Growing from Scarcity or Growing from Abundance, GROW part 2

Episode 89 – Growing from Scarcity or Growing from Abundance, GROW part 2

The way we talk to ourselves when we are trying to move forward and grow is very important. We can grow from a place on thinking we aren’t good enough and we need to improve so we are finally worthy. This is growing from scarcity and it doesn’t ever produce the growth that is lasting and meaningful.

We can choose to grow because we want to move forward and improve because we care about ourselves and our own development. This is growing from abundance and will produce deep roots of self-confidence.

This is the second episode of GROW month in the Know, Love, Grow model.

Developing emotional maturity is one skill that carries over into many areas of your life. Everyone wants it, but few people have it. Download this free worksheet to begin developing this skill for yourself:CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD

You can still grab these two free downloads that correspond to the Know, Love, Grow series. Get them now before they go away!

January Free Download – 30 Journaling questions to get to know yourself better: Click HERE

February Free Download – Combatting Shame: Click HERE


Full Transcript

Have you ever wondered how some people seem to take whatever life gives them and work through it with peace and confidence while you feel like you’re on a roller coaster? Well those people have a good sense of who they are. They love and accept themselves for who they are and what life gives them. And then they make decisions from there and move forward from clean place. They’re using the Know, Love, Grow Model, and maybe they don’t even know it.

If you haven’t been following along with the January, February and March episodes on this podcast, and you want to know how you can get off that roller coaster and find peace.

It’s time to follow along.

Each month, I’m focusing on one part of the no love GROW Model. And I have a free download for you to begin putting these concepts into practice. If you’re ready to push pause on that roller coaster, please join me for episode 78 through 93 on the Coaching Your Family Relationships Podcast, you’ll begin to find that peace and confidence in your own life.

Welcome back to growth month. And if this is your first time listening to this podcast, then just welcome to growth month. I’m so happy to have you here. I hope you listen to last week’s episode with Aimee Gianni where we introduced the Grow part of the Know, Love, Grow Model.

This is a great series. And I use this work all the time in my coaching practice. And I think it’s the best way, this is the best model that we spiral up in our own lives where we start to take responsibility for ourselves, where we start to move forward from a place of abundance, which we’re going to talk about today. And we just feel better and more grounded in who we are in our ability to handle hard things that come our way. And surely, hard things come to all of us.

Today’s episode is something that Aimee and I touched on last week, and I want to expand what this looks like. Because I know it’s so easy to get our intentions mixed up when we’re growing and we don’t even know it. Are we growing from abundance? Or are we growing from scarcity? It’s a concept the scarcity versus abundance is something that maybe you hear a lot, I tend to hear a lot of it. Maybe you’ve heard some of it too.

But sometimes we don’t even realize how scarcity is showing up in our lives. Before we get into that, though, I want to remind you that there is a free download available this month for growth. It’s called emotional maturity, developing emotional maturity, which measures our emotional ability. How do we handle our emotions? The Know, Love, Grow Model that I’ve been giving you this year is one that can help you to become like the Chinese bamboo tree that I talked about last week.

Now if you didn’t listen to last week’s episode, I’m going to tell you the story again. And if you did, it’s always helpful to hear a story a second time I get lots of information that second or third or fourth time I listen to something.

But the Chinese bamboo tree is a seed that you plant, and you water and you fertilize and you make sure it has lots of sunshine and great fertile soil and you keep watering and fertilizing and just taking care of the seed. And you do it for a year and two years and three years and four years. Can you imagine? Just picture this. You’ve been watering a seed? You have not seen anything come up above the ground. And it’s been four years.

Can you imagine continuing to water that seed without wondering, is any of this doing any good? Is the seed even alive? I don’t even know maybe I should dig it up and find out. Or maybe this all that I’m doing here is just useless. And I just need to stop. Can you imagine sticking in there for four years and watering that seed, fertilizing it, making sure that it has good fertile ground sunshine and water. That would be really hard to stick in there and to trust and have faith that the things that are happening are supposed to be happening.

While in the fifth year. The Chinese bamboo tree can grow up to 90 feet in six weeks. Now did it start growing? Only in the fifth year did it just was it just testing you to see if you were gonna keep showing up and keep watering it? No.

It was actually growing beneath the ground. You couldn’t see the ways that it was growing. It was Growing a very deep and intricate root system. And because it develops that strong foundation, that’s why it can grow up to 90 feet in six weeks. If it didn’t have that foundation, that growth would not be possible.

