How I’m Letting Go Of Scarcity Mindset

My head was wrapped around writing something else to share today. It’s a list I’ll share tomorrow about all the financial resources I’m turning to in order to better understand my finances and my own money story. With that post it’s like I wanted to skip to the good stuff without giving you context of how I got there in the first place. I wanted to jump to the part where I tell you about all the ways I’m solving the reality without telling you first about the reality. This is a personal blog though and it warrants personal stories.

My stomach is turning because vulnerability on the internet is still hard no matter how many times you jump into the deep end.

I grew up surrounded by scarcity mindset and consistently being encouraged to embrace risk aversion because in my family’s eyes there was no reward at the end of risk, there was just pain and loss of what we did have, which as an immigrant family was always barely just enough. No one in my family ever explicitly said, “Don’t do this because you’ll lose everything you have.” Or “Think you’ll never ever have enough to feel safe or happy.” Honestly, if they had maybe the unpacking of all of this would have been easier to pinpoint.

My family’s ways were subtle. They were coated in encouraging the status quo above all else and perpetuating the need for the traditional as a kind of fence around us that wouldn’t let anything get out, but as I grew older I’m realizing, it also doesn’t let anything (not even the good) get in.

I’ve worked over the last few years to slowly let go of the strings that were holding me back. Every time I thought I was done for good with scarcity mindset, it popped back up in other areas of my life. Lately, what’s made me most uncomfortable includes how little I push myself to have long-term dreams, my relationship with my finances, and my definition of home. Of this list, home was the one that was nudging me the most since quarantine started. It’s one of the reasons why moving at the end of this month is such a big deal for me. There is an entire world outside of New York City that I’ve never been able to live in full-time. At first it was because of family responsibility and later because of never challenging the “New York is home” belief that was drilled into me.

New York is my family’s home but in a lot of the ways that matter to me, it isn’t mine. Once I started asking myself the hard questions about what I need from a place I call home or what I’m craving from home and community and whether or not I can get it here, it became so abundantly apparent that New York City right now isn’t for me. Saying it out loud though, that the main reason I had to move is because I want to be happier where I live, feels so out of sorts to what I know of “valid reasons.”

Valid reasons are logical ones, they’re not emotion based, and they are incredibly risk averse. If you don’t know what’s on the other end of the decision then you make the decision that is full of knowns instead of unknowns. Except, if you’re trying to live in an abundance mindset. Living in abundance means trusting that a leap of faith isn’t a leap into the abyss because no matter where you land you’ll still have yourself and when did that stop being more than enough to rebuild if you had to?

You have to go for the opposite of the status quo and believe that you can untrain your gut from controlling your actions in ways that keep you small or reinforce your belief that you’re unable, ill-equipped, or worst, unworthy of any good. Listening to the fear your heart sparks isn’t a bad thing either, so long as you’re listening with the goal of learning what calms it so that you’re better equipped next time it pops up.

I am in the thick of learning that holding space for my fear and taking direction from it are two very different things. I don’t owe my childhood beliefs the entirety of my adulthood, unless I make the conscious decision to hand it over on a silver platter.

I was having a socially-distanced cup of coffee with a friend a few days ago and we were talking about just this. We were wondering at what point our families started choosing fear over wonder or at what point they started believing they reached their full potential and had nothing else to give. It made me sit with an even deeper, scarier question since then - at what point did I?

I have a long way to go in healing my own relationship with what I expect from myself and lovingly teaching myself to shift from a scarcity mindset to one of abundance. The first step is acknowledging I even have this problem. The second is challenging myself to embrace different and the potential for more than I could have ever imagined.