Manifesting an Abundance Mindset
I hope this blog finds you well rested and excited to welcome the new year. I always get very excited about a new year. It is a clean slate- an opportunity to not repeat errors, to implement new lessons, and evolve. In this blog, I am going to talk about my evolution on two integral parts of my identity and I imagine yours as well: careers and contentedness.
Reality Check
When I first moved to Germany, I was convinced that as long as I was as scrappy, diligent, and agile enough, I was going to launch a career in this new environment. I had done it before and I could do it again.
Long story short, will power and doing all the right things turned out not to be enough. I was coming to the realization that what I represented was not translating well in this new context. I grieved what I viewed as a loss of my career. For the first time in my life, I fully embraced a deficit mindset about myself.
Understanding the Deficit Mindset
I think we can all intuitively understand what this is. For me it means, measuring yourself against what you have not been able to achieve or what you do not have.
I had been exposed to this mentality before, particularly during my adolescence. Fortunately, I have been blessed with family members who constantly affirmed me. Because of that unconditional support, I was confident that my life could still be valuable to society even with my deficits.
As I gained independence from my family, my career became my primary outlet to lead the meaningful life I envisioned for myself. Once that crutch was taken away, my ability to hold back the deficit mindset became tenuous at best.
I was susceptible to judgment in a way I have never been before, and I was often my own worst critic. When people implicitly or very explicitly conveyed to me that I was being complacent about my career or that I was a burden to my husband, I absorbed it fully. It has taken immense emotional and intellectual work to not allow my negative self-talk or that of others to define me.
Manifesting an Abundance Mindset
An abundance mindset is the exact opposite of a deficit mindset. It is about actively choosing to count all the blessings and tools you have at your disposal. For me, achieving this mindset still remains aspirational, but I am getting better at it.
I begin by affirming myself the way my loved ones taught me, counting and being grateful for my assets. I then methodically work through those assets and think about how I can use them to serve my objectives. If there are skills that I need to acquire to get to where I want to be, I choose to direct my positive energy towards those things.
In two words, I manifest and I nurture.
Whatever the process of manifesting an abundance mindset looks like to you, I hope the biggest takeaway is that you deserve grace. You are a culmination of many things. You have to choose to see that in yourself.
Bottom Line
Ultimately my experience of trying to manifest an abundance mindset has taught me this:
Resilient self worth cannot be defined by one singular thing. Identify other attributes that make you feel confident, and cultivate those as well.
Regarding judgment: you can choose to find the insight in those critics, but then you have to set boundaries. Unsolicited judgment from others was never said to advance you.
Be intentional about the way you lead your life, but also give yourself grace when you fail. You are capable of kindness, not just to others, but also to yourself.
