Are You Addicted To The Wrong Money Mindset?
Are You Addicted To The Wrong Money Mindset?
Do you think you have a healthy or unhealthy relationship with money?
When you have a healthy relationship with anything, there’s an awareness of your boundaries, what constitutes an unhealthy relationship, and a set of values and rules that you respect and follow at all costs.
In these types of relationships, you’ve had the mature “talk” about what to do in every possible scenario and you don’t push the difficult conversations under the rug.
Pursuing a healthy relationship with food? Plan and cook your meals in advance so you don’t stroll into Five Guys during lunchtime.
Pursuing a healthy relationship with online shopping? Don’t make any impulse purchases and don’t save your credit cards on your computer.
When it comes to money mindset, a common unhealthy relationship that I see entrepreneurs slip into is the low-bank-account sales hustle.
As soon as their bank account runs low, they hustle and look for sales opportunities until their bank account is back in a comfortable place. They continue this cycle month after month, and it slowly becomes an addicting routine that they don’t know how to leave.
I’ve been in this unhealthy mindset before and know firsthand:
a) how hard it is to get out of this cycle
b) how unrealistic it feels to invest in a system to get rid of this cycle, and
c) why something so instinctual (surviving and providing for yourself) can feel so terrible to do all the time.
Why You’re In the Wrong Money Mindset
When you go through the low-bank-account sales hustle every month or every few months, you respond by going on marketplace platforms to see what kind of quick sales you can close, put out last-minute ads to see if you can pull in some money, put things on sale to move some product, and send out a lot of cold emails to people in your extended network.
You scout and look for new customers rather than tapping into an existing, engaged audience pool that you’ve built, where you can just announce that you’re taking on new business and new sales show up ready to buy.
As soon as the end of the month rolls around and your bank account is getting low, you start the cycle all over again. A month comes and goes really fast and your bills are reset for the month already — here we go again.
When you have this scouting and hunting mindset of finding new business month-after-month, you solidify this mindset in your brain of in order to make money, I need to go find it.
You begin to normalize this act of surviving to pay the bills because it’s all you know.
As soon as you know it, a year or two passes and you find yourself doing the same monthly shuffle, except you’re much more exhausted than when you started this whole thing.
You’re living paycheck to paycheck and you’re completely burnt out. Is this the origin story of an entrepreneur who’s thriving and growing a budding empire?
Nope, unless you get yourself out of this mindset.
If you currently find yourself in this mindset, you have to recognize that when you run your business out of a survival mindset, you’ve set yourself up for a reality where you barely skim by.
You can’t receive abundance if you’re taking action from a place of scarcity.
If you’re looking for $2,000 bucks to pay your bills for the month, you are going to do everything you can to make that money, but stop as soon as you hit $2,000. Under this mindset, you literally stop yourself from going bigger because the stress of even making the bare minimum is too heavy.
If you have an abundance mindset and have a goal of bringing in $20,000 in sales so that you can invest more in your business’ growth, you’ve already started on a different plane from someone who has a survival mindset.
Someone with an abundance, I’m-building-an-empire mindset makes different investments, doesn’t see ceilings, and has a goal of growing rather than surviving.
Someone who’s in a survival mindset only relieves what’s troubling them at this moment.
Someone who’s in an abundance mindset makes daily investments in the massive potential of their future.
How To Get Out Of This Mindset
I get it, getting out of this mindset is really really hard when your rent is due next week and you have bills to pay throughout the month. I went through the same struggles.
The idea of adopting an abundance mindset that invests in future growth is jarring when the stressors of your present life are so loud.
When I was going through cycles of survival mindset, here’s what I learned though — cycles of low-bank-account sales don’t end.
They just continue for as long as you entertain them. The worst part? They don’t compound into any transformational changes in your business. They don’t fix anything.
There’s no light at the end of the tunnel that rewards you for making sales and paying your bills for 6 months straight.
When I had this realization I felt insane. I felt so silly to have invested so much time in a mindset that felt so good (because I was paying my bills) but wasn’t changing the trajectory of my business at all.
I was just making money for the sake of paying my bills, not for the sake of building an actual business.
To get out of this mindset, I started identifying where I could start making baby steps to adopt an abundance mindset for my business — I started blogging every week to build awareness around my brand and grow an audience in the background while I was selling and working with customers on the foreground.
I started aggressively building my email audience with the goal of converting them into customers after a few months of cultivating a relationship with them.
I slowly started investing in coaches and courses over a span of a year to further strengthen my abundance mindset and train my mind out of its survival mindset.
Every person reading this post will receive different inspiration and pings of what the best steps are for them to start adopting an abundance mindset.
Maybe it’s something really small that you know that you can definitely accomplish on a weekly basis, maybe you’re a go big or go home kind of gal and are about to make a quantum leap to get yourself in the abundance groove.
Whatever it is, do something beyond reacting from a place of survival and move into proactive, abundant thinking if you’re ready for a change.
Got 10 minutes in the next 5 days to correct the selling mistakes your business is making? Join my 5 day sales challenge here.