Bonus: The True Cost of a Scarcity Mindset

Welcome to The Million Dollar Badass Podcast. I'm your host, Rachel Rodgers, wife, mother to four children, lover of Beyoncé, coffee drinker, and afro wearer, and I just happen to be the CEO of a seven-figure business. I am on a mission to help every woman I meet become a millionaire. If you want to make more money, you are in the right place. Let's get it going.

We are talking about scarcity mindset today, friends. I don't know why I'm singing. I'm just excited to be back with you guys, so please enjoy this bonus podcast. This is just a bonus episode. We will be back with season two in the new year, but in the meantime, I want to talk to you guys about scarcity and abundance mindset. I actually just got back from a retreat in Charleston, South Carolina, where I hosted several of my clients, some of my most VIP clients, in an $11 million mansion, beach front, had a beautiful pool and hot tub.

It had sound speakers throughout the house, which we enjoyed. We had a chef. My incredible chef, she came with me to Charleston to take care of my clients during that time. We just had amazing conversation. We had space. It rained a lot, so it was like a little cocoon. If you're going to be indoors during lots of rain, then you want to be in an $11 million mansion is what you want to be.

Honestly too, the reason why I choose really luxury spaces for my retreats always is because I really want my clients to experience what it's like to have money and to have the options that come with money, and to just really experience the lifestyle of being a million-dollar badass. That's exactly what happened. One of my clients actually said that she figured out something really important for her business and was ready to make some big moves when she got home. She called her operations director on her team and said, “Hey, here's what I've figured out while I'm here, and I'm ready to make this big move.”

He said to her like, “When did you figure that out?” She said when, “When I was walking back from the beach after my stunning photo shoot walking towards this $11 million mansion, and that's when it all came to me exactly what I need to do.” It's amazing how a really peaceful, relaxing, luxurious environment, a significant amount of sleep, self-care, and just rest like restoration, it's amazing what that can do for you and how that can bring so much clarity.

That's really what this retreat was designed to do. It was fabulous. I had an amazing time. I had some aha moments myself that you'll hear more about in 2020, but it was really great. To kick it off, of course, we landed, my team and I, at the Charleston airport, and we said, “Okay, what do we need to do right now? What's the most important thing we need to do before our clients arrive tomorrow?” We were like, “Go to King Street, and go shopping.”

There's a lovely shopping district on King Street in Charleston, and so we availed ourselves to the lovely boutiques. I want to share with you a little bit about an experience that my program director, Natalie, and I had shopping at some of these boutiques. The first one we went to, there was a beautiful first stole made from rabbits I believe, but from what I understand, they're sheared. They don't kill the rabbits to make them. I don't know. Anyway, please don't kill me. This is just a discussion.

She didn't buy it. Anyway, she was interested in this first stole is how I would describe it. It was this beautiful shawl thing that goes around your shoulders and would be gorgeous with a beautiful black dress or a variety of things honestly. You could wear it over a jacket or just with whatever you have on. Anyway, it was gorgeous. She was very interested in it. She was looking at it and checking out the different colors.

The woman who was the salesperson in the boutique pretty much was following her around. Whatever she was interested in, the woman started talking to her about it, and she was just hovering a lot. She kept asking her size and like, “Could I get this for you in this color,” and just was a little too aggressive in the sales process. At one point, I saw a beautiful ring that I was really interested in, and then she came over and started telling me about the ring, but really in a way that was really how like somebody is like picking up pieces and shoving it in front of you and asking you to try it on.

It just feels like too much. When you're shopping, you want space to peruse and to think and to consider. You don't want somebody shoving things in your face. Of course, in that boutique, we bought nothing. Then we immediately went next door to another boutique, where there were two sales people, and they were so fun. They were just fun and bubbly and lively. They had great music on in there. They really kept their distance and let us peruse without a lot of intervention.

When we did see something that we really liked, they would tell us interesting details about the things and almost in a way that wasn't like, “Here's why you need to buy this thing. Here's why it's amazing,” which feels pushy, which is what the other sales woman did. What these sales women did was they would say like, “Oh, this is so amazing. You know, it was created in Peru by this specific community, and actually, part of the funds when you buy it go back to this community and blah blah blah.”

There's a whole incredible story that goes along with the pieces that we're looking at. That story really piques your interest, gets you excited about it. There's an opportunity for you to have shared values around the thing that you're looking at. She told us about the different designers that she had in the boutique as we were like if we looked at a specific dress and asked her for her size, she would go get us the size and tell us about this designer and why they're so amazing and why we would enjoy owning this piece, but also kept their distance, let us into the dressing room to try things on, and checked on us occasionally but weren't hovering the whole time.

Of course, we left that boutique with a couple of hundred dollars’ worth of goods, because desperation doesn't sell. That is exactly why when we experience pushy salesman, we're turned off, but when we experience people who are just enthusiastic and excited about what they are selling, we aren't turned off. In fact, we're turned on, and we're excited, and we potentially want to buy those things, right?