Now we are like that Chinese bamboo tree, and we water and fertilize and just take care of the fertile soil and make sure that we have sunshine, for the seeds in our own lives. We often don’t see growth that’s coming to us as we are doing all those things. And we get frustrated. And sometimes we want to give up and simple as you want to just throw up our hands and say nothing is happening. Why am I keep trying?

It’s so easy to do that, to just give up and stop trying when we don’t see the progress. But we when we do this, when we keep showing up for ourselves, we are creating deep roots that help us to stay planted, when the storms of life come when everything gets really hard. Or maybe it seems like it’s falling apart. Or maybe you feel confused, fearful, anxious, or hopeless. When you have deep a deep root system, when you know who you are, when you can accept where you are.

That is when you can begin to grow. That’s when that growth those roots begin to take place when they start digging deeper into the ground. And when those hard times come, you will have a strong foundation that will not sway you that will not throw you into a place that you cannot handle. This is what the no love growth series, and what doing this work can give to you.

Now for sure the episodes that I’ve given you are not exhaustive, there are many, many different episodes that I could give you on each one of these words, no love and grow. There are so many things that I didn’t include because of time and just the limitations of podcasting.

But the episodes that I have given you are a great place to start, let those guide you let those be the breadcrumbs that help you to dive further into this work. So go download those free trainings, those will help you begin to know how to use the things that you’re learning on these episodes as you go along.

If you’re wanting more help, than either listening to the podcast, or the free trainings, are providing for you, then I want you to contact me. And I want you to set up a coaching session with me. You’ll find all the information to do that in the show notes. You know, just because you know information does not mean that you know how to use the information, gathering the information and learning about it.

That’s the easy part, finding out how to use it, how to make it work in your life and when to use certain things in your life. That’s the tricky part.

And we all have blind spots in our own lives. And in our own brains, it can be very hard to see what your brain is not allowing you to see. Because it’s filtering it out. That’s just what brains do. There’s nothing wrong with you that you have blind spots, it just means you’re a human being with a human brain having a human experience. And that’s what happens to us.

This is one of the biggest benefits of coaching to have someone else’s eyes on your issue to help point out those blind spots to you and help you work through them. So if you want help, I want you to go and set up an appointment with me, go into the show notes, click on the link set up an appointment. It’s only $25 for a 50 minute session.

Now as I’m talking about growing through scarcity, or growing through abundance, you know, this sounds like something that we should be able to distinguish in ourselves, right? But we have blind spots. We it’s actually really hard to see this in yourself, especially when you’re not really aware of what abundance looks like and what scarcity looks like. I’m going to give you some examples today. Because for me when I learned something the best is when I can actually see what that looks like in an everyday sense.

Give me an example of what you’re talking about. And then I’m going to measure it against my experience in my life. And I’m going to make connections there. I can actually think if I don’t have an example, I can actually think oh, I don’t struggle with that. That’s not me. And then I hear an example anything Oh, yeah, that is me. And I actually do that all the time. I really didn’t understand what you were talking about until you gave me an example.

So maybe you’re like me, and you need some examples. So I’m going to give you some of those today.

And this is the first one. And that because I have clients that come to me, and they’re beating themselves up all the time, so much judgment, and this is really common for people to do. And these are just some of the things that people say, there’s something really wrong with me and I need to fix it. I’m a failure. Look at my life, I’m a such a complete failure. My poor kids, they have me for a mother, they deserve so much better than me. I’ve hurt my family, because I didn’t know any better if I had known these things, then, then everything would be different now. And it’s all my fault. These are just some of the things that I hear on a regular basis.

And people come to me because they want to change things in their life. But the motive behind it when they say things like this, is I’m not good enough. And maybe if I change, I’ll finally be good enough. That is scarcity showing up? It’s hard to see sometimes when it’s you that’s in the middle of that. And what’s the problem with just moving forward in this way? Why can’t Why can’t we move forward from this way? Why? What’s the problem with it? Well, wherever you go, there you are, you can take yourself with you. If you don’t think you’re worthy, and okay right now, right as you are right now, today, there’s no magical place that you will get, there’s no success that you can achieve, or accolade that comes your way that will give that worthiness to you.

