Abundance Mentality

When you look at the glass and say it’s half full, that’s an example of an Abundance Mentality. This is in contrast with the opposite, the Scarcity Mentality, through which lens one would call the glass half-empty. Optimism and pessimism. I was a pessimist for most of my childhood, and it did nothing but make me miserable. It’s not just a mental experiment that you perform when someone presents you with a glass half-filled with water. Your mentality, be it one of abundance or scarcity, automatically colors the thoughts you think. When you sit down and consciously decide to think one thing or another, you can conjure up whatever thoughts you want. But when you’re just going about your day, mental chatter comes up spontaneously and you don’t consciously choose every thought. These automatic thoughts, your monkey mind, they skew heavily positive or heavily negative, depending on how you’ve trained them.

When I prophesied the worst, it always came to pass, as if I was altering reality with my very predictions. Negative patterns of thinking were carved very deep into my mind. It’s like my mind was a jungle, and thousands of cars and tourists had worn a clear path into the landscape, a path which led right over the edge of a cliff and into disaster. To become an optimist, I had to blaze new neural pathways, positive ones which led to the beach instead of the cliff, and I had to blaze them deep enough that my monkey mind would automatically choose them over the old negative paths. But I’m living proof that our personalities aren’t set in stone, that they can be changed and altered.

When you adopt an abundance mentality, your world blossoms with new choices and new options. Certain courses of action require a certain amount of optimism before we’ll even register that they exist. Take, for example, quitting a lousy job. In a scarcity mindset, I would think, I can’t quit this job, it might be the last one I can ever get. How will I eat, where will I get money from? Even if I do get another job, it’ll be even worse than this one… Obviously to escape into a better chapter of my life, I’ll have to shift my very personality.

When I view the world through an abundance mentality, I know that whatever happens, I’m taken care of. This gives me freedom to step outside the lines and chart a new course. Even if my optimism is misplaced, even if I overestimate my prospects, I’ll still end up ahead of where I would’ve been if I’d underestimated them. Prophecies are often self-fulfilling. Better to self-fulfill a good one than a bad.

In fact, the “self-fulfilling prophecy” is the most common, down-to-earth explanation why it’s so beneficial to wear rose-colored glasses. Psychologically, we don’t want to contradict ourselves, so we’ll subconsciously labor to shape the world into conformance with our attitudes. If you’re a pessimist, you might sabotage yourself. This is a good psychological, scientific sort of justification, and I was happy with it for quite a few years.

But more and more, I believe there’s more to it. When I adopt an abundance mindset, my life improves in ways which I can’t believe are explained away by my own subconscious. It’s like reality itself changes to reflect my own attitudes back at me. The more I thought about this, the more it began to make sense. It’s Occam’s Razor. There are so many people in the world with such bizarre beliefs, beliefs much more exotic and unlikely than “positive thinking positively alters reality”. Saying all these people (the vast majority of people in the world have some unlikely belief or other) are deluded, is rather a stretch. Neither are all these people just misinformed, for you can scientifically argue to them why they’re wrong, and they won’t budge, just like you can scientifically argue to me that my positive attitude doesn’t alter reality, and I won’t budge. A much simpler and more elegant explanation is that the universe itself, as a kind of metaphysical law, mercifully avoids contradicting her observers. Thus, the universe will never reveal Bigfoot to a total skeptic, neither will the universe conclusively reveal lack of Bigfoot to a total believer. Wondrous as this seems, Occam’s Law says it’s more likely than that all those believers are mad. To hold to this metaphysical Law of Beliefs, the very fabric of the universe twists and bends to fulfill my rosy optimism.

What can you expect to happen when you change your attitude and adopt one of plentitude? Right away, you’ll feel happier. Things will seem a little less urgent, and you’ll become more fluid and relaxed. Then, you’ll start noticing things going your way. You’ll find yourself “in the zone” more and more often, you’re “on a roll” and you just seem to get everything right. As your optimism increases more and more, you’ll attract more and more love, wealth, and happiness into your life– the universe is moving to be consistent with your beliefs as they solidify.

How do you train a mentality of plenty? Think of the jungle analogy again. Your neural network has certain paths worn in it, and the “monkey mind”, when not consciously guided, tends to follow those paths you’ve paved most deeply. So if you want to pave new paths, invest time in deliberately thinking the type of thoughts you want to make up your personality. One particularly effective and systematic strategy is the written positive affirmation, which I’ve written a whole article about here.

Come on, dive in to the optimistic universe… the water’s great!

FURTHER READING

Positive Affirmations
Examples of Positive Affirmations
How to Take Control of Life
Conscious and Subconscious Mind
Three Ways to Be More Present