A cornucopia of food is on the horizon! Family and friends come together around the Thanksgiving holiday for a celebration of being thankful. And, as the autumn holiday brings about food aplenty, it’s a good chance to step back and do some reflection on the abundance mindset.
Once you understand what it is, then you start to experience the many benefits available. Included among those benefits, you can see how gratitude can be a part of embracing abundance in your everyday life.
What Is an Abundance Mindset?
Why didn’t I get that raise? How much money does she have in her bank account? When will they finally pick me for that?
To understand abundance, we need to understand scarcity and the mindset built on fear. At its core, a scarcity mindset can be likened to pessimism; one sees the glass half-empty when thinking about what is owned, accomplished or received. Scarcity lays the power of the self outside oneself, so responsibility is someone else’s for the good and bad that comes.
And, as the podcast Hidden Brain’s Shankar Vedentam notes in the episode, “How The ‘Scarcity Mindset’ Can Make Problems Worse,” that, “Scarcity produces a kind of tunnel vision, and it explains why, when we’re in a hole, we often lose sight of long-term priorities and dig ourselves even deeper.”
Thankfully, there is a different mindset, and that’s the abundance mindset. To live with a mindset of abundance takes not just credit for your accomplishments, but responsibility for your life all told. And, by embracing your life–the good, the bad, and the ugly–you can fully know life. You can live wholly. You can live with abundance.
Abundance mindset affects how you perceive your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual worlds, and even your finances. Consider how much you think you should, could, would, and/or want to have in the bank account. I think the phrase, you have more than enough when you enjoy everything you’ve got, sums up abundance mindset quite nicely. It’s not settling for less. It’s not presuming you don’t deserve more. An abundance mindset is recognizing that more is not always better, but being in right relationship with everything you have.
When you stop thinking about what limits you, and you start thinking about what opportunities you can leverage from what you have, you have achieved the abundance mindset and all the benefits that come with it.
The Benefits of an Abundance Mindset
So, how does an abundance mindset benefit you? Thankfully, we have a treasure trove of research from Stanford University professor Carol Dweck and her team on what she called “growth mindset.” I won’t get into it too much now, but understand that when you believe you have a growth mindset, you grow in every way, you can learn from mistakes more rapidly, and therefore you learn better generally.
As Dr. Naveen Jain expresses in his TEDxBerkeley talk, “The most scarce resource on the planet: Mindset of abundance,” the abundance mindset provides a remarkable number of benefits in our personal lives, and for the future of our species and the planet.
In addition, when we think abundantly, victories are about bringing people together toward progress. Rising tides lift all boats. There are many ways to get things done, especially interdependently. As Dr. Stephen R. Covey of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective fame would identify the skills of abundant thinking, win-win-win and synergy, provide greater value than you started. And, most importantly, your inner world is more powerful and plentiful than your outer world, and when we grow there we tap into the unlimited potential and development opportunities.
Being Grateful and the Abundance Mindset
So, to turn inwardly to gain a greater abundance mindset, we can learn from the author and spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle. In his The New York Times bestseller, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose (2009), he writes, “Whatever you think the world is withholding you, you are withholding from the world.”
Love and joy and gratitude are abundant emotions. All emotions are actually abundant in the right amounts (including anger, sadness, frustration and others). Observations of abundance itself is abundant. According to the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center’s summary of Dr. Robert Emmons’s research, your happiness can increase by 25 percent or more by regularly touching base with your gratitude.
So, to be grateful is an act of abundance, that someone is giving of themself to you in emotion, spirit or otherwise. You can be grateful for being alive. You can be grateful for planet Earth providing us a place to exist. The opportunities to be grateful are themselves abundant. If you can dwell on gratitude a little bit regularly throughout the year, you can find greater feelings of wholeness. You can give of yourself with your whole heart, mind and spirit.
—
Where are you with your mindset? Are you embracing the abundance mindset in gratitude? Those two questions are a good first step in paving a pathway to greater abundance mindset.
Other ways that you can practice an abundance mindset with gratitude is to spend every few weeks finding all things in your everyday life for which you can be thankful. The following week, spend time to send mindful messages of gratitude to the people you want to thank. A card mailed to a friend, family member or colleague. Or, an email or phone call thanking someone for kind words or deeds. The act of reaching out and giving your gratitude sparks a chain reach of abundance of good out into the world.
Let me know in the comments ways that you practice an abundance mindset or gratitude around this Thanksgiving holiday, or throughout the year!