You can work really hard setting goals. And you can put all your effort and energy behind this to grow spiritually, mentally, physically and socially. And you can say to yourself, if I work really hard at these things, and I change, then finally, finally, I’ll be good enough. Well, that is scarcity. And what is the problem with that? One thing is that our brains are always moving the bar as to what good enough is, we never really truly define what good enough means. And our brains will move that bar just past where we are. So we never actually achieve what we think is good enough. Which we haven’t ever defined anyway, what good enough means. We just know that that’s not us, we’re not good enough. This is very common in the human experience. And you know what happens to you as you do all that work. As you’re working so hard to grow yourself spiritually, mentally, physically and socially.

Telling yourself if I just am better than I will be good enough, you’re going to have a miserable experience, as you’re working really hard, you’re going to hate all of it. And you will have a timeline agenda for yourself to grow and change as quickly as possible. So that you can finally be good enough, and get on with the rest of your life.

And not to mention that you haven’t, even though you’re working super hard to grow spiritually, mentally, physically and socially, you have not actually grown in the way that will help you the most. You might have learned a few things you might have achieved a goal, or made some new friends. But you haven’t changed and grown in a way that allows you to be more grounded in who you are.

And to create those deep roots for yourself like the Chinese bamboo tree. Like Aimee and I talked about last week, you don’t have those deep roots, your roots are very shallow, and they can be uprooted very easily in times of stress.

This is actually the way that most people approach growth, because most people do not have a lot of love, kindness or acceptance for themselves. So in order, we think in order for us to find that we need to be better, I can’t accept myself until I’m better. And so we beat ourselves up into growth thinking that that is the way but that is not the way when we approach growth that way we’re bypassing the love part of the Know, Love, Grow Model.

And love is a synonym for acceptance in this model. When we don’t have acceptance for what is we don’t have that bridge from knowing something about ourselves and being able to grow that same part of us.

We can never hate ourselves into being better. What we can do is hate our way into more frustration. More lack and more scarcity. When you try to go after things in order to prove your worth to yourself or to others, or so that you can be better, because you’re not good enough, right now, you will never actually attain what you’re wanting, because you’re doing it from scarcity, you will never feel better about yourself and get what you actually want, which is to feel good enough. Even though we haven’t defined what that means, and to feel worthy. Even though we don’t really understand what that means.

Growing through abundance is a completely different experience, it feels different in your body, it feels so much better. And the way that you’re thinking about growth is important.

You probably don’t even know right now, if you are working on growing from abundance or from scarcity. But here’s just one way that you can start finding out for yourself where you’re at.

Grab a notebook, I want you to start writing with a pencil or a pen. You can type but it’s actually better for your brain to write with a pencil or a pen. It makes more connections in your brain. Even though it’s slower for most of us, it actually is better for making these connections.

And I want you to write these questions down. Okay.

How do I want to grow?

What do I want to work on?

Why did I choose that?

What do I hope I will get from doing it?

What will happen if I don’t grow the way that I think I will?

What will I think about myself and about my efforts if it takes much longer than I think it will?

I want you to take some time and write out your answers to these questions. And any other questions that fit with the growth that you’re working on.

And then put it away? Don’t even look back at your answers.

Wait at least 24 hours and then come back and read what you wrote.

And read it as if you are reading what somebody else wrote. What’s the word choice there? What are your thoughts about yourself that are coming through in your writing? What else stands out to you? As you read that? And more importantly than anything else? How do you feel when you read those things? Does it feel kind of grasping needy like pushing forward? And anxiety energy? Or does it feel grounded and peaceful and kind.

The way that you tell your story is really important. Because what you focus on is the experience that you will have in your life. The facts of your life don’t matter nearly as much as what you do with those facts and how you interpret those facts. And when you love and accept yourself right now, where you are, as is no change needed. You don’t pick goals that are graspy, anxiety driven, perfectionist trying to prove your worth, you just don’t do that. That doesn’t happen.

I’ve talked several times about in through this series about my training that I did with Aimee a few years ago when I first learned this model. I was in a week long training with her I went into it feeling really good, really excited about what I was going to learn. And quickly by day one at lunchtime, I had drifted off into shame actually drifted is probably too nice of a word more like crashed into shame is more like it. But that was because I was seeing the scarcity in myself, and in my own life.

