What’s a Wealth Mindset and Why Does it Matter?
A wealth mindset is a collection of thoughts, actions, and beliefs experienced over time that reinforce your mindset about wealth’s availability for anyone at any given time. This mindset can be affected during childhood and influenced by your parents, events, and experiences.
People with a wealth mindset understand that they are in charge of their destiny. They decide how to use their skills to grow their revenue, how to invest it, and how to benefit from it. It can be hard to change your mindset if all your life you saw things through a different set of lenses.
Having a wealth mindset matters because seeing the world as a beautiful or hostile place determines many outcomes. Generally, what we think about, we bring about. How we expect things to go influences where they actually end up. People with a wealthy mindset have common beliefs and actions that reinforce their wealth viewpoint. Some of those actions look like this:
- Being generous
- Being open-minded
- Being inclusive
These actions make it possible to build and sustain wealth over time, regardless of inevitable setbacks and challenges. Being generous feels foolish when there isn’t enough. Being open-minded and inclusive appears too vulnerable and leaves us open to attack or being manipulated. If you’ve experienced a long-standing negative outlook, those thoughts make perfect sense.
A wealth mindset does more than conjure rainbows and unicorns dancing with the Pollyannas of the world. A wealth mindset shifts people from being selfish to selfless. It overrides the innate reptilian brain that prefers self-preservation to the benefit of an entire community. It stops the focus from being solely on one person and redirects the focus outward.
People with a wealth mindset often have less than others, but their measuring stick isn’t numbers on a spreadsheet. They need less to do more, they thrive in more difficult times, and they outwit, outsmart, and outlive people who view the world through a lens of lack.
Why Doesn’t Everyone Have a Wealth Mindset?
While everyone can – and dare I say, should – have a wealth mindset, not everyone does. The reasons run the gamut:
- Their childhood experiences
- Lack of education
- A trauma
- Shame or fear
That’s a short list, but a powerful one nonetheless. Let’s break these down and see how they impact someone and push them into a lack mindset instead of a wealth mindset.
Childhood Experience- Your parents likely made the biggest impact on your wealth mindset. How they felt about money and other areas of life directly affected your early development. From their philosophies – which you may have been too young to fully understand – to their literal dealings with finances, you were swept up right along with them on the day-to-day.
If your parents were healthy themselves, you likely experienced having your needs met with ease and didn’t attach any unhealthy meaning to finances or how your parents managed their budget. You may have had everything you needed and most of what you wanted. You may have gone on annual vacations and felt comfortable asking for things. Under healthy circumstances, children develop with a sense of safety about money and expect that things always work out because that’s the experience they had.
If your parents were struggling with money, or other forms of wealth, you may have experienced a whole other set of emotions related to your family’s personal finance. It may not have been possible for you to ask for the things you wanted, and your parents may have made it clear that money was an issue. Messages such as “money doesn’t grow on trees” or “that’s too expensive” may have been common. You may have internalized that money is hard to get or slips through your fingers easily.
One thing’s for sure, your parents’ attitude about money and how they managed their money made a lasting impact on you. The years you spent living under their influence ingrained thoughts, beliefs, and actions that bleed over into your adulthood. Regardless of your current circumstance, how you feel about wealth is likely tempered with how your parents felt when you were growing up.
Not having enough money at a pivotal time or losing your money in a devastating way can impact your thoughts, actions, and beliefs. We know from the introduction that one impact likely won’t shatter a wealth mindset but an experience large enough or dire enough may. Likewise, a series of events, small in nature, but lasting a long time can equally make lack seem more likely than wealth.
Thoughts ⇄ Actions ⇄ Beliefs X Time = Wealth OR Lack
The illustration above reminds us that any thought morphs into an action. The repeated results that come from those thoughts and actions over a period of time will equal in a wealth or lack mindset. Making sure your thoughts, actions, and beliefs reinforce a wealth mindset should be the focus.
Can You Change Your Mindset from Lack to Abundance?
In two words – Of Course! Your mindset can shift whenever you set an intention to do so. The key is realizing your current mindset, addressing those long-held beliefs, and taking deliberate action to change them.
That doesn’t sound so hard, does it?
The self-awareness that your childhood helped create your mindset was a perfect place to springboard your transformation. Whether you had poor role models, no practical education, a traumatic experience that left you stunted and stammering, or all of the above, you can still have a wealth mindset!
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. That is going to be very important for you to understand as we move forward. Let’s take a look at the special equation again:
Thoughts ⇄ Actions ⇄ Beliefs X Time = Wealth OR Lack
Remember, thinking something, doing something, and believing something over time is going to influence your mindset. If you have been operating with a lack mindset, you may be stuck in a loop that looks like this:
Money is hard to get ⇄ Hoarding money ⇄ Being generous is foolish = Lack
Whereas a wealth mindset looks like this:
Money is a fluid resource ⇄ Tithing or helping others ⇄ Generosity creates wealth = Wealth
A fundamental difference – and one of many – between a lack and a wealth mindset is that money is hard to come by and giving it away is irresponsible. That generosity should be based on what’s left over, if there is any.
