The Scarcity Mindset That Might Be Killing Your Business

Scarcity mindset is tricky because it rarely announces itself as fear. Most of the time, it convinces you that you are just being careful.

But fear has a way of shaping decisions quietly.It can quietly push you into survival mode where everything feels urgent and nothing ever feels like enough.

In this episode of Honest Brew, we unpack how scarcity thinking shows up in business and everyday life. We talk about the pressure to constantly stay productive and why slowing down is often what leads to clearer, more intentional decisions.

The conversation also explores the difference between reacting from survival mode versus making intentional long term choices that actually support growth.

A candid conversation between three seasoned business women who've been in the trenches of entrepreneurship. We bridge the gap between the glamorous just market and sell advice and the reality of what it takes to build a sustainable business. While most business content focuses on marketing, branding, OR operations in isolation, we bring all three worlds together. Because your brand culture needs to live in every system you create, your operations need to support your brand promise, and your marketing needs the infrastructure to deliver on what it sells.

We're here for the solopreneurs ready to grow beyond themselves, the partnership survivors rebuilding stronger, and anyone tired of business advice that treats branding, marketing, and operations as separate planets when they're part of one ecosystem.

HOSTS

Cheale Villa, Visual Caffeine, visualcaffeine.com / Monique Johnson, MoJo Design, ...

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to Honest Brew Podcast, unfiltered conversations on business growth. I am Shell with Visual Caffeine, Monique of Mojo Design, and I am Sarah of Indigo Elephant. This is where three small female business owners gather to share what's really working, what's not, and what we wish we had known sooner. Today, this conversation is a spicy one, at least from my perspective. As a business coach, I deal with this topic quite frequently with my clients, and I've had my own personal struggles. It is scarcity versus abundance mindset. It's the mindset mess holding our business back. We're diving in to the way that you think about resources. Time, money, people, opportunities shapes every single decision you make. And spoiler, it shows up in your brand, your marketing, and definitely your operations. We are diving in, and this is what we're gonna start brewing up first, ladies. The mindset audit. You didn't know you needed. How scarcity thinking disguises itself as being practical, or I'm just being smart right now.

SPEAKER_02 1:19

So for me, literally me getting into entrepreneurship was me really navigating my scarcity mindset and embodying that abundance. And even now, it's been years that I've been doing indigo elephant that I'm still learning how to embody it. If I ever have scarcity beliefs around money, at this point I know it has nothing to do with money. It has something else to do with it that I am attaching a meaning to. So an example of that was when I stopped having a part-time job to go full-time in my business, I thought money gave me safety. So when I would get paid every two weeks, I was like, I don't have to worry, I'll get paid in two weeks. Girl, you don't get that in entrepreneurship. So that was a really hard transition to me, navigating that money's not what cultivates safety for me. That's something I can actually do for myself. Like, how can I have those experiences of safety? And another big lesson that helped me was understand that money's energy. Money is meant to flow, it's meant to come to you, it's meant to leave. It's not meant to be stuck in your bank account. Like it wants to move. And that's why sometimes I believe when we have like those quote unquote unexpected expenses is because money wants to move. It's been sitting for too long. So just understanding that money is just energy, it's literally a piece of paper, it's literally a coin. Like cows used to be currency. You know what I mean? Like it's just energy that wants to move, and that helped me find more peace and embodying abundance and knowing how scarcity is impacting my decisions, my behaviors, and so on.

SPEAKER_01 2:54

Yeah, for me, abundance is not necessarily money or even related to money in a way. It's feeling like you're okay and you have enough coming in and coming and going. And that definitely is a mindset, like 100%. It's completely a mindset. For example, I do branding for small businesses, right? My neighbor does small branding for small businesses. And instead of viewing her, this is not true, but it's okay. Um, instead of viewing her as competition, it's being able to maybe partner with her in a way. What she offers is something different than what I offer, even though we generally speaking do the same thing. It's the same thing with let's just say a photographer, right? There's bazillion photographers around where I live. But a food photographer is 180% different than a portrait photographer, let's say. And so it's almost like being able to like join forces or partner or feel like they're not competition, but that abundance is in the market and it's it's comforting. When you change your mindset to feel that instead of scarcity, it opens up a complete new world. Like I've experienced this in the past like couple of years of me being my own small business owner. Instead of feeling like, oh my gosh, they're gonna butt heads with me. It's like, no, they don't, they're not gonna butt heads because they're not me and they're not offering the same exact things that I do. So that's kind of like my overarching abundance theme, I would say.

