by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
The Scarcity Mindset & How to Step Into Real Abundance
If you’re constantly worrying because you think there aren’t enough opportunities in life or because you feel you lack access to ‘enough‘ of whatever you believe you need – money, love, material things, attention, time, energy, stability, [whatever else you can think of] – then you’re operating from a scarcity mindset:
Most people live this way without even realising it and so they think it’s normal to see the world through a lens of limitation. To make matters worse for themselves, they often also think it’s rational and might even believe it’s ‘realistic’ to think and live in this way.
This article will help you to understand that scarcity is not reality:
Instead, we explore the idea that the scarcity mindset is an unreal way of being in the world that serves as extension of an unreal relationship with yourself.
When your inner experience is fragmented, fearful, and built on emotional avoidance, then the external world looks the same because you project this fragmentation out into the world around you.
This article will help you understand the mechanics behind the scarcity mindset so you can start seeing yourself and life in a real way and slip into the abundance that naturally emerges when you reconnect to your own realness.
Let’s dig a little deeper:
Scarcity Mindset: What We’ll Cover in this Article
- The Scarcity Mindset & How to Step Into Real Abundance
- The Scarcity Mindset Is a Projection, Not a Fact of Life
- 1. When You Attach to Ego Over Realness
- 2. Shame: The Hidden Mechanism Behind Scarcity
- 3. When Self-Worth Becomes Outcome-Dependent
- 4. The Habit of Forcing Life Instead of Flowing With It
- 5. Overvaluing What You Want Because You’re Living in the Void
- Scarcity Is a Symptom of Shame and a Dysregulated Nervous System
- The Path Out of Scarcity and Back Into Abundance
- 3. Create a Real Vision and Take Real Action
- Scarcity Mindset – The Bottom Line: Abundance Is Real
The Scarcity Mindset Is a Projection, Not a Fact of Life
Let’s start with the that truth most people never consider:
Your scarcity mindset is not caused by the world being genuinely limited; it’s caused by the projection of your inner fragmentation onto your external circumstances.
What this means is that ‘scarcity’ isn’t fundamentally about money, opportunities, or relationships but about the way you perceive them and that perception is shaped by deeper emotional and psychological patterns.
This comes back to a simple law of human experience:
Perception is projection.
There are five core projections that create the illusion of scarcity, all rooted in the same underlying issue: a disconnection from realness and the presence of unprocessed shame.
Once you understand these projections, you can begin to dismantle them and return to the truth of abundance and a relationship with your own realness.
Let’s explore these 5 core scarcity mindset projections in more detail:
1. When You Attach to Ego Over Realness
The first projection that creates scarcity is the belief that you are separate and isolated from everything else.
This comes from identifying with the ego – your constructed sense of self – rather than your realness.
Ego, by its nature, believes in independence and separation:
It loves the idea of being a lone wolf, self-contained, self-sufficient, and in control – these are all ‘good’ qualities to have when balanced but independence, when taken as an identity rather than a practical necessity, becomes a psychological trap.
When you identify in this way then the ego starts to whisper lies to you: “It’s you versus the world and if life becomes a zero-sum competition (which means that if you ‘win’ somebody else ‘loses’), you will always feel like there’s not enough – for you, for those around you, or for anyone at all.
Realness, on the other hand, is interdependent which means that it recognises that we’re all connected to life to other people, to opportunities, and to the natural flow of things at all times.
When you’re connected in this way, then life feels open and you can start to see more clearly which is the direct opposite of limitation you perceive when isolated behind the filter of the ego.
All of this is to say that scarcity begins the moment you forget that you’re part of something larger than your ego.
2. Shame: The Hidden Mechanism Behind Scarcity
Underneath every scarcity mindset is an emotional pattern that most people avoid looking at:
Shame.
This is the shame that tells you you’re not good enough, not safe enough, not worthy enough, and not capable enough to trust yourself or life.
Shame is the emotion that makes you cling to the ego for dear life and so you use the ego as a shield, a form of control freakery, and a way to avoid vulnerability and bypass uncomfortable emotions.
This may ‘protect’ you in the short-term, but this attachment keeps you stuck in a distorted relationship with reality because if you don’t trust yourself, you won’t take real action, and if you don’t trust life, you won’t allow life to help you.