This is a normal response for a scary problem… lack of money. It is counterintuitive to give something away when an equation looks like this:
5 – 2 = 3
In the natural, we can see that 3 < than 5. If you give away 2, you literally do not have 5 anymore. That translates to our mindset about other resources and keeps the focus on the wrong thing. In the lack economy, less comes from giving things away. In the wealth economy, more comes from giving things away.
Shifting to a Wealth Mindset One Step at a Time
Whatever your mindset is, albeit healthy or not, it is there to serve you. Looking at our equation, the key factor solidifying your mindset is time. One experience won’t embed a thought, action, or belief (outside of some traumas). Generally, a mindset is ingrained over a period of time. Our egos associate those repetitive situations with our safety and reinforce them. That’s why they keep happening. The pattern is proving to your subconscious that what you think, what you are doing, and the outcomes you get are there to help keep you safe.
Under this line of thinking, you are just as safe being generous and viewing the world through a lens of wealth as you are being a miser, hoarding your money and thinking you are being responsible. It’s just how you are looking at things. Weird, huh?
So, let’s keep it real. If you have been filtering your life’s experiences through a lack-lens, it’s going to take some time – the key component in our equation – to overrun your ego and your default system. Be patient!
There are steps you can take to start to shift your mindset from lack to abundance. Start with one or start with them all if you are an overachiever like me.
Step 1. Get honest. The very first step towards shifting your mindset is being honest about it. Your ego is protecting you and trying to prevent your biggest fears. The thoughts, actions, and beliefs that you have perfected over time reinforce your lack mentality. It’s time to admit that there might be another way and you might be interested in pursuing it. Being honest about how your perceptions drive your behaviors has to happen in order to make change. Here’s why:
You’ll be questioning everything you do- Once you decide to change, you’ll be like a two-year-old chanting, “Why, why, why?” Ego wants to confirm or deny your new way of thinking and if you aren’t open to thinking a new way, you won’t change. Being honest about your current state of mind will make it easier to stop resisting a new way of operating.
It won’t be automatic- Even after you know why you are making new decisions and operating in a new way, it won’t be automatic. Remember the component of time in our equation? It will take time to prove to yourself that thinking something new, taking new action, and forming a belief about it works better than your old method. Hang in there.
Step 2. Get educated. No one is going to do something because I said so. It just doesn’t work that way. Sure, I have influence, or you wouldn’t be this far along in the eBook. The information I am sharing has to bounce up against your scrutiny and the equation. Reading this book is a wonderful step but getting educated about a wealth mindset takes more than a quick read. Here are some options to expand your knowledge:
Follow an influencer- From Instagram to a mailing list, there are many ways to follow a wealth mindset influencer. Find someone who you resonate with and dive into their curriculum. There are many ways to consume information and you are sure to find one that resonates with you.
Become a podcaster– Podcasts are the fastest growing medium for consuming information. There are endless podcasts about money, wealth mindset, abundance, and managing all areas of life. I speak about wealth mindset and an abundance paradigm regularly on my podcast.
Step 3. Take action. At some point, knowledge becomes entertainment if it isn’t put to practical use. Adopting a wealth mindset will begin once you start working the equation. Thinking new thoughts, followed by actions over time, will ingrain the beliefs that you want to achieve. Here are some ways to jump start yourself:
Volunteer- A lack mindset sees volunteerism as giving away your time for people who either don’t deserve or appreciate it. A lack mindset will tell you that donating or volunteering is foolish and siphons your energy and resources. Debunk this myth by volunteering and experiencing the benefits that come from giving to people who may never be able to pay you back.
Help your competitor- Rule #1 in the selfishness handbook is avoiding anything that helps your competition. The anecdote to that poison is offering the very thing you want to the person you are competing with. If you own a boutique, send customers to visit your competition when you don’t offer what they need. If you own a restaurant, make sure to tell others how great the diner down the street is, too. Treating others the way you want to be treated is a giant step towards the wealth mindset.
My Favorite Book on this Topic of Wealth Mindset and an Abundance Paradigm is from Dr. Joe Vitale. Take a look at “The Abundance Paradigm: Moving From the Law of Attraction to the Law of Creation” and see if it makes all the difference for your life experience.
I’m bestselling USA Today and Wall Street Journal author Connie Ragen Green. My goal is to help at least a thousand people to reach six-figures and beyond with an online business for time freedom and passive income and to simplify your life. Come along with me, if you will and let us discover how we may further connect to achieve all of your dreams and goals. This is also why I want you to think about cultivating a wealth mindset and an abundance paradigm as you are growing a profitable online business. Perhaps my “Monthly Mentoring Program” is right for you.
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