SPEAKER_00 4:53

That's all money is. So anything we attach to it is just a story. And I agree though that scarcity mindset can be things other than money, right? It's including, and just like Monique said, abundance. She sees abundance is not just money. So the example I would give to that, where I think people struggle the most in viewing this way, is time. I don't have enough time. I'm so stressed out. I got too much to do. And so that's a really beautiful way because I think when people think of scarcity, they they go to the money place and it's completely valid and it's totally true. But it's also true that it is in other areas. And you can also bring abundance in other areas. One thing that can be perceived wrongly in with abundance is that it is toxic positivity. That viewpoint is is quite out there, and I think it is so inaccurate because I see abundance as it's a strategic decision making. Because you look at when you're looking at abundance and you're looking at as, you know, how you view, let's just talk about in a marketing sense, right? If I look at my marketing as a scarcity, that means I'm putting desperation into my marketing. That means I'm actually getting away from my branding voice. But if I'm thinking like abundantly, like, oh my gosh, there is so much out there for me to tap into to Monique's point about like her neighbor. There, it's it's not about, it's not about competition, it's about community and collaboration. That's an abundant way of thinking. But if we looked at our marketing in an abundant way, you are gonna be more true to your brand voice and how you want to show up. You're not gonna accept the clients that you would never accept if you were in an abundant mindset, right? You're going to being in abundant mindset with your marketing, you're gonna be like, I am so niching down in these markets. These are the people I want to work with. Like, you are making much better strategic decision. Anything come up for you, ladies?

SPEAKER_01 6:58

I immediately thought of being reactive versus being proactive. To me, you're brainstorming on, you know, let's just say social media strategy coming up. And all of a sudden, someone points to something that you wrote and you're frantically trying to like backpedal or whatever. That to me is being completely reactive as opposed to moving forward and like sort of forging your own path for the future and just being proactive about like new ideas you might have. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_02 7:34

That does make sense because to me, that's operating from an emotional place, not a grounded place, which makes sense because when we feel scarcity, because I felt it with time, money, even opportunity. If you're truly abundant, you can let stuff go. And I think when you're in that scarcity place, you tend to avoid things like the plague, or you cling to it so hard because you're afraid it's not gonna come back. And I have lived both those lives and I even still navigate it now, and it's exhausting being in scarcity. Like I just think sometimes I'm like that energy I put into avoiding that thing, clinging to that thing could have been used as something that's actually more productive. And when I say productive, I don't mean necessarily like marketing, but like meditating, going on a walk, like doing things to actually regulate and ground myself in it because we are human beings and being a business owner is a part of us. So I always want to ensure whether it's talking to myself or a client that it's okay to have those human experiences and you are able to pause what you're doing or push something so that you can allow it to move through you rather than it getting stuck in you. Cause let me tell you, the body will keep the store. She has those receipts and those emotions, that's whatever, are gonna come back 10 times worse than if you just allow yourself to go through it and then you'll be able to see the other side so much clearer.

SPEAKER_00 8:59

Love everything you guys are saying, and I am so wanting to touch because I feel like what you're saying and what we said up to this point, once again, not just about money. Time is sticking out to me because I think time is where surprisingly scarcity probably shows up the most. And even in like a marketing sense and an operation sense, we are like you said, Sarah, cheating ourselves in those moments of that we're spending time. Because I think of like administration, and I don't, and I that's why I don't do it, right? But the moments that as an owner, I should, you know, dive in there and just the the part of it that I like as a CEO, I could spend so much more time in there. But that's not just a money thing, that is a time thing. Like I'm investing my time in. So when you think of like the things that you love the most, you will invest the most time in. But I think that it also can function as an abundance versus scarcity in how you're viewing time. One thing with time is that it is a story that we tell ourselves. I don't have time. I don't have time for that. I'm under pressure. And anytime I've told myself that story, I I course correct. And you end up being like, wow, that was really a lie. Yeah. Because it's how you're viewing things. So it's time we operate it from a scarcity, we're missing opportunities. When we are pubert to viewing it from an abundance, we're creating opportunity.

