Abundance, Your Lifestyle Choice

Abundance, your lifestyle choice

In the last episode, Jo shared some surprising ways that your scarcity mindset might be showing up in your practice and your life. In this episode, she goes on to discuss how abundance is not positive thinking but rather a lifestyle choice and shares 5 things you can do to create more abundance.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

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TRANSCRIPT:

Welcome to this episode of the Entrepreneurial Clinician Podcast, which I have titled Abundance, Your Lifestyle Choice.

So in the last episode I shared with you 10 ways scarcity is showing up and it’s a bit of a heavy episode. I promise you we haven’t got 10 ways. It’s not gonna take you 10 things. There’s not a checklist that you can check off at the end of this podcast and go, yay, I’ve arrived at abundance. That’s not how it works. But if you haven’t listened to last week’s episode around scarcity and how it’s turning up for you, could I encourage you to do that? What I would love for you to do is listen to this podcast, then go back and listen to the previous podcast and then come back and listen to this one again. And as I go through this podcast, you’ll see why I encourage you to do that.

So this episode I wanna share with you how we can develop a lifestyle of abundance that is the first clue. It’s a lifestyle. It’s not positive thinking. It’s not a deck of affirmation cards and heck, it is not a destination and is not attachment to the outcome. So if you have come to this podcast episode today thinking that this is going to be the thing that breaks you through to earning a million dollars in the next 24 hours, you are sadly mistaken. Cause if I promised to do that, I would be incredibly incongruent with myself. You would call me out on it and the world would be a bad place. So I’m not gonna do that. What I do wanna do is create communities of health professionals all over the world who are committed to working out how we do this incredibly important work, serving the people who need our assistance, creating vibrant, healthy lives that our clients actually wanna be a part of.

This is about learning how we can do this work without sacrificing ourselves to the work. Thank you Emmy for that lovely little introduction there. So I have two puppies at my feet. Today we have the Smudge and Emmy from next door. Neither of them want to go outside and leave me alone. So we are going to work out how we can record a podcast with two puppies in the house. Hopefully they won’t get under my feet cause I’m using my standing desk again today because I wanna get some energy happening.

So abundance is a lifestyle choice and therefore it requires thoughts, habits, actions, experiences that all reinforce your abundant life. So if you’ve seen four clients today or if you’re going to see four clients today, you’ve got at least four hours of scarcity turning up in your experience, you will somaticise this. This will turn up in your body because we are so smart as health professionals, we can bypass our thinking, put on our health professional face, pretend it’s not affecting me, but it lands in our bodies. So four hours of clinical work is not gonna be counteracted by you saying your abundance affirmation once this morning when you woke up. Not gonna change too much. Not to mention you probably woke up tired, had a staff member call in sick. Maybe some unexpected bills arrived. No one’s thought about dinner tonight. You are still tired. And who the heck didn’t refill the toilet paper in your cubicle? And what the heck do you mean there’s no toilet paper left? Yeah, saying your abundance affirmation once a day through gritted teeth, “I am abundant”, isn’t gonna cut it. If you truly want to move from a scarcity lifestyle through to an abundance lifestyle, this requires lifestyle change. And I’m using this terminology because all of us have worked with clients who want the one step wonder that’s gonna bring about the transformational change. But you know, they don’t wanna break the habits of the past 30 years trying to get somebody to stop smoking, trying to get somebody to lower their cholesterol, trying to get somebody to decrease their weight. You know, for health reasons. Lifestyle change. Can I say it any louder for the people in the back of the room? This requires lifestyle change.

And I’m not going to give you things that I was given in the beginning to help me reinforce my sense of abundance. Because some of these actions, like going and spending thousands of dollars on leather goods at high-end fashion stores, did nothing to help me with my attitude of abundance and did everything to help me reinforce my attitudes of not being good enough. Poor management. And I suck as a human because I wasn’t ready for it. I wasn’t ready to start making those types of purchases and incorporate them and integrate them into my life. So I’ve actually done the work and thought about what it is that I have had to do in the past three years since Covid and Cancer to apprehend my scarcity? Cause I tell you, COVID and cancer really brought my scarcity work home. It was very comfortable in my body. It turns up all the freaking time. This year I have worked really hard on apprehending scarcity in my life.

So the first way that we can do this, and there are five. They’re all equally important. No, you don’t have to follow them in order. No, you don’t have to do all of them. This gives you somewhere to start.

Number one, act in the way that is congruent to what you say you want. If you want higher quality staff who wanna work hard, then become the leader who attracts this type of talent. Build the culture in your business that retains this type of talent, which means you need to become the leader of this type of talent. You wanna sleep well and become more energised. Well actually learn what’s sapping your energy. You wanna stop wasting time chasing people who owe you money, owe you money, pay your bills on time.

I cannot tell you how many times I have worked with health professionals who tell me that they have poor cash flow, that they haven’t got enough money who do not pay their bills on time. They will be the first ones to complain when clients no show late. Cancel and don’t honour a cancellation fee. Learn to pay your bills on time. Just do it. It’s a discipline, it’s a habit, it’s a commitment. It’s a lifestyle choice.

This learning to act in a way that is congruent with what I say I want has been a huge eye-opener for me in 2023. Right now we are in May and I have been consistently auditing my behaviour this year to find out where they do not match or they’re incongruent with what I say I want. It is eye-opening. It is amazing how many behaviours are in my life that reinforce scarcity when I say I wanna live a life of abundance.

