Cultivate Your Own Attitude of Abundance

Quit complaining about not having enough — you already have everything you need.

By Mickey Snowdon

The leader of our country is a misogynist and a racist.

Our world is warming at an unprecedented rate, with species biodiversity plummeting.

Is this depressing? Of course it is. But does it have to derail your life? Absolutely not. Here’s why.

Most maladaptive behaviors we have, we learned at an early age from trying to get our needs met. Whether it’s love, affection, attention, care, or even space, we often learn the most unhealthy ways to get these needs met from those closest to us.

And that’s okay. Nobody’s perfect. Once we accept this fact, we can relinquish control and relax. And once we can relax, we can realize that we already have everything we need within and without ourselves.

What does this hippy-babble mean, you ask? How do I already have everything I need when I so obviously don’t?

Think of an incredibly anxious dog (they’re usually small) that gets upset every time you leave. The dog knows that you’re going to leave at some point during the day, so until you actually leave, it shakes and cries.

And then you confirm the dog’s biggest fear by leaving it alone. Aha! The dog was right — you did leave. But that’s not the point.

The point is that the dog wasted its precious time it had with you worrying about when it wasn’t going to be with you. Sound familiar? Maybe you feel this way about your job, always worrying about clients or bosses even when you’re not at the office. Or maybe you feel this way about your significant other. Maybe someone feels this way about you.

This kind of suffocating behavior becomes habitual whether we mean for it to or not. It does not serve us. Conversely, it only keeps us from living in the moment and fully realizing all that we have.

Adopting an attitude of abundance is a way to combat this toxic mindset.

An attitude of abundance implies self-realization. The abundance refers to all of the unique characteristics that make you who you are, the people in your life who make you smile, the roof over your head, and the food in your refrigerator. The abundance is the sun shining through your window, the heat in your home when it’s snowing outside, and the bed that’s always ready to absorb your body weight at the end of the day.

Self-realization is the hard(er) part. To achieve it, I recommend that you make a list — either physically or mentally — of the abundance that fills your daily life.

I can already hear your ego screaming, This is just a cop-out to not work harder! or, You don’t even know what I have going on in my life!

Well, to the first argument, no, an attitude of abundance is not a cop-out at all. Understanding how much we have to be grateful for does not need to diminish our work ethic. In fact, it can prompt us to work even harder to help those who have less than we do.

To the second argument, you’re right — I have no idea what you, specifically, are going through. But the one thing that we both have in common — which is what authorizes me to be administering this advice — is that we’re human. And as humans, we deal with a whole lot of shit on a daily basis.

So much of our lives we spend living as victims to circumstances outside of our control. Victims to our finances, victims to our jobs, victims to our families, and most importantly, victims to ourselves. But it is this last victimization — ourselves — that we have the most power to change.

As The Eagles famously sang,

Adopting an attitude of abundance takes patience and practice. It’s not a life change you’re going to be able to make overnight, and it’s not something you’ll permanently have once you’ve discovered it. You’ll need to actively work on maintaining your attitude of abundance. You’ll need to fail and let your ego get in the way. You’ll need to choose to adopt it.

It is an attitude, after all.

At the end of the day, remember: we all hold the key to accessing our own abundance.

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