Do you want success? What are you prepared to do to reach that success? Are you willing to try the simple things as well as the complicated ones? This is the whole point of this blog post, ‘If You Want Success Change Your Thinking’, to make you look beyond the obvious.
Table of Contents
What do I mean?
I bet you read the books and blogs, do training and courses, follow what the big boys do and then feel like you aren’t getting anywhere or at least, not fast enough.
Therein lies the problem right there!!
Can you see it? Do you know what I am talking about?
How do you perceive money?
Consider a million pounds. £1,000,000.
Look at the number. Does it seem real? Is it a huge amount to you, out of reach, not something for the ‘likes of you’? Have you heard that said? ‘Not for the likes of us/you/me’?
Was money scarce growing up, is it now?
Why do I ask?
Because if you have a scarcity mindset, your subconscious will stop you from reaching success. It thinks it is keeping you safe by continuing your beliefs.
Do you start to feel like you might be getting close, that success is just around the corner and suddenly it all goes wrong? Have you tried other things that get close and then fall apart?
Or even worse, do you give up on yourself, when you were getting close. Now that happens more than you think. I have seen it. They start up, learn everything, the money starts rolling in but it’s never enough and they give up and move on to something else at the crucial time, when it could have become really successful.
A scarcity mindset
Basically, it is believing that there isn’t enough to go around. Not enough money, food, etc. 
We have all heard that a high percentage of the world’s wealth is in the hands of a very small percentage of people.
From BBC.co.uk
- The gap between the super rich and the rest of the world widened last year as wealth continued to be owned by a small minority, Oxfam has claimed.
- Some 82% of money generated last year went to the richest 1% of the global population while the poorest half saw no increase at all, the charity said.
- Oxfam said its figures – which critics have queried – showed a failing system.
From Climate&Capitalism website:
- The top 1% of households globally own 43% of all personal wealth while the bottom 50% have only 1%. The 1% are all millionaires in net wealth (after debt) and there are 52m of them. Within this 1%, there are 175,000 ultra-wealthy people with over $50m in net wealth – that’s a minuscule number of people (less than 0.1%) owning 25% of the world’s wealth!
- This information comes from the 2020 Credit Suisse Global Wealth report which has just been released.
How does reading those figures make you feel?
What’s that got to do with business?
A scarcity mentality refers to people seeing life as a finite cake, so if one person takes a larger piece, that leaves less for everyone else. Most people, particularly within the corporate world, are conditioned to possess a scarcity mentality.
It’s no wonder really, when promotions and raises are scarce, resources are limited, the managers hoard information and micromanagement abounds, then often short-term thinking becomes the norm. A scarcity mindset is what keeps so many of us from achieving the goals we set ourselves.
Whereas an abundance mindset refers to the idea that there’s more than enough out there for everyone.
If you think money is scarce then you won’t make a lot of money. Your subconscious will steer you away from making money so you stay in line with your beliefs.
Turn it around!
If you’ve been brooding about a career change but haven’t taken the leap, you’re probably having thoughts like, “There aren’t enough good jobs out there,” “I do not have enough transferrable skills,” or “Who am I kidding, there’s an excessive amount of competition.”
These are all ideas supported by the scarcity mindset based on what you don’t have. A scarcity mentality sees limitations instead of opportunities.
What you could do instead is turn those ideas around to thoughts like, ‘I have 25 years of marketing experience, which will be a huge asset if I decide to start a business,’ or ‘Over the last 5/10/15/20 years, I’ve made a great many contacts which will be essential when I start networking for my next job.’
If you’ve just lost your job, instead of wallowing in self-pity, believe how good it is to finally have the time to work out what you actually want to do with the rest of your life.
Why you have the mindset you do
It can be as simple as the place you grew up. If life was a struggle, not much of anything in your life and the lives of the friends you grew up with, that becomes a belief. ‘Life is a struggle, there is never enough to go round.’
If money was tight, however hard your parents worked, that too contributes. Maybe you grew up in a place where many did have plenty but due to circumstance’s your family struggled. You get the belief early on that there are haves and have nots. It can even make you believe deep down that you are unworthy of riches.
When this happens your world view becomes blinkered and you only see the things that confirm your outlook.
You don’t look for or see all the people who had the same type of background and went on to become successful.
It can prevent your Success!
WHAT? Yes, it’s true. Have you started businesses, done all the right things and then just as you start to become successful, it all goes wrong? Maybe it’s happened more than once.
Have you got really into a business or job really enjoying it, when out of the blue you decide it’s not what you want, that it’s going nowhere?
