How to Overcome the Poverty Mindset and Start Thriving

Have you ever thought that the scarcity you experience in life, whether it’s physical, emotional, mental, or spiritual, actually stems from the mind? We are only as rich as our minds allow us to be. If you’re trying to attract abundance into your life, but you have a poor mind, it’s never going to happen.

This is why we need to address the poverty mindset.

The poverty mindset is a harmful perception of life that paints the world in a frame where there’s never enough to go around. It’s a view of scarcity and a belief that we must struggle to have our fair share.

The poverty mindset perpetuates feelings of need and further brings you away from being content with what you have. It’s a low vibrational energy that attracts more of the same (struggle) and repels abundance.

What’s worse is that while you harbor a poverty mindset, chances are you’re not going to make anything of your life. You bow out of the race before it has even begun and wonder why you’ve gotten nowhere.

Here ,we’re going to dissect this degrading mentality so that you can better understand it, get rid of it, and build up better mindsets that lead you to abundance.

What Is the Poverty Mindset?

A poverty mindset is often formed during youth from the belief that money is scarce, regardless of how much you have. Maybe you never got what you wanted as a kid, or perhaps you were regularly told how expensive everything is, or that money doesn’t grow on trees.

So you grow up drilling in the belief that money is disproportionately precious, a finite resource, and this warps your perception of abundance. As you get older, you unconsciously reinforce this belief until you get caught in a self-perpetuating cycle where you never have enough to be happy.

This creates a low vibrational energy, which manifests a low vibrational experience. But we’re only looking at the material aspect. Abundance is more than your material condition, it’s a high vibrational state of consciousness expressed through your beliefs, attitudes, and feelings.

The years I spent living in Vietnam were a real eye-opener. Especially when riding through the Northern Mountains and passing through tiny villages, I met a lot of people who had so little, but their cups were so full.

Many of the residents lived in small adobe huts or run-down concrete shelters. Mostly, they were farmers who didn’t have a whole lot to show for their lives, at least not from a materialistic perspective.

What struck me was their friendliness. The villagers’ kindness and generosity were unmatched. While passing through, many would invite me into their homes, share food with me, offer me a place to sleep, and give me all the happy water I could handle.

They laughed, sang, and just seemed genuinely happy about the little things in life, such as seeing a foreigner well out of his natural habitat.

These people are not poor. They are some of the richest people I’ve ever met. They are abundant, perhaps not materially, but emotionally.

This shifted something in me. I’ve spent most of my life feeling inadequate. I’ve always been on a goose chase, chasing things because I believed that wealth was the key to abundance and that abundance was the path to happiness.

Since then, I’ve questioned my perspective on abundance, which has made some pretty dramatic shifts in my life.

The Poverty Mindset vs Real Poverty

First, we must not mistake the poverty mindset for real poverty, even though they are often interconnected.

• Poverty mindset: A frame of mind where you perceive your life in scarcity
• Poverty: The material condition of having little to no wealth

The poverty mindset is a limiting belief system where you feel like you’re lacking despite how much you have. It’s a frame of scarcity: The idea that there is a finite amount of resources that you can have and that you’re fundamentally separated from them.

People who see through a lens of poverty tend to experience life in a way where their success comes at someone else’s failure. And that your failure is due to someone else’s success. It’s the classic ‘there’s not enough pie for all’ scenario.

Just to be clear, having a poverty mindset doesn’t necessarily relate to your financial position. It’s a perception of life where there isn’t enough to go around. When you break this limiting belief system, your life becomes more fruitful. This is when you feel more wholesome, and it also sets a better mental infrastructure to attract more material abundance into your life.

Seeing life in a frame of scarcity is a limitation as you see all the red flags but none of the green. It’s a pessimistic way of thinking that manifests a negative life experience through emotions such as jealousy, guilt, worry, stress, shame, hopelessness, self-victimization, and self-pity.

When in this state, you’re likely to miss opportunities or to push them away, either consciously or unconsciously. Instead of seeing the world as your oyster, you can never get ahead because you hold yourself back.

