The Mindset That Decides Whether You're Desirable

Picture yourself in a car. You want to go somewhere, so you press the accelerator all the way down. At the same time, your other foot is pressed all the way down on the brake. And just to make sure, you've also got the emergency brake pulled up as far as it goes.

You are trying to get somewhere. You are also doing everything in your power to make sure you don't move.

The ride is jerky. Every bit of progress feels like it costs you twice what it should. And when you finally do lurch forward, something immediately drags you back down. It's exhausting, and the exhausting part isn't the road. It's you. You are working against yourself the entire time.

Most people are driving through their whole life exactly like this. It shows up in money, in relationships, in health, in creativity, in every direction a person tries to move. And the instinct almost everyone has is to push the accelerator down harder. I need my partner to be better. I need more money. I need more time. I need some circumstance in my life to change, and then I'll be able to go somewhere.

That instinct is the problem. The problem was never the accelerator. The problem is riding the brake through your entire life.

I've spent close to a decade building my marriage into something that stays close, loving, and sexually alive over the long haul, not just holding together, but actually deepening. Dawn and I have been together seventeen years now, married for fifteen. And underneath almost everything I've learned about how a relationship stays alive instead of going flat, this is the pattern sitting at the bottom of it. So before I can talk to you about what any of this does to a relationship, which is coming next week, I need you to understand what this actually is, because most people have this concept completely backwards.

Abundance Isn't About Money

When people hear the word abundance, they think about their bank account. Money or no money. And I want to blow that idea open, because it is far too small a container for what's actually happening.

Abundance and scarcity are not financial categories. They are the lens your entire nervous system looks through before you make a single decision. So here is where I want you to start, and I want you to actually sit with it rather than skim past it.

Abundance is not about money. Abundance is about trust.

Abundance is the trust that there is enough. That there's more where that came from. That life is fundamentally on your side, that you're going to be okay, that things are going to work out, and that you don't have to fight your way into getting what's yours.

Scarcity is the opposite belief. It's the conviction that everything is zero sum, that there is a limited supply of money, time, love, attention, and joy, and that someone else having more of it means there's less available for you. Scarcity is the belief that whatever feels good has to be gripped, because if you let go, it's gone for good.

Neither of these is a personality trait, even though they get worn like one. They're learned. Somewhere back with limited information, you made a decision. Things are going to work out, or they're not. I'm going to be okay, or I'm not. I'll find love, or I won't. Those were conclusions a much younger version of you reached, and most of us reached them honestly, because a brain that defaults to avoiding fear and pain is a completely normal human brain. There's nothing wrong with you for having landed somewhere on this spectrum. But you can feel where you actually are, and once you can feel it, you'll start noticing it everywhere. In your money, your time, your body, your relationships, your sex life. All of it.

What Abundance Actually Feels Like

Go back to the car. Now imagine you take your foot off the brake and release the emergency brake. The car moves with almost no effort. You don't need to grind. You don't need to grip the wheel like the road might disappear under you. You can just drive, because the roads are everywhere and you're no longer fighting the one machine that was supposed to be taking you somewhere.

That's the core of what abundance feels like. You're moving with the current of life instead of trying to force life into the shape you've decided it needs to be. Life has a direction it's already moving in. The way things are is the way things are, whether you approve of it or not, and your resistance to that fact is exactly where your foot ends up back on the brake.

An abundant life allows good things to happen. It also allows the things that feel bad to happen, without immediately trying to fix, explain, or escape them. It's a trust that you're going to be okay regardless of which one shows up, and a willingness to let go of the story about how everything has to be, in favor of what actually is.

Let me give you something real, from a few days before I wrote this. For no reason I could identify, a kind of low, heavy cloud settled over me on a Monday evening and stayed through Wednesday. I felt off. A little sad. Not myself. An older version of me would have gone hunting for the cause immediately, replaying Monday looking for the thing that triggered it, trying to think my way back to solid ground. That hunting is what a lack of trust looks like in real time.

