How To Ditch Your Poverty Mindset (Even When It’s Not Always Obvious)

You probably aren’t thinking of yourself as carrying around a poverty mindset.

But try answering this question: what did you tell yourself the last time you made—or chose not to make—an investment in your future?

Did you say, “I know this expense is the right thing to do to build my business and my audience”?

Or did you say, “Yes, this would be a good thing to do but I just can’t afford it” and then let it drop?

Nothing wrong with trying to find a cheaper way to make it happen—bootstrapping is a time-honored tradition for a reason.

But walking away from something you know in your gut is necessary to make your vision a reality isn’t bootstrapping. It’s a poverty mentality.

Or maybe you’re making the right financial investments in your business, but you haven’t quite embraced the fine art of saying no to bad-fit clients.

That’s a—much less obvious—form of poverty mindset. Unchecked, you’ll start building a client base that looks nothing like the ideal people you serve best.

I see this more often than you might expect in mission-driven consultants and executive coaches.

We get comfortable serving a certain kind of client a certain kind of way. And before we know it, we’re on a hamster wheel.

Sound familiar?

So here’s how to get off: test your assumptions.

Think $15,000 is all you’ll get for your typical assessment project? Try pricing it at $25,000 and see what happens. If there’s no pushback from that client, try upping it to $35,000 for the next.

And in case you’re thinking that’s an impossible example…I challenged a client to do just that and in two weeks he put an extra $30K in his pocket. He moved his pricing from $15,000 to $25,000 to $35,000, without a single complaint—now he’ll test $45,000 on his next client.

We all carry around some form of poverty mindset in our lives. The trick when it comes to your business is to bring it into the light, test it and push through any self-imposed limits on your thinking.

Not only will you attract terrific clients and buyers who deeply value the transformations you deliver—but they’ll be happy to pay for them.

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