How to Develop an Abundance Mindset: 8 Shifts to Create Wealth and Freedom

What does abundance mean to you?

Is it having more money?

More time?

Greater freedom?

Or is it having the confidence, resources and personal power to create your life on your terms? 💃

During a recent Facebook Live, Shane explored an idea he calls intentional affluence. I loved this conversation because it challenged the traditional definition of wealth and brought it back to something much more personal.

What I pulled away from the conversation is that affluence is not simply about how much money you have in the bank.

It is about wherewithal.

It is having the financial resources, time freedom, confidence and ability to make choices based on what you genuinely want, rather than always being limited by what you can afford or what other people expect of you.

That is what an abundance mindset looks like in practice.

It is not wishful thinking. It is not pretending that challenges do not exist. And it certainly is not sitting back and waiting for something wonderful to fall into your lap.

Learning how to develop an abundance mindset means becoming conscious of the thoughts, language and emotional patterns directing your life. It means reclaiming your ability to respond, create and move forward, even when your circumstances give you every reason not to.

Key Takeaways

• Affluence is about more than money. It is having the freedom and wherewithal to create life on your terms.

• Your language reveals the deeper beliefs and intentions influencing your results.

• Personal agency means retaining responsibility and responding creatively instead of simply reacting to circumstances.

• Struggle can become an identity, even when you consciously believe you are trying to succeed.

• Real freedom often requires trading approval and short-term comfort for purposeful action and long-term progress.

  
  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv8OGCJ5cDA

What Is an Abundance Mindset?

An abundance mindset is the belief that possibilities, resources and opportunities are available to you, even when you cannot yet see exactly how everything will unfold.

It does not mean believing that life will always be easy.

It means refusing to treat your present circumstances as the final authority on what is possible for your future.

A scarcity mindset focuses on what is missing:

• There is never enough money.

• There is never enough time.

• Other people have all the opportunities.

• The economy is against me.

• Nothing ever works for me.

• If somebody else succeeds, there must be less available for me.

An abundance mindset asks a different set of questions:

• What can I create from here?

• What resources are already available to me?

• What can I learn?

• Who could I learn from?

• What action can I take next?

• What opportunity might be hidden inside this situation?

That shift does not instantly change every circumstance. What it changes is the state from which you meet those circumstances.

And that changes everything.

Affluence Is a State of Mind Before It Is a Bank Balance

When Shane used the word “affluence,” he was not talking only about becoming rich.

To quote Shane:

“Affluence is wherewithal.”

That distinction really landed with me.

Not everybody wants or needs millions and millions of dollars. One person’s ideal lifestyle is not more important than another’s simply because it costs more.

The real question is:

What are you here to create, and what resources will that life require?

For some people, abundance might mean a simple life with time for family, good health and meaningful work.

For someone else, it might mean building a global business, travelling extensively, contributing to important causes and creating extraordinary experiences with the people they love.

Neither vision is inherently better.

What matters is whether you have consciously chosen your life or simply accepted the life your current circumstances appeared to permit.

To me, abundance feels like relaxed confidence.

It is knowing that you can work hard without making hardship your identity. It is building something that energises you instead of spending your entire life in work that drains you.

Money is usually a by-product of providing value. The more value you can provide, and the more effectively you can scale that value, the greater your ability to generate wealth.

We live in an incredible time for doing this. Technology allows one person to share knowledge, ideas and services with people all over the world. AI is making that even more accessible.

But the tool itself is not enough.

A person can have access to extraordinary technology and still remain psychologically committed to struggling.

That is why developing an abundance mindset begins on the inside.

Prosperity Of Life founder Shane Krider shares his insights on developing an abundance mindset, moving beyond scarcity and creating greater wealth, freedom and personal agency.

Your Language Reveals Your True Intention

One of the strongest things I pulled away from Shane’s conversation was the importance of language.

Listen closely to the words you use when you talk about your life:

• “Nothing ever goes right for me.”

• “I am trying as hard as I can, but nothing works.”

• “Everything is against me.”

• “The economy is the reason I cannot get ahead.”

• “I have bad genes, so this is just how it is.”

• “People like me never get opportunities like that.”

There may be elements of truth in some of these statements.

Life is not always fair. People experience setbacks, loss, betrayal, poor timing and genuinely difficult circumstances. Acknowledging your power does not require denying reality.

But your language reveals the context from which you are operating.