Instead, I let it be there. I didn't force myself out of it, rationalize it, or shove it down and perform being fine. I told myself, more than once, that if there was something this was meant to show me, I'd find it when I was meant to find it, and that going looking for it right now would only turn up nothing. I let Dawn know I was off, plainly and briefly, without unloading it onto her and without hiding it from her either. There's a difference between a man dumping his unprocessed feelings on his partner and a man simply telling the truth about where he's at. I did the second one. And there was a part of her that got a little uncomfortable as it stretched from one night into the next, which I let her have, because managing her discomfort for her isn't my job and it isn't love, it's control wearing a nicer outfit.

By this morning the cloud was gone. I went out for a fifteen mile bike ride that kicked my ass, and I felt like myself again. Nothing was wrong with me during those three days, and nothing needed to be solved. That's what trust actually looks like from the inside. Not the absence of hard feelings, but the absence of the panic that usually follows them.

And one clarification, because this idea gets abused constantly by people looking for an excuse. Abundance is not naivety. It's not pretending bad things can't happen, and it's not a belief that you're guaranteed to be a billionaire or that nobody ever goes bankrupt. It's the trust that whatever happens, you're going to be okay, you're going to have enough, and you're going to be taken care of. That trust is very hard to access while your foot is still on the brake. The only way to find out if it's true is to take your foot off it.

What Scarcity Actually Feels Like

Scarcity is the other pedal, and I want to be honest about where I still find it in myself, because it would be dishonest to write this as though I've transcended it and only observe it in other people.

Dawn and I are polar opposites here, and it's been one of the deepest points of friction in our marriage. My instinct, most of the time, is let's go. Let's try it. Figure it out as we go. Her instinct, more often, is hold on, wait, what about, what if. For years I read that as her holding me back, and for years she probably read my forward motion as reckless. Neither reading was fully fair, and neither of us built that instinct on purpose. Hers came from a life that taught her, long before she could have argued with it, that her own instincts couldn't be trusted and that the ground could disappear if she wasn't watching for it. Mine came from somewhere else, but it came from somewhere too. Nobody arrives at either pedal by accident.

The felt experience of scarcity is gripping. Forcing. Grinding. The belief, underneath everything, that there isn't enough, so you'd better hold on tight to what you've got before it disappears. It's the clingy partner who is so afraid of losing someone that they suffocate them, and eventually the very thing they were gripping so hard slips out of their hands, because a hand gripped that tight has no room left for anyone else's hand to fit into it. It's the person so focused on protecting their money that they walk past opportunities for joy, for connection, for the exact life the money was supposed to buy them in the first place.

I watched this up close early in my career. A man I worked with had built a genuinely impressive business. Big house, nice cars, real success by every visible measure. And his marriages kept ending, two of them, and his relationship with his kids never became anything more functional than him being the person who paid for things. He was riding the brake his entire life, and money was simply the one pedal he'd convinced himself was the accelerator.

That's the trap of scarcity. You can absolutely make progress from inside it. But you are always fighting your own resistance while you do it, and scarcity has a way of becoming a self fulfilling prophecy. You spend so much energy bracing against the thing you're afraid of that you end up creating exactly that thing, because bracing is not the same as building. None of this makes scarcity a character flaw. It's what a nervous system trying to survive does, and it's a completely natural response to fear. But it's also something you can see clearly enough, once you know what you're looking at, to start choosing differently.

Why Everyone Thinks This Is About Money, and Why It Isn't

Here's the part people get backwards more than any other. When someone hears "abundant mindset," they picture net worth. Income. Assets. But some of the most abundant people I have ever known were never particularly focused on accumulating money, even though their mindset would have made doing so relatively easy for them.

That should be a strange fact if abundance is really about money. If someone has fully tapped into the belief that there's always enough, always more, and they're always going to be okay, why wouldn't they aim that energy at building the biggest bank account possible? The honest answer is that the people with the most money are frequently not the most abundant people anywhere else in their lives. Peace, sacrificed. Joy, sacrificed. Freedom, sacrificed, all of it laid on an altar in exchange for a number that keeps climbing. I think about something Alex Hormozi once said in an interview, describing how he'd essentially given up on happiness and chosen to grind for money instead, because money felt controllable in a way happiness never did. That is not a man describing abundance. That's a man describing the most sophisticated version of scarcity there is, dressed up in a private jet.