On the brink of success, have you allowed yourself to give up, at least once, if not more times?
Do you fall for the scams, the get rich quick schemes? Not just once but over and over? If that’s a yes too, then you are proving yourself right. That you can’t be successful.
What can you do?
Tony Robbins says something along the lines of: the quality of your life is a reflection of the group of people you spend most of your time with. Do your friends have a burning desire to improve their lives? If not and YOU want success, then maybe you need new friends or at least spend less time with the ones you have.
It is possible to retrain your mind to look at things in a more positive light.
A scarcity mindset actually wholeheartedly believes that if one person wins, the other person loses.
So you want to try to create win-win conditions in your life to combat this way of thinking. Look for ways for both parties to part with a sense of having accomplished something and a feeling much better about the relationship. Try practicing this in your professional and personal life too.
This often means listening properly, really engaged, without judging or censoring and fully understanding what a win-win means for both of you and continuing to brainstorm solutions until you find one that satisfies both parties.
Train your mind
So when you are focused on the negative, more negative stuff appears in your life. Why does that happen? Because your brain shuts out all the good and positive stuff because the main focus of your thoughts is negative. You literally don’t notice anything positive because your subconscious thinks you WANT the negative things because you are so focused on it.
YES, it really does work like that!
Does that make sense to you?
When you focus on positive thoughts and ideas, you feel happier and more of the same comes your way. Then you step into minutes, hours, days, weeks even of everything going right. You are in the right mindset.
If you want success change your thinking so you can reach your goals.
Conclusion
Whatever your start in life, however you think, you can change your mindset and your life. 
A positive mindset sees a failure in a positive light, it was a lesson, that lesson can be used to help others, perhaps by creating a training course or putting in a book.
The negative mindset sees disaster only. It wallows in misery and focuses on what else could go wrong. It can then take some time to pick yourself back up and move forwards with this mindset. A lot of time could be wasted or the person could decide to give up as everything always goes wrong.
If you want Success, examine the way you think and the ways those around you think and speak.
If you haven’t ever quite reached success, only seem to ‘almost get there’ perhaps it’s worth considering this.
Has this helped in any way? Does it resonate with you?
Let me know in the comments.
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Yeah, I agree so violently with that. The scarcity mindset is such a huge problem for so many people. I mean, I believe it is an epidemic even worse than what we have with Covid-19. And getting rid of that is absolutely paramount if you want to move forward with your life and truly accomplish great things.
From my own experience, I’ve definitely been in that place. It’s like you said. I started it. It was going decent. And then, at some point, it just blew up in a good way. And then, it went all wrong. And that was definitely due to the scarcity mindset. Had I not had it, I would have never, in essence, destroyed it all. So, I just really want to stress that point you made. You have to believe that you can be successful. It seems like a really small thing. But that’s a belief. And beliefs dictate our thoughts. And our thoughts dictate our actions.
So, it’s way, way, way more important than many people realize.
I agree that it is vitally important to have the right mindset. Without it we sabotage ourselves often.
|Our thoughts create our world, so much more than we realise. Change your mindset and change your life.
Thank you for commenting.
Thank you very much for writing this inspiring article. This is the first time I heard about the scarcity mindset, and it seems to affect a lot of people in my surrounding (and me to some extend). I think it’s important to change this mindset. Thanks for writing some suggestions to do it. I will try to train my mind and become hopeful for future success in my business.
We gain scarcity beliefs from adults around us growing up. The subconscious ensures that your life aligns with your
beliefs. So when success starts to appear, the subconscious makes sure we sabotage ourselves to keep us in line with those strongly held beliefs.
Changing your mindset can literally change your life.
Thank you for commenting.
Success is a way of thinking in all begins in the mind, once we can change the way that we think it will change our actions and in turn, we will make the kind of decisions that we need to make to meet our goals. When we change our minds we will change our world for the better.
That’s exactly it Norman. We create our lives and it all begins in the mind.
Thank you for reading and commenting.
Hey there,
Great article on what it takes mentally to achieve success. Having a scarcity mindset, like you mentioned, can prove to be detrimental to anyone’s dreams of being successful. Do you have any good mindset tips to stay positive in those tough times? I know it can be hard to stay positive when your environment feels like it is collapsing!
Thank you Pat, glad you enjoyed the blog post.
Tips: Learn to be aware of your thoughts and change negatives to positives before they spiral downwards.
In the morning, when you wake, make a list of things you are grateful for. It gives the day a good start.
If you are feeling negative try to focus on good events that have happened in your life instead.
Thank you for commenting.