If your underlying context is “nothing ever works for me,” you will approach opportunities expecting them to fail.

You may still take action. You might work incredibly hard. You might tell yourself and everyone around you that you desperately want a different result.

But underneath all that activity, you may be unconsciously gathering more evidence that struggle is inevitable.

Your mind is very good at proving what you have already concluded to be true.

The same principle applies to your imagination. Your imagination is constantly creating pictures of what might happen next, but those pictures can be expansive or limiting.

If you repeatedly imagine rejection, failure and worst-case scenarios, you begin making decisions from fear before anything has even happened.

I explore this more deeply in What Does Your Imagination Look Like?, because learning to consciously direct your imagination is one of the most powerful ways to move from limitation into possibility.

Once you decide that the world is unfair, success is futile or circumstances are in charge, that conclusion becomes the end of the story unless you become willing to question it.

That is why language is such a powerful looking glass.

It gives you the opportunity to catch the conclusion before it controls your life.

Choose Words That Support Your Purpose

This is not about repeating lovely affirmations while ignoring your behaviour.

It is about becoming conscious of the beliefs underneath your words.

Choose an idea that genuinely resonates with you and examine it.

What images does it create?

How does it make you feel?

What kind of behaviour does it call you into?

Does it align with your values, your goals and the person you want to become?

For Shane, “affluence” created an image of abundance without struggle.

It became a mental and emotional reference point. It was a reminder that he could work hard and pursue meaningful goals without making hardship central to his identity.

This connects with one of the core ideas taught in one of our popular programs Praxis: the integration of belief and behaviour.

Your words communicate what you believe. Your behaviour reveals whether you are actually living it.

The goal is not to sound more positive.

The goal is to become congruent.

Are You Successfully Struggling?

This was one of my favourite distinctions from the conversation.

Shane described a strange game people can unconsciously play: the game of struggling.

When you are playing that game, winning does not necessarily mean creating the result you want.

Winning means not quitting.

It means proving how hard you are working.

It means showing how much pressure you can withstand and how many disappointments you can survive.

You can be busy, committed and taking genuine action while still being psychologically attached to the role of the struggler.

The problem is that if you genuinely succeeded, the game would end.

The struggle would no longer be necessary, and you would lose the identity and emotional reward that came from being the person who always battled through.

This can help explain why people sometimes build momentum and then plateau or move backwards.

It is not always because they lack talent or opportunity. The struggle itself may have become familiar. Their emotions, beliefs, circumstances and past evidence all fit within that model.

Familiar can feel safe, even when it is making us miserable.

But familiar is not the same as productive.

A powerful question to ask yourself is:

What if I stopped trying to win at struggling and started trying to create the result?

That question may be uncomfortable.

It might reveal that you have been measuring your commitment by the amount of hardship you can tolerate rather than the progress you are creating.

There is no prize for making success more difficult than it needs to be.

Stop Trying to Convince Everyone

Shane shared a personal example from his early days as an independent distributor.

He had been taught not to sell, convince or explain. The instruction was to sort, not sell.

In other words, his role was to identify the people for whom the opportunity was genuinely a fit, rather than trying to force everyone into saying yes.

However, beneath the surface, Shane still believed it was his job to convince people.

He was generating leads, having conversations and putting in the effort, but very little was moving. He was frustrated and preparing to call his mentor to complain.

Then he stopped and asked himself:

“What is he going to say?”

The answer was obvious.

His mentor would tell him to look at the attitude and intention he was bringing into those conversations.

Shane realised he did not need to make the call. He could have that conversation with himself.

He decided to try building the business without convincing anybody.

And that decision triggered an immediate emotional response.

The idea felt almost absurd because, somewhere along the way, he had formed the conclusion that succeeding in business meant convincing people.

When he challenged that conclusion, all the emotion connected to the original decision came rushing back.

That can happen when we question a deeply held belief.

The emotion attached to the moment we formed it can return as though it is happening all over again. But when we allow that energy to move, we create space to choose something new.

Shane’s next call was completely different.

The business began moving immediately. It was not a slow, gradual change. To hear him describe it, it was as though someone had flipped a switch.

The external activity was similar.

The internal game had completely changed.

That is a brilliant example of how to shift from scarcity to abundance.

Scarcity says:

“I need this person to say yes because there may not be another opportunity.”

Abundance says:

“My job is to discover whether there is a genuine fit. I do not need to convince anyone.”

