Your mental approach toward wealth and success directly affects how you interact with your clients and make decisions affecting your business. If you’re stuck in a “scarcity mindset” — the belief that opportunities are few and far between — you can limit your own potential for growth, says Rosemary Smyth, founder of Rosemary Smyth and Associates in Victoria.
Financial advisors with a scarcity mindset get caught up focusing on what they lack, whether that’s clients, time, money or support. Those with an “abundance” mentality, on the other hand, believe that there are more than enough resources to go around, and everyone can reap those rewards.
By developing an abundance mindset in your practice, Smyth says, you’ll be better equipped to focus on long-term goals and cultivate positive interactions with clients and colleagues.
Here are three tips for developing an abundance mindset:
1. Evaluate your beliefs
The first step toward developing an abundance mindset is figuring out why you’re holding onto a scarcity mindset, Smyth says. For example, if you grew up with parents who were always tight with money despite earning upper middle-class salaries, you may have adopted the belief that money is hard to come by. If you can identify where your beliefs originated, you can start questioning their relevance in your current life, Smyth says.
2. Avoid comparisons
In rookie training, you may have noticed that some new advisors can zoom through their first year with fantastic results, Smyth says. But comparing your growth to someone else’s accomplishments can limit your own potential.
If you’re fixed with a mindset that only one of you can be the “winner,” or only one can become highly successful in the financial advisory business, you’ll miss out on opportunities to help each other grow.
Take a look at the big picture, Smyth says, by considering how many extra hours other rookies may be working, or what connections they’ve already built.
3. Recognize areas of abundance
Move away from limiting beliefs by acknowledging your strengths and achievements. For example, if you have a scarcity mindset, you might say there’s not enough money in your city, or the economy is struggling too much for your business to be able to hit its targets, Smyth says.
Instead, you can reframe your view by examining what client assets you already have. It’s better to focus energy on providing quality service to your current clients than to spend time lamenting a perceived scarcity of high net-worth clients.
You also should examine whether your clients have a scarcity or abundance mindset, Smyth adds. If clients are tied to a scarcity mindset, it may be limiting their potential for saving and investing.
This is the second part in a two-part series on changing your mindset.