The Scarcity Mindset I Didn’t Know I Had
Impatience is fear, I wrote in my notebook a couple of weeks ago. But it would take another month of being a full-time business owner before I realised that impatience isn’t just fear, it’s scarcity.
Building my business is opening my eyes to just how much of a scarcity mindset I’ve had around my business, and how it’s been limiting the options I see for myself. I’m starting to see that there’s a different way - one of abundance. This is quickly becoming my biggest mindset shift yet of my 6 month business leap. And it’s one that is long overdue.
Scarcity vs abundance
You might have heard about the concept of a scarcity mindset, and how it differs from an abundance mindset. It’s something that circles around quite a bit in the creative and business communities online, and I’ve always found the concept interesting. However, I never recognised that my own mindset is in some ways one of scarcity.
In short, if you have a scarcity mindset, you see the world as filled with limitations. You see that you have to compete with others over these limited resources, that you have to hold onto the good that you’ve got, because if you share it or let it go, you’ll lose this precious, scarce good. With an abundance mindset on the other hand, you see the world as filled with opportunities. You see others as peers rather than competitors, you share what you know because you believe a rising tide lifts all boats. You let go of things that aren’t right for you, because you trust that there will be more and better options available for you.
I didn’t see the scarcity in my mindset, because I’ve always considered myself a pretty optimistic person. I believe that in the end, good will always win. I look for silver linings and lessons to learn through hard times. I believe there’s a place for all creatives and I’ve wanted to encourage and support other creatives ever since I started blogging. I’ve rarely in my life entered into competitions because they simply don’t interest me very much.
And yet, the last two months of running my business full-time has turned the light on in a part of myself where a scarcity mindset has reigned in the dark, beyond my awareness and largely unchallenged.
The annoying question that flicked on the light
When I started my leap, I got myself a new calendar. It’s a beautiful, reflective one that has questions for reviewing the past week. One of the questions it asks is
What opportunities have shown up?
This question annoyed me a little. It didn’t ask if any opportunities had shown up, no no, it just assumed they had. As if opportunities where prone to just popping up all over the place.
The first week, I wrote something I barely saw as an opportunity, just to write something. The second week, I actually wrote “ouff, not much”. But as the weeks passed, I noticed I had more and more to write under that question. Not because opportunities were starting to hit me in the face, but because I was starting to look for them.
And this, my friend, is the power of an abundance mindset.
At the same time, I was learning what it’s like to run a business full-time. I was pondering ways to develop and grow my business, thinking about different paths I could see ahead. And the combination of these two things was doing something with me. It was an almost physical sensation of opening my eyes to what is possible, and that in turn made me realise how closed my mindset had been. That I, in fact, have been carrying around a scarcity mindset.
What is possible?
It’s often said that my generation was told that we could be anything we wanted to be. I was never told that. I was told not to pursue creativity as anything more than a hobby. I was told to study something safe and get a secure job.
I can’t blame anyone for teaching me that. I come from a working class family where money was always limited and safety was important. The few entrepreneurial initiatives that existed around me was either viewed as examples of what to avoid, or as something “people like us” didn’t do. Besides, I loved studying, so a higher education was my natural path.
When I had finished my education, getting a job was a crash course in scarcity. We were hundreds of applicants for a single position. The jobs I really wanted was impossible to get. You essentially needed to have done the exact job you were applying for to get it. The amount of jobs available was always limited and the people who had the interesting ones sat on them for 10 years. The whole process screamed that if you get a decent job, hold on for dear life because you won’t get another one.
All this meant it took me years to come to terms with the idea that I, in fact, could start my own business. Even longer to believe I could build a successful one. And when I started believing I could, I unconsciously saw it as this one, slim possibility. It didn’t help that I had heard so often how hard it is to build a business, and then how brave I was for taking my 6 month leap. On a semi-subconscious level, I felt I had to get it exactly right in a very particular way or I would fail.
And that, my friend, is my scarcity mindset.
The wobble that made my scarcity show its ugly face
Our mindset struggles are never as apparent as when we start to wobble. When we run into a fear, or we get stressed, or things get hard, it’s like a DING DING DING call for our not so helpful mindsets to try to tackle us when we’re already unsteady.
So this is what happened one day, when I felt that my leap was passing a little faster than I wished. Two of my six months had passed, and I had realised that when the summer was over, there would just be a month of it left. I went out for a walk to try to calm myself, but the fear kept turning inside of me. The past two months had been challenging and yet at the same time the best ones in many years. I was admitting to myself, maybe for the first time fully, how much I absolutely did not want to go back.
And in swooped the scarcity mindset. It started telling me a story that this leap was my one chance and when it’s over it’s back to the life I don’t want, forever. That everything I attempted HAD TO WORK or nothing would ever work. That it was already over, that I had booked my last client and that the positive development of the past weeks was a fluke.
If abundance felt like opening my eyes, scarcity felt like clinging to the point of strangling. If abundance is a row of open windows on your mind, a light breeze playing in the curtains, scarcity shuts those windows with a bang, one after the other. It felt like impatience and trying to control something uncontrollable.
But this time, a small voice in my mind said
What opportunities have shown up?
And I could recognise scarcity for what it is. I could sense the windows closing. I could take a deep breath, walk across my mental room and crack the windows open again.
Choosing to trust abundance
Looking for and journaling out the opportunities around me has made me recognise that maybe there isn’t just one way I can do this. Maybe there are infinite ways of growing my business and living the slow, creative life that I want. Maybe opportunities are everywhere, I just haven’t been looking because I’ve been so focused on this one version of doing things that I’d decided was the only way.
This mindset shift is cracking everything wide open for me.
The word I chose for 2021 was “trust”, and abundance is trust. It’s trusting that things will work out, you just don’t know how yet. Not that you can just sit back and wait for everything to solve itself, but trusting that you will find your way, if you just keep looking and stay open to all possibilities. It’s trusting that you’re capable.
And I know that there’s a discussion here about privilege. As someone who grew up in a working class family, I know that scarcity is a reality. But I also know that our minds can limit our options way more than the world does.
I don’t know where my abundance mindset will lead me or how it will transform how I run my business, but that’s also kinda the point. I don’t know all the paths that are possible for me. There is so much yet to explore.
It’s still a practice for me, to look for abundance in my business. It’s something I need to remind myself of, especially when I wobble. But this is how we make mindset shifts. It doesn’t happen all the way at once. Over time, we choose to direct our thoughts in this new pattern until one day, you realise it has become the new normal.
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