This combination of self-distrust and life-distrust is the perfect breeding ground for scarcity:
It makes the world appear full of barriers and limitations, even when the truth is far more open.
Shame creates the belief that you must fight for every scrap because you don’t believe you have the inner resources to engage with life in a grounded, confident way.
Most of the time, people don’t realise they are operating from shame; they only notice the symptoms like indecision, fear, avoidance, anxiety, overthinking, perfectionism, and the constant feeling of being on the back foot in life.
But when you strip away the behavioural patterns, shame is what you find at the core and it’s what’s causing you to perceive unreal scarcity instead of real abundance.
3. When Self-Worth Becomes Outcome-Dependent
Another major contributor to the scarcity mindset is the tendency to place your sense of self-worth outside yourself:
If your self-worth depends on outcomes like achievements, validation, money, success, or relationships, then you’ll always feel like you are one step away from losing everything because you’re outsourcing your self-worth to something temporary instead of something lasting.
This outcome-dependence creates a subtle but powerful pressure:
The need to constantly ‘prove’ yourself and to perform instead of staying present in the process of creating, working, connecting, and growing because you’re fixated on results. In this (unreal) state of mind, the process becomes something you must endure or control, rather than something you participate in.
Another downside of defining your self-worth by outcomes is that your worth also becomes future-based because outcomes exist in the future:
This means you live in a stressed out state where the present moment never feels like enough and so you don’t feel like enough by extension.
This, again, is where scarcity creeps in: the belief that what you have now is insufficient and what you want is always just out of reach.
The shift here is not to stop wanting things, but to become outcome-independent:
This means you can pursue goals without allowing them to define your identity because – when your worth is rooted in realness rather than results – the world stops feeling scarce and starts feeling spacious again.
4. The Habit of Forcing Life Instead of Flowing With It
Scarcity also manifests when you fall into the trap of trying to force everything:
This basically boils down to the fact that when shame is running the show, you don’t trust life and when you don’t trust life, you try to control it.
This habit of forcing instead of flowing shows up in countless ways:
Over-planning, overworking, micromanaging, catastrophising, pushing beyond your capacity, or trying to get everything done through sheer willpower. You rely entirely on your own understanding, your own strategies, and your own timeline instead of learning by doing and letting life get involved in the process too.
This kind of forcing is exhausting and it goes against the nature of reality:
Flow happens when you are aligned with truth and open to the unexpected; force happens when you are disconnected from truth and terrified of uncertainty.
The more you force, the more opportunities you block but learning to flow is how life brings you possibilities you couldn’t have logically planned. Force is how you cling to rigid expectations and miss what’s actually available whereas flow is about opening your hands out and receiving what life wants to be giving you (as long as you take real action).
In short, forcing life is scarcity in action – the belief that if you don’t make it happen exactly as planned, it won’t happen at all (even though you’re not omnipotent or omniscient and can’t make anything happen exactly as planned).
5. Overvaluing What You Want Because You’re Living in the Void
Finally, when you’re cut off from your realness, you unintentionally create a psychological “Void” – a space inside that feels empty, disconnected, or lacking in meaning.
Most people assume the Void will be filled once they finally get what they want: the money, the partner, the success, the achievement but the Void cannot be filled by anything external – it can only be filled by accepting truth and taking real action in alignment with it.
When you’re living in the Void, you will overvalue external goals:
You turn them into the “Ultimate” and so you make them too important – because of that, you become fearful and rigid around them.
The shift is to see what you want as good, not god:
When something is good, you can pursue it with clarity and openness but, when it becomes god, you cling to it.
Clinging is scarcity but openness and learning to let go is abundance.
Scarcity Is a Symptom of Shame and a Dysregulated Nervous System
At its core, the scarcity mindset is not a character flaw or a rational strategy but a physiological and emotional state:
If you have a scarcity mindset, it basically means that your body has gone into survival mode, your mind is interpreting everything through the lens of ‘threat’, and so your behaviours follow suit.
A dysregulated nervous system makes the world appear threatening, competitive, and limited (all of which make things seem ‘scarce’ instead of ‘abundant’):
When your body calms down, your perception of life begins to shift and so you can finally stop projecting fear onto reality and start seeing things more clearly.
What this means is that scarcity collapses not when the world changes but when you come back into regulation and reconnect with your realness.
