Changing Your Mindset

To close out this week on Scarcity vs. Sufficiency, I want to talk about the physical practice of actually changing your mindset.

Earlier this week, I talked about using the spreadsheet to logically prove to your brain that you aren’t going backwards. But as I shared on Sunday, there is a contradiction in how scarcity operates — I can confidently invest capital into real estate or a startup, but my nervous system will still stress at the thought of most consumption spending. You might have your own version of hidden scarcity.

Because I inherited a scarcity mindset around personal spending, I eventually had to accept that logic only gets you so far. I had to actively train my nervous system to handle it and treat it like exposure therapy.

I had to intentionally buy things that were purely for my own enjoyment… not for utility, not for the business, and with absolutely zero measurable ROI.

And then came the hardest part… I had to sit with the deep discomfort of having spent the money on myself. Crazy, right?

I’m not going to sit here and tell you that I have mastered this. I have not. I constantly have to challenge my primary money story and remind myself that I am worthy of personal spending.

But you have to sit in that discomfort and ride it out. You have to teach your brain to overcome whatever internal inherited narratives you have.

If you struggle with hidden scarcity, the cure isn’t aggressively saving more. Sometimes, the cure is forcing yourself to experience the joy of what you have already built and trusting that you have the capacity to build more.

For Ken and me, that exposure starts small. Every day, Ken drives into Lively just to bring back two Tim Hortons coffees so we can sit in our gazebo to have coffee together.

We could easily make coffee at home. The traditional personal finance “rules” would say it’s a ridiculous waste of money. But we don’t care. It’s a luxury, it brings us joy, and it has absolutely zero measurable ROI.

The only time we were forced to break the habit was during Snowmageddon earlier this month, when our road was completely snowed in for five days and we actually had to make our own coffee… and then we ran out of emergency coffee and were saved by our neighbours who were more prepared! LOL.

That daily Tim Hortons run is a micro-practice in Sufficiency. And that practice scales up.

I’ve learned that Sufficiency spending is not about keeping up appearances or following the traditional rules of success. We keep our house small because we simply don’t care and our cars are older but owned outright. Instead, we are spending more on joy.

It’s taken a lot of time for me, but today, Ken and I travel more than we used to. We value experiences and the fun we have living on the water… in fact, our boat is probably worth more than the house that sits on our property.