Number two, express gratitude. For every dollar you receive, every deposit into your account, every gift card given. Denise Duffield-Thomas taught me this many, many years ago. Stop looking at what you don’t have and start being grateful and expressing gratitude for everything that comes in. Everything. 10 cents, 20 cents, a Starbucks gift card, an Amazon gift card, a gift of flowers, a gift of a book. The money that your client paid, the back pay that somebody owed you. Express gratitude for it daily. Don’t just think it, express it, write it out. You need a motor action. You need a motor action to get this into your body. Ooh, this totally changes your relationship with your bank account and with your cash flow. Let me assure you. If you can start expressing gratitude for every dollar or every gift that comes your way, wait for more to come. Wait for more to come. It will start coming now.

Number three, I can assure you that we will not be given any more resources. Whether it’s money, time, people, energy until we have learned to be effective with what we’ve already been given. In my faith of Christianity, this is called stewardship. And I can attest to this principle. Until we learn how to be effective stewards with the resources we have, we will not be given any more. Why would I wanna give you $10,000 when you’ve shown me you can’t manage $2,000? Why would I wanna give you a waiting list of 20 clients when you’ve shown me you can’t return the calls of the four people who have reached out to you and have left messages on your voicemail? Yeah, hush. But this is how our scarcity turns up and how we’re interrupting abundance from becoming a part of our lifestyle.

The fourth thing that we can do, we have to surround ourselves with like-minded people. We have to change our sociology. We have been conditioned to think scarcity. I explained that in the last podcast. I’m not gonna go over it again. Now we’ve been conditioned and I’ve been doing this work for nearly 30 years. I got 30 years of habitual learning to undo 30 years. This is gonna take effort. This is not habitual for me yet this is a constant choice. Every day I need to surround myself with like-minded people to find the people who want to live abundantly, who will graciously challenge me when my scarcity starts to show. But it’s not just the immediate people, the physical, tangible people. Cause sometimes it’s gonna be hard, especially in our families. I already shared with you how my family of origin has contributed to my scarcity mindset. But it’s also what we listen to. It’s also how we participate in line. For example, what memes do you actually find funny and how are they reinforcing your scarcity mindset?

And the fifth way, and perhaps the easiest way to allow abundance to turn up in your life is to act generously. Now you’re going, Jo, I don’t have enough money to act generously. Oh my gosh, that’s such a limited thinking. Every time I feel the pool of scarcity, especially through comparison, cause as I shared last week, it turns up for me that way I will deliberately become generous. I will think about what can I share? Can I write a testimonial or a review? Can I share something that they’re offering? Can I share their book or their tools? How can I be generous with what I already have? It does not mean I have to put my hand in my pocket. Sometimes it might. Sometimes that’s exactly what it might mean. Other times it’s usually an act of generously giving my time, my influence, my energy sharing, sharing with my list, with my social media.

Like you’ve got no idea how powerful that stuff is when you do it from a place of being generous. And these are not transactional actions. Can you get that? You don’t go, I’m going to be generous and share this person’s great social media post over here. Therefore I expect $5,000 in my bank account. If you are still in transactional thinking, you need to go back to the very, very beginning of this podcast and listen to everything again. And sometimes we do need to listen to everything again because the way we turn up in the world cannot be a transaction. The way we are going to break through, beak down, break around, transform, and have the things we want in this world is when we understand that we have to live by principles, not by tasks, not by checklists, not by to-do lists. And the way we turn up in the world is not a transaction. You do not get to be generous once and have a lifestyle of abundance.

But these five actions are incredibly powerful behaviours that we can cultivate into a lifestyle of abundance. When we deliberately use these five behaviours, they become habits. It is now so easy for me to be generous, so easy for me to be generous. If you are on my email list, you know how easy it is for me to be generous. If you’re a part of my Daring Dozen community or my You, The Entrepreneurial Clinician community, or you work with me one-on-one, you see every month I’m asking you what can I share about your stuff this month that allows me to be able to be generous for you. I don’t do it because I want you to like me. I do it because I know generosity is that powerful. I know it works.

When these behaviours line up with what we say we want, then our resources can flow. Everything starts to feel effortless. The resources can flow because you are no longer rejecting or repelling saying, I can’t or I won’t, or it won’t. It’s not fair. I’m not good enough, I’m not worth it. Your sociology, your physiology, your psychology is changing. When your resources flow, you have this posture to be able to receive more. But I’m really curious to know from you at the end of this podcast today, which of the five that I’ve shared, will it be to act in a way that is congruent with what you say you want? Will it be expressing gratitude for every dollar that comes to you? Will it be stewarding and managing the resources that you’ve already been given? Well, so more can come. Will you surround yourself with like-minded people? And will you act generously?

Out of these five, which one do you wanna start with? Which one do you wanna give a go for the next 30 days and see what change comes into your world? I would love to know from you which one you’re gonna try first.

So let me know. You can do this in a couple of ways. Number one, come join the Future Proofing Health Professionals Facebook group over in Facebook. Share in there. Number two, share it on your social stories, on your social media. Let everybody know you’ve listened to this podcast today and the number one thing you wanna share. Now that is going to require huge amounts of vulnerability and you might not like the idea of doing that. And that’s okay. That’s why I give you two options.

I do look forward to bringing you more of these podcasts. I have some amazing guests lined up to come in the next coming weeks. So look out for some more guest inspired podcast episodes and until then, go be your awesome self.