SPEAKER_01 10:35

Yep. So good. 100% true. I feel like with the time theme in the abundance mindset, prioritize, and I know we've talked about this on other podcasts, but prioritizing the things that are important in your life and staying true to that is like you're you're building your calendar instead of looking at your calendar, seeing a thousand things, and then trying to scrape some stuff away. It's like you're creating your calendar. And in doing that, you're prioritizing what is like most important to you. I know I always talk from a mom perspective, but I find that when my kids need something, it's like they're or my husband, of course, or my cats, my family. If my family needs something and it's like urgent, you better believe that's gonna take precedent over me spending an extra hour on a logo or something. I'll find another time to like continue my work on the logo. And so it's just being smart about how you use your time and then also I think prioritizing what is important in your life and to you that kind of like builds your your calendar.

SPEAKER_02 11:46

I do kind of want to point this in a different direction too, just because all of this is accurate and it's very business focused. Obviously, that's what the podcast is about. However, these thoughts or behaviors are going to be everywhere else. Like the way you buy stuff at the grocery store is going to then influence how you invest in your business or even how you sell. If you're like, why aren't I married yet? Why isn't this happening? That same rushing is going to be in like, why haven't they responded to me yet? What am I doing wrong? That sense of franticness is going to show up everywhere. And once you can kind of take a step back to observe it, you're able to catch it quicker and also to be like, girl, you don't even believe that. Like that's just my automatic thinking. That's just my ego or whatever you want to label it. And then come back to what are your values? What are you working towards? Because I also sometimes feel scarcity can creep up when we're thinking very short term. And I feel like as business owners, it is, yes, you can have those short-term like wins, like what you want to do in a month or whatever, but it's really a longer game you're playing at. And we have the beauty of something we plant a seed now in could bring in revenue three months from now. Or say something happens in our schedule to where we have to move things around. Well, we have the freedom of time. I can just work on Sunday if I need to take Thursday off because my family needs me. It is reminding ourselves like why we even started our businesses and went to entrepreneurship because it isn't for the faint of heart. And it stems from why are we blocking the freedom that we want so badly?

SPEAKER_00 13:20

Yes. And I getting back into this kind of being an overall conversation, be it a money conversation, be it a time conversation, let's go to like the money is an example. It is a reframing of I can't afford it to how can I afford it? I say that with a disclaimer. And the disclaimer is that from a business perspective, but I think that you can pull this into your life as a whole. And by the way, Sarah, so brilliant because anything that shows up in our business is already everywhere else in our lives. So I do want to note on that before I jump into this, which is um viewing things as an investment. So is it like, are you investing in something or is it just like in an asset, something that is actually not going to create value, basically? So when we view it through the lens of, and Sarah, you're I feel like you're pointing to this of like something that like you're not going to see an immediate result out of it, but there is a long term, and that's what I deem is like an investment. So branding, marketing, operations, all those things you're investing in, and there are long games. There's short version games of it, but then there's the long game versions of it. I think that when you're when you pull things through that lens, I think they can really help you train your brain not to go to scarcity. Because if you say you don't want to invest in a brand for your business, for example, there are there are there are consequences to your brand maybe being janky until you have a professional help you out. I can say that with love, but it is true. There are there are concessions you are making by making those decisions. When you are able to view things through the lens of, okay, this is a this is an investment for a long-term impact, you know, but then it's also recognizing that things of this chair would be cool to have in my office. Well, that's just an expense that's not, yeah, your butt might be a lot more comfortable, but that's not an expense for the long term. So I think that not only does can that lens help us in the scarcity versus abundance mindset, it also can help us just make more strategic decisions in our business and in our lives. Because we can get very impulsive about things too. And I would say our tendency to be impulsivity can also promote that scarcity to like come up and go, oh gosh, I got that credit card bill. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 15:51

Yes. I want to say something about the chair because this is a perfect example of is the chair just like cute and will look pretty in my office? Or is the chair it may cost more because my back is killing me by sitting all day on an awful chair. And like that's the difference between just making an investment in something that might just be superficial versus actually like affecting your body and how you feel throughout the day. I bring this up because I went through the same exact thing. I, for years, I would sit on like a terrible chair and my back was killing me, and I was like, uh. And then I, my husband got a fancy chair, and he was like, oh my, this chair is amazing. And like, you know, I feel good, like I don't, I my back doesn't hurt, whatever. And so I it was time for me to do the same. And it really did change how I was feeling like throughout the day. So I think that's like a perfect sort of analogy between something that's like a long-term sort of investment in your own health per se, versus just something that's like superficial, you know.

