How To Develop Abundance Mentality (with specific steps)

So you’ve heard other personal development authors talk about abundance mentality. How believing that there’s enough of everything to go round will bring you riches, happiness and big fluffy teddy bears (or so I’m told).

Yet so few authors give you specific steps to build abundance mentality. They only give you vague statements like “really believe it” or “ask your heart”. How are you supposed to get a big fluffy teddy bear with advice like that?

Don’t worry, I’m going to change that. Here’s a specific, no-nonsense way to develop abundance mentality, based on timeless psychological principles…

How to develop communist mentality (wait, what?)

During the Korean civil war of the late 1950s, the Chinese Koreans successfully converted an unprecedented number of American prisoners to communism. They didn’t use threats or rewards. They were much smarter than that… they went directly for changing the soldiers’ beliefs.

What the Chinese understood was that our behavior is a direct result of what we believe about ourselves and the world. Think of it like a loop – we are constantly taking action that confirms who we believe we are, but we base our beliefs on who we are on our actions. It’s a catch-22.

So the Chinese interrupted the loop. You might think it was a big task reprogramming men who had been highly trained only to give their name, rank, and serial number, but the Chinese did it bit by bit.

During an interrogation, prisoners were persuaded to make one or two mildly anti-American or pro-communist statements. (For example, “The United States is not perfect,” or “A communist country has less unemployment.”) Once these apparently minor statements had been extracted, the prisoner would then be asked to define exactly how the United States was not perfect. When he was worn down and weary, he would then be asked to sign his name to the list of reasons he had come up with.

Later, the prisoner would be made to read his list in a discussion group with other prisoners. The Chinese would then broadcast his name and list of reasons during an anti-American radio broadcast not only to his own camp but to all the other North Korean POW camps and the rest of the American forces in South Korea as well.

Suddenly, the prisoner found himself labeled a collaborator, someone who participated in the kind of behavior that helped the enemy. When fellow prisoners asked why he had done it, he couldn’t claim he had been tortured. After all, he had said those things and signed his name to them.

Psychological research has shown that human beings can tolerate only a certain amount of discrepancy between their thoughts and their behavior. Like anyone unaware of the power of his own beliefs, the prisoner felt he had to justify his actions in order to maintain consistency with his own internal sense of identity. He would say that what he had said was true. In that moment his beliefs changed. He now believed that he was pro-communist, and his fellow prisoners reinforced his new identity by treating him differently. The loop was complete.

Before long, his desire to act consistently with his new beliefs would drive him to collaborate with the Chinese even more, thereby further reinforcing his new beliefs until he no longer even questioned they were true.

How to develop abundance mentality

Abundance mentality is simply a belief. A belief that there’s enough to go round for everybody. And you can cultivate that belief using the same strategy that the Chinese used to convert prisoners to communism.

Simply list specific actions you would take if you believed there’s enough for everybody, and then take those actions.

At first it will make you feel very uncomfortable. If you hold a scarcity mentality about money, and start giving out as if there was enough to go round for everybody, your mind will be screaming at you that you’re wasting it. That you’re throwing value out the window. That’s scarcity mentality.

But after a while, your mind won’t be able to take the disrepancy between your actions and beliefs anymore. So it will go “Hey, I’ve been doing all these things demonstrating abundance mentality. I must really believe it!”. And just like that, your beliefs will flip, and you will truly believe there’s enough for everybody.

And you know what? There IS enough for everybody! Once you realize that money is not a commodity to be hoarded, but just a representation of how much value you provide to others… once you realize that by giving out smiles and nice comments, you’re not losing out, but have MORE happiness yourself… you will truly be able to have plenty of all those!

So let’s get right to it!

Abundance mentality actions

Here a few ideas on what you can do:

• give away money to charity (especially useful if you feel you have barely enough money to get by)
• smile at 10 random strangers in one day
• uncopyright your writing
• in a teamwork situation, praise other people’s contributions and avoid drawing attention to your own work
• volunteer for a good cause (especially useful if you feel you’re always busy and have very little time for yourself)
• when you’re eating out with other people, offer them some food
• give out free hugs
• let somebody else take the spotlight

Write down all the actions from the above list you want to take, and any you come up with on your own. If you have scarcity mentality in some situation, you’re not likely to remember the actions just like that, so writing it down really helps.

Once you’ve written your abundance mentality actions down, review them every morning. Imagine yourself really taking those actions during the day, whenever you get a chance.

You will start to take those actions, and within days, you will begin to feel happier and more free, because you will truly believe there is enough for everybody.

And in the spirit of abundance, please share any abundance mentality actions you can think of in the comments below!

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Update on free hugs:

After my article on free hugs went a bit viral, with a ton of people saying they loved the idea… me and some other bloggers decided we’ll be issuing a challenge to you to try it as well! Stay tuned, more info coming early next week.