As the new year approaches, we’re all looking for opportunities to improve ourselves. The past couple of years have been difficult for everyone, so it’s really time to think about your personal well-being when setting and achieving your goals.
Having an abundance mindset can help you build healthier relationships with money, yourself, and your loved ones. For these reasons, it’s a fantastic strategy that you can use to achieve your goals in 2022.
Mindset is important in goal setting because it helps support your emotional wellbeing. What use is achieving your goals if the process makes you unhappy?
If you work on creating a positive mindset, the rest will follow. Research by the Mayo Clinic shows that actively trying to have a positive mindset improves your cardiovascular health, improves your coping skills, and reduces your risk of depression.
As always, there needs to be balance in your life. A newer concept, toxic positivity, describes a situation where too much positivity negatively affects your mindset.
Think about how infuriating it is to always hear that someone has it worse when you’re having a bad day. While positive mindsets are important, remember to let yourself feel your negative feelings too.
Some days are hard and it’s important to remember that having a positive mindset doesn’t mean that you’re not allowed to have a bad day or two.
A scarcity mindset occurs when you get stuck in a negative cycle of thoughts about your opportunities in life. If you find yourself thinking negatively about your job, finances, or other aspects of your life, you might be stuck in a scarcity mindset.
This mindset causes you to hyperfocus on what you don’t have, as opposed to what you do.
It can take some time to combat a scarcity mindset, but it doesn’t have to be difficult. Start with small changes to your routine and build up to bigger changes as you adjust to your new mindset.
The most effective way to do this is to shift yourself towards an abundance mindset, which is the opposite of a scarcity mindset.
Journaling is a good first step to changing your mindset because it helps you identify what triggers your negative thoughts. When you identify your triggers, you can work through them to change your behavior and stop cycles of negative thinking.
An abundance mindset is a frame of mind where you view your life from a position of growth and potential.
For example, with a scarcity mindset you might think that you don’t have enough of something. However, an abundance mindset steers your focus towards ways that you’re trying to achieve a specific goal.
Achieving an abundance mindset is all about setting small realistic goals for yourself. You’re not going to be able to change your mindset overnight, but small steps towards improvement will start to pay off.
Many of us feel a lot of pressure in our personal lives. We feel like we need to look or act a certain way to achieve a social ideal. In this case, an abundance mindset is especially helpful because that social ideal isn’t attainable.
When you focus on what you already have, you can work towards happiness without feeling like you need to attain these unrealistic goals.
Action: Try journaling some affirmations to remind yourself about what you’ve achieved throughout the week.
From hanging out with a friend to crossing something off your to-do list, there are many small wins that help remind you of what you’ve achieved in your personal life.
It’s difficult to not compare yourself to others’ professional successes. A lot of us set much higher standards for ourselves than we’d expect for others, making us constantly disappointed if we don’t achieve them right away.
Action: To encourage a professional abundance mindset, journal about an instance per week where you felt that you handled a situation well or made an effort to learn a new skill.
A majority of people worry about their finances. Excessive stress, especially about finances, can make people feel overwhelmed and powerless to achieve their goals.
An abundance mindset helps show you that you’re not powerless and you’re working to improve yourself every day. To achieve a financial abundance mindset, set small financial goals that you can build on.
Action: Try learning to cook your favorite dishes at home. This allows you to still enjoy your favorite foods while saving money.
You’ll also benefit from the satisfaction of knowing that you can still pick up some new skills while you work on your finances.
An abundance mindset helps you become a less judgmental person. A lot of negativity in our lives comes from unfairly criticizing ourselves and others.
Through abundance thinking, you start to realize that everyone’s measures of success are different. It also helps show that when others reach goals at different rates than you, it doesn’t mean that your worth is any different.
Attaching your worth directly to your success isn’t good for anyone. Sometimes there are factors that are out of your control, and that shouldn’t affect your worth as a person.
What are you grateful for this week? Write three reasons why you deserve it.
Think critically about your current mindset. Why do you, personally, want to live with abundance?
Reflect on a time when you did something kind for the sake of kindness.
When will you know you’re living with an abundance mindset? How will this evolve over time?
How do you plan on sharing the benefits of your abundance mindset?
An abundance mindset reminds us that our worth is more than our failures or successes. Check out the visual below for some more advice on how you can start practicing your abundance thinking to help improve yourself for 2022.