Check out my book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace if you’d like to go even deeper into cultivating self-trust and life-trust for abundance.
The Path Out of Scarcity and Back Into Abundance
Overcoming scarcity isn’t about positive thinking or pretending everything is ‘perfect’ – it’s about reconnecting with the truth of reality rather than your shame-fuelled projections.
The real path forward has three essential steps:
1. Regulate the Nervous System
Before anything else, the body must come out of survival mode because you simply can’t make abundant decisions with a scarcity physiology.
Find something that helps you to start activating the parasympathetic nervous system so that you’re not stuck in fight-or-flight mode (the sympathetic nervous system).
Some examples might be:
- Long-exhale breathing techniques
- Grounding exercises
- Somatic release work
- Regulating exercises like yin yoga (this is my favourite)
- Cold exposure (if appropriate)
- Healthy sleep routines
- Reducing stimulants during periods of anxiety
This step alone can dramatically reduce scarcity-based thinking because you’re teaching your body that it is safe to receive, safe to trust, and safe to engage with life.
2. Master the Mind
Once the body is grounded, you can begin re-training the mind.
This involves:
- Noticing scarcity-based thoughts as they appear (use my free thought log tool to get started).
- Identifying the emotional charge (usually shame or fear) underneath them.
- Naming the projection rather than believing it.
- Shifting your focus back to what is real, present, and within your control.
Your mind is used to making things seem scarce because it has been shaped by emotional patterns that grew out of shame.
When you recognise the pattern, you can interrupt it and each interruption strengthens your connection to realness.
3. Create a Real Vision and Take Real Action
Abundance doesn’t mean being passive and waiting for life to magically ‘fix’ everything:
Abundance emerges when you participate with life from a grounded, truthful state which means creating a vision rooted in realness – which means it’s aligned with who you are, not who your ego thinks you need to be – and then moving towards it through consistent real action.
Real action is not force – it’s participation:
It is what happens when intention meets truth.
When you take real action, you naturally align with flow rather than pushing against life and this strengthens self-trust and life-trust, which slowly dissolves the scarcity illusion.
Scarcity Mindset – The Bottom Line: Abundance Is Real
The biggest lie of the scarcity mindset is the belief that the world does not have ‘enough’ for you. but in reality:
- Money is just a number.
- Relationships are abundant.
- Opportunities are everywhere.
- Ideas are infinite.
- Life is generative by design.
The world may be fuelled by the illusion of scarcity (because ‘The World’ is other people and so many of them have the scarcity mindset) but reality is not scarce and only the ego, fuelled by shame and disconnection, believes otherwise.
When you reconnect to your realness – through regulating the body, mastering the mind, and taking aligned action – you step back into the truth: that abundance is not something you create, but something you learn to see and embrace.
When you live in realness, you discover that life is not withholding anything from you – it was only your scarcity mindset blocking the flow.
Once that dissolves, you realise the thing you’d been searching for all along was never “out there” but was already present in you and waiting for you to return to it.
Stay real out there,
P.S. If you’re ready to stop holding yourself back from your real life because of your emotional ego ‘stuff’ then book a free coaching session with me and we’ll find ways for you to take real action.
Trust: A Manual for Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace is a book about learning to return to your realness by cultivating trust in yourself and trust in life.
It contains practical exercises and dedicated meditations (Transformational Bridges) to take you DEEP in knowing yourself and life.
This book will answer many of the questions you have growing REAL and flowing towards wholeness. It covers everything from shame to addiction to the unconscious mind and synchronicity (and way more).
Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness is a book designed to help you look at your life from the inside-out so that you can stop holding yourself back and go get what you really want.
It contains 166 practical ‘Revolutions’ for awareness and over 8,000 Self-Guidance Questions for you to uncover new insight about yourself, the world, and reality that you can translate into action and start building your real life on the realest possible foundation.
Shadow Life is an exploration of the human shadow and the hidden side of our personalities. It looks at the masks we wear, where these masks come from, and how we can take them off.
The book explores how we can better manage our relationships with shame, guilt, and trauma in order to remove the Mask that the world has asked us to wear (and that we forgot we were wearing) so we can live an authentic life with less drama, chaos, or BS whilst we’re still around.
The Flow Builder Journal has everything you need to make the next 21-weeks of your life a turning point.
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