode and figure out how we will get through the next few months. As tempting as it may be to rely on the feeling that the future is going to be bleak, we might be better off embracing the abundance mindset . Here’s what it is and how it can help improve your thinking.
What is the abundance mindset?
For those of us who lack financial stability, it can be difficult to even imagine what life would be like without the constant stress and anxiety of money (or, in fact, lack of it). If this sounds familiar, you may have a scarcity mindset where it seems like no matter what you do or how much you work, you will never have enough, and money will always be something to worry about. The abundance mindset is the opposite of this: it’s all about focusing on what we have and allowing us to see opportunities, not limitations.
How abundance thinking can help
When Andrew Yang ran for the Democratic presidency, one of his main proposals was to provide Americans with a universal basic income of $ 1,000 a month. One of his arguments was that it can actually make people smarter, or at least help us think better.
Yang pointed to a 2013 study at Princeton University in which a group of farmers were given IQ tests before and after harvest. Farmers who weren’t worried about money increased their IQs by 13 points, leading researchers to speculate that poverty lowers the mental capacity needed to manage other aspects of our lives. (This is how we feel about IQ tests , but that’s a different story.)
If anything, Yang used this to illustrate that while scarcity mindsets can create stress over what we don’t have, the abundance mindset allows our brains to focus attention and energy on something else.
How to develop a mindset of abundance
There is already a lot of information on how to do this, although some of it comes from sketchy self-help gurus and people selling multi-level marketing schemes , so if you want to know more about it, perhaps skip these resources. It’s best to start with these five strategies from professional coach Carol Castrillon :
- Focus on what you have.
- Surround yourself with people who think abundantly.
- Create win-win situations.
- Incorporate gratitude into your daily life.
- Train your mind to recognize opportunities.
Like everything else, changing your mindset takes time and patience – not to mention trying to think this way when you genuinely worry about money every day can be incredibly difficult and frustrating. But, according to Young and Castrillon, rethinking how you think about stressors in your life can free up mental space that can then be filled with things like happiness, productivity, and better decision making.