And every day that I was there, I felt more and more overwhelmed. And it was full of more and more shame. And I kept saying things to myself like what is wrong with me that I have not learned this until now I am too old, like should have learned this by now. Why did I not take pay attention. If I had paid attention to this years ago, things would be so different right now.

And I have to hurry, I have to hurry up and learn all of this so I can be better and I can stop messing everything up. I had so much judgment for myself and where I was. And I had an urgency to fix all these things in my life so that I could be better so that my relationship with my husband could be better so that my relationship with the rest of my family could be better and I could stop making all these mistakes, these dumb mistakes I’ve been making for decades.

When you want to change things from this sense of urgency, that can be a big sign that you are in scarcity. When you would judge your past self with your present knowledge you are in scarcity when you need to change not only yourself but other people You are in scarcity. When you need for things to be different before you can be happy, you are in scarcity. But when you know that you could live with the way things are right now, including yourself and be happy and never change, you are not in scarcity, you are living in abundance, you are growing from this place of I can be happy, and I am happy the way things are right now. But I think that I want something different from my future, because it feels good to me to keep growing and keep to keep moving forward.

This is growing from abundance. Your worthiness is not measured by anything that you do or don’t do. Now or in the future. It isn’t measured by what you have or haven’t done in the past. Your worthiness as a human being actually was 100% Infinite. From the time that you became a human being no matter what. It never changes no matter what. And it’s the same for everyone else around you, no matter what they are doing either. Want to just make one more point here.

It’s really a common belief that it’s good to be a perfectionist, that being a perfectionist is a good thing because then you’re so careful about the way you do things. And you don’t make mistakes. Well, perfectionism is not such a good thing. It comes from lack from scarcity, from this thought that if I can do things perfectly, if I can say the perfect thing, and act the perfect way, and achieve things perfectly and never make mistakes, then I’ll be above anyone’s criticism and judgment, including my own.

It’s very outward focused. And it’s impossible to achieve.

Because none of us are capable of not making mistakes. And then the perfectionist when those mistakes show up, fall further into scarcity and shame. Perfection, perfectionism is a very different than healthy, striving, healthy striving for excellence comes from a desire to improve yourself, because that’s who you want to be.

It’s inward focused, it says I’m doing this because I care about my own growth and development. Not because I’m going to be better when I get there. But because I care about me, and I just want to do this, because this is how I take care of myself. And I try to be the best me that I can. That’s what healthy striving for excellence looks like.

And when we are in healthy striving for excellence, and we make mistakes, we allow ourselves to learn and grow from the mistakes from the failure. We don’t go into shame because we made a mistake. Many of us are living in their perfectionistic mindset. And we are passing that on to our children.

I taught children for 30 years, I would tell you over those three decades that I taught children, I saw an exponential increase in anxiety driven perfectionism.

So many of them were frozen, when they would make a mistake, they would completely fall apart, making one small mistake. Or if they were not the best one in their class, at whatever they were doing. They were not able to handle the scarcity in their own brain, that it’s okay to make mistakes. It’s okay to fail sometimes. In fact, it’s actually great to fail sometimes, because those are the times that we learn the most.

So, if you have a child that has a lot of anxiety, take a look at how you might have passed on some perfectionistic tendencies. That’s a possibility that that is there.

I introduced myself in a training I went to a few weeks ago, and I said hello. My name is Tina Gosney. And I am a recovering perfectionist and control freak. My husband was sitting next to next to me that he’s just nodded his head like Yes, she is. So I know what I’m talking about here. And there’s no shame in that.

Because when we know better we do better

All right. So we don’t ever judge our past self with our present knowledge, all we do is move forward. I want you to get out your notebook. And I want you to start writing and ask yourself those questions that I gave you before. How do I want to grow? What do I want to do? Why did I choose that? What do I hope I will get from doing it? What will happen if I don’t grow the way? I think I will? And what will I think about myself, if it takes much longer than I think it’s going to and look at the feelings notice the feelings and emotions that you have, that you experience?

As you go about answering those questions. That emotion that you have that comes out, it’s probably going to be more than one. That is a great indicator of whether you are doing it from scarcity or whether you’re doing it from abundance. Thank you for being here with me today. All three downloads are still available.

So go click the link in the show notes. I want you to grab them while you can. Watch out for those thoughts. They will create the experience that you have in your own life. So if you don’t like your life experience right now. Ask yourself how am I creating this for myself? The way that I am feeling the circumstances of my life.