Real abundance is the felt sense that there is enough, that you're okay, and that you're going to continue being okay. And that felt sense is exactly what allows someone to release their grip on money rather than chase it. If you're currently living paycheck to paycheck, this will sound insane, and I understand why. But notice the assumption sitting underneath the fear. There's not going to be enough. I'm going to run out. That assumption is scarcity's whole argument, and it's the argument abundance quietly refuses to accept.

Money is not abundance. Money is something you receive in exchange for value you've given, held temporarily so it can later be exchanged for something else. The energy behind it, the calm, the generosity, the freedom to give and receive without gripping, that's where abundance and scarcity actually live. Fear, stress, and constant tension drain the very energy a person needs to create value in the first place, which is part of why gripping tighter almost never produces more money. It produces less.

The most abundant people I know are generous. They're grateful. They give for the pleasure of giving rather than the obligation of it, and they plug into a flow that's already moving instead of trying to protect a pool they're convinced is shrinking. None of this means you shouldn't save or plan for your future. It means the saving can come from a light, trusting place instead of a fearful, gripping one, and that difference changes almost everything about how it feels to build a life.

Where This Shows Up

Once you can feel the difference between these two states, you'll start finding this pattern everywhere, not just in money.

Time. Scarcity feels like there's never enough of it, like you're always behind, always racing a clock that's actively working against you. Any request on your time lands as a threat. Abundance is the trust that you have exactly as much time as everyone else does, that what matters will get the time it needs, and that you are not in a competition against the clock.

Capacity. Scarcity says I don't have the bandwidth, everything is too much, I'm already tapped out. Abundance is the trust that your capacity expands to meet what you're actually willing to hold, and that energy spent bracing against a feeling is energy that isn't available to actually feel it.

Trust. People who say they have trust issues are describing a scarcity mindset, the belief that people generally aren't trustworthy. That belief tends to create the exact evidence it's afraid of, because someone who senses they won't be trusted no matter what they do will often stop telling the truth, which then confirms the original belief. Abundance is the willingness to extend trust and, if it isn't honored, to withdraw it afterward, rather than withholding it up front as a form of protection that never actually protects anyone.

Your body and health. Scarcity sounds like I have to earn the right to rest, or I need to eat as much as I can while it's available, in case it isn't later. It can also show up as constant self scanning for symptoms, a kind of vigilance that can eventually manufacture the very illness it was trying to catch. Abundance is trusting that your body is already working to take care of itself, and a body that isn't being treated like a threat generally stops fighting back.

Creativity. Writer's block is often scarcity wearing a work problem's clothes, the pressure to create something because there might not be another idea coming. What gets made under that pressure rarely has the life in it that something made freely does. Abundance trusts that more ideas are always available, so this one doesn't have to be perfect, hoarded, or forced.

Other people's success. Scarcity experiences someone else's win as a loss for you, a quiet subtraction from whatever's left for your own life. Abundance can actually celebrate someone else's abundance, because it was never coming out of your share to begin with.

None of this is meant to be a checklist you have to master. It's meant to help you start recognizing a single pattern showing up in a dozen different rooms of your life. Are you open, or are you afraid. Are you trusting, or are you gripping. Are you letting reality be what it already is, or are you spending your energy arguing with it.

Taking Your Foot Off the Brake

Taking your foot off the brake isn't recklessness. It's the opposite of it. It's what allows you to actually steer, to go with the current you're already floating in instead of trying to paddle upstream against it. That's where the things you actually want become available, and it was never going to happen through more gripping or more effort. It happens through less resistance.

Neville Goddard taught something in this neighborhood decades ago, the idea of living with the expectation that you'll always receive what you need from a supply that never runs out. That's the feeling underneath everything I've described here, whether or not you ever put it in those words.

So one more time, because it's worth landing before we move forward. Abundance isn't about money. Abundance is about trust.

Next Monday, I'm taking this exact pattern into relationship specifically. What scarcity does to a man's ability to lead, and why it quietly kills desire. What it does to a woman's ability to feel free enough to open. Why this mindset, more than almost anything else, is the difference between being magnetic and being invisible to the person you love. That's coming next week.

This post is the companion to Part 1 of a two part podcast series on abundance versus scarcity. You can listen to the full episode here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube

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