What does it mean to have an abundance mindset?

So what does it mean to have an abundant mindset?  These are words you might find in various places and you might also hear people say, I fight with a poverty mentality or I really would like to have more of an abundance mindset in life. This is something that I struggled with so much.  There was a time in my life that while I was growing up, we were in a place where even though it was a beautiful life, an amazing life we often were short on supply in different areas.

And I found myself, as an adult, catching myself in situations. You know, if my children would grab one too many pieces of bounty to clean up a mess I would tell them they didn’t need that much. I was consistently overreacting. And I remember one time in particular, the Lord asked me, Why do you react like that; when you have enough resources right now to go to the nearest WalMart and clear out the shelves of paper towels and you wouldn’t even begin to feel it financially?

There was a disconnect between what had happened and what I was dealing with from the inside. I was lacking an abundance mentality and I was growing into that. I am going to share with you some wisdom from Dr. Bill Winston and we share in Creating Your Best Life in chapter three. He says, Our vast inheritance comes in proportion to our new identity. I found that in time, when I realized I was struggling with the past and how I grew up; it was still affecting this and I was living with a shortage or scarcity mentality. I was not operating in an abundance mentality.

An abundance mindset when it is really boiled down is going to come down to how you see yourself. In the last blog, we talked about how so much of what we expect to take place in our life is based on our confident expectation. This is what we know as the Biblical word, hope… so much of our confident expectation comes from the identity blueprint that was established in our childhood. Doctors will say that the far majority of your identity and your subconscious 90% of it is put into place by the age of seven.  The Jesuits even have a saying, give me a boy until they’re seven and I will show you the man. And that’s because that is when the identity is set in place.

So if you grew up in an environment where things were in short supply, struggling to make ends meet or you heard about the haves and the have-nots or heard that everything works for other people and doesn’t seem to work out for us or maybe it was something like the old show He Haw and the expression, If it wasn’t for bad luck, we would have no luck at all… ALL of these phrases might make us laugh but these are also hitting us right in the root of our identity. Addressing your identity and understanding who God has created you to be is the foundation for YOU. Then you begin to grow in your vast inheritance and your ability to create your best life. That work begins with understanding and developing your identity in God! What has He created YOU to be? Who has He created YOU to be? And once again, this is part of the process of how to grow and develop in what God has blessed you with to help you create your best life.