Your scarcity beliefs may be limiting your salary or sales and what to do about it [mindset wellness]

Let me be blunt: If you want to negotiate effectively for a higher salary, you need a solid income mindset. Without that, it’s going to be freakin’ hard. Same for any negotiations that involve money for you, like sales for your own business, etc. It doesn’t matter if you charge for your services or products as part of a job or in your own business; your income mindset is key either way.

Mindset wellness is essential for financial wellness.

That’s why mindset wellness is always the very first thing you want to work on. And you will continue cleansing and massaging it while you’re upgrading your negotiation skills and other technicalities.

Believe me, I know what I’m talking about. I know more than I’d like to know because I’ve learned a lot through experience. And unfortunately, I didn’t know this as my younger self. However, I’ve dedicated lots of time and energy to catch up on upgrading my mindset and passing all my learnings on to my clients. (As I like to say: If you were never wounded, you don’t know how to heal… But once you’ve learned to heal, you become a teacher for others.) This doesn’t mean my life is advancing on a perfectly smooth path. There are still bumps in the road, but they no longer trip me up as they used to.

I inherited so much of that scarcity and lack baggage (yes, we inherit a lot of it from our ancestors – thank you very much!), and then life added more of it. I grew up in post-war Germany, oranges were still a Christmas luxury when I was a little girl, and the household money was counted. I often heard: “We can’t afford this.” (There’s no judgement, only observation. The people around me who said that weren’t aware of the limiting conditioning these statements cause.) The Catholic religion prevalent in that area did its part, too, though I instinctively rejected its teachings.

Just like many other kids, I had a myriad of experiences that contributed to a scarcity mindset. Today, I want to choose two stories that deeply impregnated my conditioning. One of them, I remember personally, and the other is an interesting fact that I learned about just recently. But whether we’re consciously aware of our limiting influences or not, they are all stored in our subconscious. That’s why inner limitations are so tricky and sneaky: Most of them are subconscious, and many wouldn’t even make any sense to our rational minds.

Here’s my first story, a childhood experience:

As a little girl, I often did the grocery shopping for our family, weather permitting. The village I grew up in didn’t have any shops, so I’d take my bike to the grocery store in a neighboring town, about three miles from home. Our bikes were very simple at the time, no gears or any such fancies, so on my way home, I’d be pushing it up a long hill, a basket filled with groceries on the bicycle rack and a couple of bags on both sides of the handlebar. I loved doing the grocery shopping, if it just weren’t for those hills on my way home... My other challenge was that I was supposed to buy a list of groceries for which I had a limited budget. And so, very early in my life, I learned to study – and even memorize – the prices of the foods I’d typically be asked to buy.

I was still quite short, and one day at the grocery store, I tried to reach a juice bottle on one of the top shelves. But the bottle was too high up for my modest height, and as I was trying to grab it on my tippy toes, it slipped from my little hands and fell to the floor. I was terrified! What if they had me pay for the bottle and I didn’t have enough money to take one home now? And I was also embarrassed because I’d made a mess in the store. (Shame is the worst!)

Now, what’s important here is that I wasn’t afraid of my parents scolding me. They would have understood and been fine with it. But I was terrified that I had failed them. After all, I was the “big sister” in our family.

Gladly, the store didn’t even charge me for the bottle. One of the ladies just cleaned it up, and it got resolved.

But it didn’t get resolved in my mind until much later. In fact, just remembering it made me cry way into my adulthood. In BodyTalk, one of the holistic modalities I studied, we call this “active memory”; a memory that still affects us and that we can turn into a passive memory through certain techniques. By doing this, we won’t forget it. We just neutralize it so that it no longer has power over us; it no longer limits us.

The second story goes back to my ancestors:

Just recently, as I was back home in Germany and leafing through an old family album that I’d never seen before, I found out that in one of our lineages, the family did not have a kitchen in their house. They’d cook in the narrow corridor because the house was too small for a kitchen. They were clearly not rich.

As I said above, we inherit many of our beliefs in our genes. We are not born as clean slates, as is often stated. We carry a lot of our ancestors’ baggage with us, and if we don’t get rid of it, it will be passed on to the next generation… until someone takes it onto themselves to put an end to it or at least mitigate it.

There was lack mentality in many of our ancestral families, which could have had a variety of different causes. And while we may know about some, we don’t know it all. But with specific methodologies, we can get to the root of it and move at least a portion of it out of our way.

Awareness often helps. But it’s not always enough. We need to make a decision to let go. Sometimes, this requires the help of an expert. Holistic practitioners know how to do this. Coaches who also studied holistic practices know how to do this. It’s also a part of what truly transformational coaching is about.

For starters, here’s something you can do for yourself, once you’ve identified what’s holding you back. Ask yourself: “Would I let this [belief/emotion/thought/resentment/guilt, etc.] go?” – If your answer is yes, then the next question is: “When?” Can you let it go now? Can you neutralize your memory?

Try it! It’s one of many ways to improve your mindset wellness.

And if you feel like you need more than this and want to upgrade your income mindset, DM me. This is also included in my Dream Salary Course, by the way. That’s a very affordable online course for anyone that wants to negotiate the salary they deserve. Happy to send you the link.