The difference can be felt in your energy, your language and the quality of the conversation.

Personal Agency Is Central to Abundance

If you want to understand how to develop an abundance mindset, you need to understand agency.

Agency is your ability to act.

It is being self-motivated, self-disciplined and directed by your own purpose rather than being pushed around by every opinion, event or circumstance.

It means choosing your target based on your values, aspirations and intuition.

It means refusing to set the ceiling of your life according to what your parents achieved, what your friends consider normal or what appears reasonable within your current environment.

Shane also offered a useful way of looking at responsibility:

Responsibility is your ability to respond.

Not merely react.

Respond.

There will always be forces inviting you to hand that ability away.

You can hand responsibility to the economy, your upbringing, your genes, the news, experts, circumstances, a past mistake or the limited expectations of people around you.

Those factors may be real.

Genes affect people differently. Economies change. Crises happen. People make decisions that affect us.

But none of those things automatically requires you to surrender your ability to respond.

An abundance mindset is not the belief that you control everything.

It is the understanding that you retain the power to choose your response, direct your attention and take the next available action.

Success Is Not Simply an Odds Game

Since the late 1990s, there has been no shortage of reasons to believe that success was becoming impossible.

We have lived through Y2K fears, the dot-com crash, September 11, the 2008 financial crisis, COVID and many other periods of instability.

Each event had a genuine impact on business.

During COVID, our live-event business could not simply continue operating in the usual way. Live events were not possible, and nobody knew exactly when they would return.

A different response was required.

We shifted to virtual events.

At the time, we did not have every answer. We simply knew that sitting still and agreeing that nothing could be done was not an option.

Those years became record years for us at that point.

Meanwhile, other people in the same industry went out of business because they accepted the prevailing story that success was impossible under those conditions.

I do not share that to suggest every difficult situation is easy.

It is not.

I share it because there are almost always more available choices than we can see during the first emotional reaction.

As Shane said, you can take an enormous number of actions each day to tilt the scales in your favour.

Find someone who has created the result you want.

Find a business model you can access.

Learn what works.

Model the fundamentals.

Make adjustments.

Keep moving.

There is no additional prize for reinventing the wheel when someone can show you a proven route.

Success begins to look less like an odds game when you keep stacking the deck through your choices and actions.

Respond Instead of Reacting

When adversity appears, many people move immediately into anger, panic, outrage, despair or paralysis.

That is understandable. It is also rarely the best state from which to make an important decision.

When you are in fight-or-flight mode, it becomes harder to access higher reasoning, creativity, intuition and empathy.

Communication deteriorates.

Your focus narrows.

You begin acting from survival rather than purpose.

That is why the first responsibility in an emergency is to remain calm.

Nobody particularly enjoys hearing “remain calm” when something is going wrong, but it is still the job.

Your responsibility is to stay committed to your intention, not your reactability.

Shane used the example of driving from point A to point B.

Imagine that somebody cuts you off and you become furious.

Would you jump out of the driver’s seat, move into the passenger seat and allow the car to continue without anyone steering it because you were too upset to take control?

Of course not.

Yet that is effectively what people do when a challenge interrupts their goals.

One emotional reaction takes the wheel, and they stop directing their own life.

An abundance mindset keeps its hands on the wheel.

Take Control of Your Attention

One of the most useful practical lessons from Shane’s conversation was this:

“You take control of your intention by taking control of your attention.”

Where is your attention going each day?

Is it fixed on everything that could go wrong?

Is it consumed by other people’s fearful predictions?

Are you allowing an old disappointment, another person’s opinion or a conversation from three weeks ago to continue living rent-free in your mind?

Our thoughts occupy mental space, and not every thought deserves a permanent lease.

If this is something you struggle with, I have written more about how to stop people, fears and negative thoughts from living rent-free in your head.

Developing an abundance mindset requires you to become much more selective about what receives your attention.

Keep bringing your focus back to:

• The life you intend to create

• The value you can provide

• The resources already available to you

• Possible avenues for action

• The next practical move

• The advantages hidden within the obstacle

• The people from whom you can learn

  
  

Your internal state influences what you notice, how you communicate and the actions you take.

This is also where mindset connects with what many people describe as the Law of Vibration. Your thoughts, emotions and actions create an energy that either supports your intention or works against it.

For me, the practical takeaway is simple: it is difficult to create an abundant life while spending every day emotionally tuned into fear, defeat and scarcity.