SPEAKER_00 17:02

It was definitely pointing to the bougie attitude. Check out our girl boss episode because that that era of girl bossing caused a lot of those bougie decisions for having the Instagram aesthetic kind of thing versus like, is it a long term? Totally agree. That is a long-term investment in your body's health for sure.

SPEAKER_02 17:24

I also feel like what can help someone navigate this, like when making decisions, because I do feel like it can be hard to be decisive if you have those thoughts going through your brain or like you're feeling tense, frantic, any type of emotion that's making you unclear is giving yourself permission to pause. Pause before you buy it, pause before you do the proposal, pause before you do an Instagram post. Like allowing yourself to pause is what's gonna help you notice these tendencies before you make a decision or do an action that you're like, why the hell did I say yes to this? Like now you're like zenful of it. Because that also calls back in an energy to you as well. So, and as someone, I like to say a recovered type A overachiever person, that slowing down is the most annoying piece of advice you can hear. However, it is so crucial because when you're able to slow down, you're able to be more intentional, which means you're able to discern why am I doing this right now? Like, do I actually want to do this? Because that will save you a lot of headache later on.

SPEAKER_01 18:32

Yep. I wanted to chime in quick because I relate to that on a thousand levels. I used to get an email from a client or something, like they need something. And I'm like, okay, I'm gonna do this like right away. And then I realize, wait a minute, I'm now giving them permission to ask. I mean, of course, my clients can ask me for things, but I also am not at their beck and call, right? And so for me, it's like, let's think about how I want to respond. And then sometimes I do the item right away, but I schedule the email to go out in like a day or two so that it's not in my mind anymore, but it's also not responding so quickly for them. I don't want to set a precedent that I'm like 24 hours a day, I'm available because I'm not. It's reality. But um, I just I love that, Sarah, so much. I can really relate to that.

SPEAKER_00 19:24

Yeah, and I think we do train people on how to treat us for sure. You so the shift changes everything and a few shifts I'm hearing here. Sarah, you inserted the pause. And I think that they're one thing I offer my clients, um my coaching clients, is to ask themselves, where am I choosing from in this moment? And that tends to be a very powerful question for for people to kind of bring, put in their back pocket for those moments. I think awareness comes first though. Like I pointed to earlier, we can get stuck in the I'm being practical when we're in scarcity. We can convince ourselves of many things. So pause is always a powerful thing, not just in this conversation, but just in general. It is good to pause, recheck. We mentioned the reframing of I can't afford it to how can I afford it? Now that's only if you've discerned if it is a long-term investment. And then the other thing is building a buffer into your business so that you're not constantly in survival mode because when we are operating from this brain back here, we will be more likely to be in a survival mode, which in turn creates a scarcity mindset. So the more that we can be in our executive thinking, we can actually connect to a lot of the things that we're we're uh talking about here. So I would like to smack us with a big truth. We can't build an abundant business from a scarcity mindset, but you also can't just think abundantly when your systems are held together with duct tape and hope. Both have to shift together. And I think that we've successfully been balancing both of those sides of that conversation. And I am going to put us into last sips mode after I deliver a quote to just keep in mind that I want to leave you with. Your brand cannot sound confident if you're operating from fear.

SPEAKER_02 21:19

And with that, last sips. The biggest thing I hope you take away is that there is nothing wrong with you with having scarcity thoughts. It is part of being human. It's about acknowledging it and being like, you know what? This doesn't serve me anymore. It might have served you for a period of time, but now you want to do something else because it's blocking your blessings. It's blocking you from moving forward and just allowing yourself to have those pauses to discern where are these thoughts coming from? Do I believe in this? Because then it'll make it so much easier, as she all said, to begin reframing, to begin shifting your actions, and you will reap the rewards of it, whether it's the following day or even three years from now. Just remember it's a long game. You're human and always give yourself grace.