Have you ever had a bad case of FOMO – the Fear Of Missing Out?
Do you ever feel like there’s so much more you could be doing with your life… or that you don’t have the time or resources to live life full-out and on your own terms?
One of our Abundance Coders wrote in asking me to write a post to address her fear about her life being too boring. She felt like her life had gotten really small because of financial constraints.
When your life feels small – which it can when you’re experiencing scarcity, you can’t afford to do much, you’re stuck in routines that are the same day in day out, and you aren’t yet experiencing your life as full of abundant freedom and choice – then it’s easy to fear that you may never get out of what can feel like a prison within your own life.
It’s natural to wonder: What kind of a life could I be living if it weren’t for the constraints you keep bumping up against in my life? What amazing things am I missing out on that others are already enjoying in their lives?
I think this kind of fear is linked to FOMO, or the ‘fear of missing out’ … because we only tend to think of our lives as dull or small when we don’t love our life the way it is, and we feel like there’s something more exciting we could be doing with it.
We feel the tension, the gap, between where we are now and where we want to be.
Now this is really interesting, because there’s a lot to be said for feeling into this gap.
This gap is ripe for exploration. And that exploration is really the key which opens the door of our current prison, and lets us come out into the light.
The problem is: no one has told us that there are 3 important steps to making this exploration fruitful, and it’s crucial that we do them in the right order…
Most of us are familiar with the process of building a ‘dream’ vision for life. We look at the kind of life we’d like to have. We think about what true freedom and abundance would mean to us. We create dream-life vision boards, repeat affirmations, map out our goals and even create action plans.
Often, though, it doesn’t quite work. Nothing much changes.
In fact, it can end up just fueling an even greater sense of frustration and FOMO, because now we know the kind of life we really want and we still don’t have it. Despite all our goals and action plans, nothing is really changing. And that’s a painful gap to live in.
What’s the reason this approach often doesn’t work?
The biggest prison is usually in our own minds …
What do you believe – or not believe – that might be keeping you stuck?
What do you believe, on a core level, about the possibility of abundance coming into your life?
I’m not talking about you believing that abundance is possible in theory, or for others… but about actually believing that it’s possible right here, right now, for YOU to access unlimited abundance in your life.
Unless you deeply and truly believe, in the core of your being, that abundance is your natural birthright… then you’re going to find yourself spinning your wheels and not really making much progress.
The question is – If you know that you haven’t yet truly embraced a belief in abundance, and you know that you probably have a limiting belief blockage holding you back from living your dream life – how do you change that?
3 Steps to Belief Change
There are 3 steps to belief change. Creating vision boards, repeating affirmations, and doing goal setting is really important … but that’s not Step 1. That’s Step 3.
If you haven’t done Steps 1 and 2 first, then Step 3 alone is not going to get you to the life of your dreams … it’s just going to add to your frustration and sense of FOMO.
The 1st Step…
Step #1 is first to IDENTIFY the beliefs that are holding you back.
What do you believe about money, success and abundance? Do you think you have to work hard for it? Do you think abundance is for others but not for you? Do you feel deserving enough to have the kind of success you desire? Do you think money is easy come easy go? Do you think money might corrupt you in some way?
This step can be the hardest for people because our beliefs are mostly subconscious … meaning they are below the level of our conscious awareness.
In my book The Abundance Code, I help you with this step. I spent years researching and studying the behaviour of people trying to build their wealth in order to figure out the Top 7 limiting beliefs about money, success and abundance that hold most people back.
Once you know what specific subconscious limiting beliefs about money and abundance are holding you back, then you can move on to …
The 2nd Step…
Step #2 is to WEAKEN your limiting beliefs.
Actually tear down their validity using your logical mind. Can you find evidence against the limiting belief that will allow your mind to entertain the idea that it might not always be true, in every situation in your life? Can you find examples of when that belief was contradicted?
Again, I take you through this process for the Top 7 limiting beliefs about money, success and wealth in my book The Abundance Code. I help you to weaken those beliefs by presenting solid evidence against them so that your mind understands that these beliefs are not absolute. They’re just made up stories that we took on as ‘truths’ when we were young because we didn’t know any better at the time.
If you don’t weaken your false and success-undermining limiting beliefs … then just whacking affirmations, vision boards, or goals on top of them … is like putting wallpaper on a mouldy wall. The mould will still grow through from underneath.
I was talking about this concept to someone recently who was a naturopath by trade, and she said “That’s exactly what I tell my clients about their digestive health! If we don’t kill off the unhelpful bacteria in the gut BEFORE we introduce the new, helpful bacteria, then the new bacteria doesn’t stand a chance of creating a healthy gut ecosystem.”
Well guess what, it’s the same with your beliefs.
If you can clear the Top 7 limiting beliefs about money that I’ve identified for you in The Abundance Code book, then that is probably going to be 80 percent of the battle won.
The 3rd Step
Step #3 in belief change is to REPLACE the old limiting beliefs with new beliefs that are going to be supportive of the outcomes you want in life.
This is when you spend time creating your vision boards, repeating affirmations based on better beliefs, creating goals and action plans, doing visualisations, meditations, and hypnosis. There are literally hundreds of techniques you can use for wiring in new beliefs.
AND they work like a charm … IF you’ve done the first 2 steps FIRST.
This is actually the easiest step of all three. But it tends not to work without the other two.
That’s why so many people still feel like they are not making much progress. I hear it all the time. “I’ve been working on my abundance mindset for years, and it’s not happening! It’s not flowing into my life … What am I doing wrong?”
Usually the work they’ve been doing is all Step 3 stuff, and they haven’t done either Step 1 or Step 2. Often, they don’t even know about Steps 1 and 2!
So what I want to say to my fellow Abundance Coder who wrote in, afraid of always having a life that feels small, constrained and boring… is don’t give up!
Understand The 3 Steps to Belief Change. Done together, and done in the right order, they are the keys that will get you out of the ‘small life’ prison.
Work to identify, weaken and replace your limiting beliefs and I promise you, things will change. Your life will start to open up, expand and transform. And soon enough, you’ll look around at the beautiful life you have BELIEVED into being and you’ll realize that you no longer feel any FOMO at all.
You’ll be FOMO-free, forever.
To YOUR Abundance
Julie Ann Cairns
If this post was helpful for you, I’d love to hear from you about why. Send me an email at theteam@theabundancecode.com. Also, if you’re not already getting my blog newsletter directly into your inbox, you can sign up below and receive a bonus eBook called Creating Abundance From the Inside Out, with 35 pages of my top secrets to creating a life filled with abundance beyond your wildest dreams.