There may still be tension when you are pursuing something important.

The question is whether that tension becomes constructive or destructive.

You can turn the energy of a challenge into action, creativity and greater focus.

Or you can let it pull you into fear and emotional reaction.

Professionals do not waste weeks beating themselves up because something went wrong.

They assess the situation, reframe it, identify their advantages and determine the next move.

Better still, they find a way to make the obstacle itself the reason for the next wave of success.

Be Disagreeable With Limiting Circumstances

One of the most powerful traits you can develop is the ability to disagree with your circumstances.

That does not mean becoming hostile or refusing to listen to sound advice.

It means recognising that a perspective can be understandable, partially accurate and still not be the only possible interpretation.

If accepting someone else’s framework places you in fear, scarcity or paralysis, it may not be a useful framework for creating what you want.

You can understand why another person sees the world that way without adopting their emotional state or allowing their conclusion to become yours.

When everybody else is contracting, reducing their goals and abandoning the future they wanted, consider asking:

What might happen if I doubled down?

Not recklessly.

Not blindly.

Purposefully.

When life hands you lemons, make lemonade. But also take a closer look at the lemons.

Is the situation really the catastrophe your first emotional reaction claimed it was?

Does it require a practical or procedural response rather than an emotional one?

Could it contain an opportunity you have not yet noticed?

Sometimes the best move is to sleep on it and return in the morning with a clearer mind.

You may discover that the situation does not deserve the starring role you were about to give it.

Trade Approval for Freedom

Performative wealth is about appearing successful to other people.

It is buying, doing and pursuing things because they create approval, even if they do not move you closer to the life you genuinely want.

Approval can become a form of emotional regulation.

When other people agree with our choices, we feel safe. When they question us, we start doubting ourselves.

But if you organise your entire life around what other people approve of, you will probably build a life that makes sense to them rather than one that is right for you.

I understand that tension personally.

My own decision to leave the perceived security of employment and build something independently did not make sense to everyone around me. However, traditional employment had already shown me that even when you perform at a high level, your income and future can still be changed by decisions made above you.

That experience eventually led me to explore alternatives to the traditional corporate career and build a path that gave me greater autonomy over my time, income and direction.

Shane shared a similar experience.

When he first considered entrepreneurship, almost nobody around him thought it was a sensible idea.

The potential income sounded outlandish, particularly because he had left high school early.

At the time, Shane had a new car in Arizona with working air conditioning. That was significant to him. He had also moved into a house for the first time rather than living in an apartment.

He worried that if the business took time to work and he had to sell the car or give up the house, people would think he was an idiot.

That fear nearly stopped him.

Then he recognised something important.

The car was not the car he ultimately wanted.

The house was a meaningful step forward, but it was not the home he ultimately wanted either.

He became willing to trade a few things he somewhat wanted in the short term for the future he absolutely wanted.

To quote Shane:

“I traded approval for freedom.”

That is a powerful trade.

Are you gathering evidence that other people consider you sensible?

Or are you gathering evidence that you are building the life you genuinely want?

Become More Invested in Your Life Than Other People’s Stories

Before becoming an entrepreneur, Shane was working between 80 and 100 hours a week while also doing side jobs.

At night, he had a couple of hours to eat, switch off and watch his favourite television programs before going to bed and doing it all again.

Then he had a brutally honest thought.

Why was he more emotionally invested in fictional characters living fictional lives than he was in creating his own?

That question changed something.

Within nine months of becoming serious about entrepreneurship, Shane earned more in a single month than he had made during the entire previous year as an employee working enormous hours and taking on additional jobs.

He was working approximately four hours a day in the new venture.

The difference was not that he had discovered a magical shortcut.

He had changed the game.

He had stopped treating struggle as proof of commitment and started directing his energy towards creating a result.

You Are More Capable Than You Think

Shane shared an image during the conversation that has stayed with me:

“We are all like giants drowning in three feet of water.”

There is nothing holding the giants down, but they remain underwater because nobody else around them is sitting up.

All it takes is for one giant to sit up.

Then stand up.

Then help the other giants stand too.

So many people are emotionally stopped by every passing wave because they have accepted the passenger seat in their own lives.

A wave that knocks someone else over does not have to determine what happens to you.

This does not require denying difficulty or pretending that painful things never happen.

It means refusing to define yourself as a permanent victim of every circumstance.