This causes stagnation and acts as a major barrier to growing into your best self and manifesting your dreams. Not to mention, the poverty mindset is just a generally disempowering state of mind that pushes away abundance.

Characteristics of a Poverty Mindset

Now that you have a conceptual framework of what the poverty mindset is, how do you know if you have it? What are some symptoms of the poverty mindset, and how will this inadvertently affect your life?

Here are some common traits and characteristics of people who have a poverty mindset.

1. You compare yourself to others: Rather than focusing on your journey, you tend to notice what other people have, which makes you feel like you’re lacking because you don’t have those things.

2. You have a fear complex: You tend to worry about what could happen, and you concern yourself too much with hypotheticals rather than actual outcomes.

3. You only focus on what you need: Instead of focusing on what you have and how fulfilled you are to have those things, you’re always looking at what you don’t currently have, which creates a constant sense of desperation.

4. You regularly feel jealous of others with wealth: Instead of celebrating other people’s success, you get jealous or even resentful when people achieve something that you don’t have.

5. You create stories about your failures: You tend to create stories about why you’re disadvantaged or why you can’t succeed in life. For other people who become successful, there will always be an outstanding reason why they’re successful.

6. You are worried about your achievements: Your hyper-focus on achieving things takes you away from what you already have. This leads to competition and the mentality that there is not enough to go around.

7. You play the victim card: You believe that you’re a victim of the world. Life is unfair, and you’ve just gotten the bottom half of it. Since you’re a victim, you dedicate yourself to being a bystander in your life.

8. You tend to overvalue material things: You likely believe that having things is the epitome of success. So you place a lot more value on external things rather than intrinsic qualities such as gratitude and family.

9. You focus on the risk: You have an aversion towards taking action because you always think about the risk and what could happen if things don’t work out.

10. You tend to chase pleasure: Rather than focusing on more wholesome, substantial states of consciousness, you’re concerned with momentary pleasures by getting the next shiny thing.

11. You think wealth will solve your problems: Part of a poverty mindset is believing that wealth is the key to all the good things in life. If you have more wealth, you’re successful.

12. You believe that resources are scarce: You believe that everything is finite and that other people gaining something takes away from you or your opportunities. This drives you to be more careful and potentially competitive because you feel that you need to fight for equality.

Examples of the Poverty Mindset

First off, you need to change the way you see things if you want to experience abundance. As long as you’re caught in a frame of scarcity, you’re not going to attract abundance into your life.

Below are some examples of perceiving a situation through a frame of abundance vs a frame of scarcity. Use this table to reflect on your own life experience, and look at where you need to make some adjustments.

How to Get Out of the Poverty Mindset

Money is an advantage, it’s not a game changer.

If you have a lot of disposable income, you can live a nice, cushy life, but that’s not going to make you any happier. It’s important to value things that truly matter for your growth, well-being, and wholeness.

Never forget that happiness is an internal condition. If you’re trying to buy happiness, you’re barking up the wrong tree. So please, do the inner work. Go inside, not outside, and you’re going to make your life a much better place to live.

Life isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme. You need to work for it. And it’s the work that you put into your life that makes it worth it.

So instead of chasing money, focus on the process that is used to make money. As an example, if you’re a content creator or aspiring to be one, actually enjoy making content rather than trying to become successful through it.

This applies to anything you do. Do it because you genuinely care about it. If you fill your cup with more things in life that nourish you, it’s going to benefit you in more ways than one.

Sometimes you have to stretch yourself a little as abundance is a bit of an oxymoron. You get more by giving more.

Chances are, you rarely give. If you see a homeless person, do you give them a bit of cash or tell yourself that you can’t afford it, even if it’s just a dollar? Do you give your time and energy without expecting a reward? What about donating to causes that you care about?

Here’s the thing. You need to give to get. You need to break the cycle of poverty by taking the first step. Remember, the universe matches your vibration, not the other way around. So, if you adopt the feeling of generosity and giving, you’re going to receive more in the form of positive emotions, feelings, outlooks, opportunities, people, and things.

Ultimately, you need to work on the poverty mindset in small doses regularly because whatever you enforce into your reality becomes your reality.