Most of us don’t recognize how abundant we genuinely are. Even people who are truly “wealthy” in financial terms usually still feel there is “not enough.” 

One sign that you have a poverty consciousness is if you feel a sense of competition when you think about others who offer the same product or service as you. If thinking about your “competition” brings up feelings of fear, panic, and uneasiness… then you believe there is not enough money to go around and that you must fight ravenously for what is yours. Ask yourself if you believe that when YOU receive money (or resources or opportunity) that it takes AWAY from someone else? Do you find yourself feeling that there is a Money Pie in the sky somewhere, and you have to try to get your piece and keep others from stealing these limited resources?

Often feelings like this stem from childhood experiences where either you experienced a lack of necessities or were in an environment with adults who FELT lack—stressed about money, talked about not having it, and felt terrible about not having it. When we hear “money doesn’t grow on trees,” it may inspire us to become “smart” with our spending, but usually, it just makes us feel a sense of lack. These emotions related to money make a powerful imprint on us that will continue to be our money blueprint at an unconscious level throughout our lives unless we do the work to change it. It becomes a BELIEF, even if our conscious mind tries to believe something different.

So, how do you change a poverty consciousness belief? Evidence. We believe things usually because we’ve been passed down the “seed” of a belief system, and then we find “evidence” in our lives that proves it true, so BELIEVE it. This is a tricky process, though, for 2 reasons. One is that when we’re children, we automatically believe what adults tell us because our survival depends on them. The other is that our minds are confirmation-seeking machines. If you’ve ever heard of the “self-fulfilling prophecy,” it means that we will seek and find and DO what we expect to find. If we’re told there is a lack of money, then we SEE around us a lack of money, we begin to expect a lack of money—which we then FIND, and so we BELIEVE there’s a lack of money.

 Overcoming this will take work, but here’s a place to start:

1. Look for evidence that you do, in fact, HAVE money by looking at those who have less.
2. Look for evidence that money is easy to GET by remembering times in your life when it just appeared out of nowhere.
3. Look for evidence that there is more than ENOUGH in the world by looking at how many millionaires and billionaires there are in the world (if you feel hostile toward them, more on that later)
4. Look for evidence that there is, in fact, no competition because each person’s “right clients” will find them.
5. Remember that even in those circumstances where it LOOKS like there is “not enough,” it is caused by a misallocation of resources and that YOU are learning to get yourself in the right money mind frame to allocate the resources in your direction.

Overcoming Poverty Consciousness

Do you believe that when YOU receive money (or resources or opportunity), it takes AWAY from someone else? Do you feel there are limited resources to go around? Be honest with yourself.

Search for evidence that there is ABUNDANCE:

What circumstances can you observe in your life or in the world that show you that you do, in fact, HAVE money and abundance (perhaps seen in comparison to others):

What times in your life has the money come easily, out of nowhere, or right when you needed it?

Do some research and find out how many millionaires and billionaires there are in your country, your state, and your city… how many are there? Do you feel like this is a lot of people?

What evidence have you had in your life that there is, in fact, no competition because each person’s “right clients” will find them?

Can you find enough evidence to believe that the world has abundant resources and that if you change your money mindset and take steps toward changing YOUR allocation of these resources, you can, in fact, create more abundance? If not, what holds you back?

Last but not least, how many times do you think something like ‘’Come on! This person/business/account makes sooooo much money with this personality/product/idea and I CANNOT????’’