If something appears to derail your plans, there may be a deeper truth or another possibility that you cannot see within the first emotional moment.

Take a breath.

Walk away if necessary.

Come back with a clearer mind.

Look for the open door.

It might be behind you, but you will never see it if your attention remains fixed on the one that just closed.

How to Develop an Abundance Mindset: 8 Practical Shifts

An abundance mindset is not created through one breakthrough conversation.

It is developed by repeatedly returning to purpose whenever you notice yourself slipping into scarcity, struggle, approval-seeking or reaction.

1. Define What Abundance Means to You

Do not inherit somebody else’s definition of success.

Decide what kind of life you genuinely want. Consider the work you want to do, the experiences you want to have, the people you want to spend time with and the contribution you want to make.

Make your vision specific enough that you can recognise whether your daily choices support it.

2. Listen to Your Habitual Language

Notice where you speak from scarcity, blame, defeat or inevitability.

Statements such as “nothing ever works for me” and “people like me cannot do that” are not harmless observations. They reveal conclusions that may be controlling your actions.

Catch the language and question the belief underneath it.

3. Stop Making Struggle Your Identity

Hard work may be required, but suffering is not proof that you are moving in the right direction.

Ask whether your current actions are producing progress or simply allowing you to remain successfully busy and successfully struggling.

Measure commitment by the result you are creating, not the amount of hardship you can endure.

4. Question Your Conclusions

When something goes wrong, separate the facts from your interpretation.

Ask:

Is this the only possible meaning I could give this situation?

Your first emotional conclusion is not always the truth. Create room for another perspective to emerge.

5. Retain Your Ability to Respond

Focus on what you can do, create, learn, adjust or contribute from where you are now.

You may not control the economy, other people or every event, but you can retain responsibility for your next response.

That is personal agency.

6. Regulate Before Making Decisions

Do not allow panic, fear or anger to become the decision-maker.

Pause. Take a walk. Sleep on it if you can. Return when you can access creativity, reason and intuition.

Remain in the driver’s seat.

7. Trade Approval for Freedom

Be willing to make choices that other people may not immediately understand.

You do not need to reject every opinion, but you do need to know whether you are building a life that is authentic to you or merely maintaining an image that keeps other people comfortable.

8. Keep Stacking the Deck

Look for actions that improve your odds.

Learn from people who have created results you respect. Follow proven principles. Build useful skills. Provide more value. Adjust when something is not working.

Small, purposeful actions compound.

The more consistently you act with intention, the less your future resembles a game of chance.

Where Personal Development Meets Entrepreneurship

For Shane and me, these ideas have never been theoretical. 💯

Principles such as personal agency, emotional regulation, purposeful action and developing an abundance mindset have shaped both our lives and the company we have built.

Prosperity Of Life brings personal development together with an optional entrepreneurial pathway for people who want to apply these principles to building something of their own.

It is not employment, and it is not a promise of guaranteed results. It is a personal development education company with an optional independent business model. Individual outcomes depend on each person’s effort, consistency, skills and willingness to grow.

If you are curious about the company behind these conversations, I have put together a detailed Prosperity Of Life review explaining the programs, the business model, what participants actually do and the questions people commonly ask.

Take your time, look at the information and decide for yourself whether it aligns with the direction you want your life to take.

Final Thoughts

We live in an extraordinary time for building a life by design.

We have access to technology, information, education and global opportunities that previous generations could hardly have imagined.

Yet many people still feel anxious, trapped and powerless.

What I pulled away from Shane’s conversation is that abundance begins when we reclaim agency.

It begins when we stop allowing every new circumstance to decide who we are going to be.

It begins when we stop glorifying struggle, release our need to convince everyone and become willing to trade approval for freedom.

Learning how to develop an abundance mindset does not mean ignoring reality.

It means recognising that reality contains more options than fear will initially allow you to see.

Get back into the driver’s seat.

Choose the target.

Direct your attention towards the possibilities for creating it.

Be willing to challenge the beliefs and circumstances that tell you it cannot be done.

To quote Shane, we are giants drowning in three feet of water.

Sit up.

Stand up.

And once you do, help someone else recognise that they can stand too.

That is intentional affluence.

It is playing your game of life on your terms, guided by your values, goals and intuition, and creating the wealth, freedom and impact you know you are here to experience.

To your success,

Rachel Krider

VP Worldwide Marketing

Prosperity Of Life