When you worry that a sale is going to walk out the door, you act like an asshole. Even if it's not your intention, even if you don't typically act like an asshole, when you are desperate for the sale, you don't show up with an energy that is inviting and that is welcoming and that is abundant, and so it feels gross to the people who are receiving that energy. This is one of the reasons why it's so important to really shift your mind around your beliefs around money, because otherwise, it's going to turn you into a bit of an asshole.

I'm going to give you another example. Another example is I want you to think about your favorite client for a moment. Think about your very favorite client, and think about why they are awesome. I bet money that your favorite clients appreciate you. They get value from your services. They do their part. They give you the things that you need to do your job. They participate if it's like a coaching program. They participate in the process and do their part, and they get their problem solved or whatever result thereafter in the program.

That's why it's exciting to work for them, work with them because they're getting results, and you're connecting and you feel appreciated. I bet they aren't asking you a never-ending litany of questions. They're not requesting additional things or services that are outside the scope of the agreement that you originally had. They're not demanding 17 more rounds of editing, because we all love that, and they're not declaring that they will get their money's worth by hook or by crook. That's exactly how you feel after working with somebody like that, like they stole something from you, namely your joy and possibly also your soul.

Why is that? Because one is showing up with scarcity, and the other is showing up with abundance. That's why they behave that way. That's the difference between those two types of clients. We've all seen that meme about the client who pays $300 and wants seven rounds of revisions and 12 extra phone calls and endless emails and your firstborn versus the client who pays $3,000, ask two questions, ask for one round of very reasonable edits, and in one phone call, they've got amazing results and everything that they wanted, and they're done.

Isn't that interesting how that shows up? All of these are examples of scarcity, and none of us are immune. We all might experience it. We all might get triggered. A lot of times, it has to do with some childhood stories, things we experienced in different moments in our lives that for whatever reason just hit us a certain way and have stayed with us. We've got to start to unpack those stories and really unpack those feelings and really deal with it, because otherwise, they can definitely keep you in this space of almost self-sabotaging because your thoughts are around scarcity, and then your actions are around scarcity.

What happens is you manifest your own thoughts. You think you don't have enough money. You're really worried about struggling, and then you take a bunch of action that keeps you struggling and prevents you from making money. We want to shift that. It's really important. scarcity just means in short supply, and scarcity can be real or imagined. Sometimes, there really is scarcity. There really is a limit to how much income you have or how much money is available to you, how many resources are available to you. Sometimes. It's totally imagined.

we imagine that we're broke. I remember a lawyer that I used to know who got a job working at a big law firm. She was making six figures in income, very significant income. she also though hung out with hedge fund managers, because hedge fund managers were her clients. These hedge fund managers were making millions of dollars, and so she felt poor because she was hanging out with people who were making millions and she was making a mere 100,000 or a couple hundred thousand, and just felt broke.

That's an example of an imagined scarcity. You're not actually broke. Let's be honest. If you look around the world, there are many, many people around the world who live on extremely low amounts of money and income and are able to survive, and a lot of times, they're able to actually be abundant and enjoy life. I feel like, honestly, one of the most amazing times in my life was right after my daughter Riley was born and we were pretty broke. Our money was really, really tight.

That was over eight years ago. We were making money, but it was just enough to get by, and yet it was a really joyful time in our lives. Money of course does not equal happiness. Just because you have money, you're not going to be happy. Just because you have no money, you don't have to be unhappy, but you do want to have an abundant approach to life and business, because it really does shift how you show up, and it makes it more likely that you're going to have success and success faster.

I remember my girlfriend in law school only bought nice things ever, and never seemed to run out of cash. It was so fascinating how she was always treating herself but never seemed to run out of cash. Now, I'm not saying go into all this debt. There's finite amount of money that we all have, so of course we can't necessarily spend more than we have. I mean, I guess we can with credit cards, but that's not what this friend was doing.

She was just intentional and strategic about her money and really treated herself to some finer things, and made sure she wasn't spending money on stuff that she didn't care about. She had such an abundant mindset. I remember every time we went shopping together, I would so struggle because… I would try on a dress. It would be beautiful. Then I'd look at the price tag and be like, “Ugh, there's no way I can afford it.” She'd be like, “Buy the damn dress.”

She was that girlfriend, and she certainly always bought the dress for herself. She always ordered the champagne. She always booked the fancy hotel. That's just how she approached life. I'm so grateful for her because we spent a lot of time together during my last year of law school, and I think it really affected my mindset. It really, I think, led to me becoming an entrepreneur or contributed to me believing that I could become an entrepreneur and make enough money on my own.

It's really important to not only… One element of having an abundant mindset is really surrounding yourself with people who have it. If you surround yourself with people who feel like they are in poverty, and I mean imagined poverty, I definitely have friends who do not have a lot of money at all, and some of them are the most joyful people I've ever met. They're not necessarily bad people. I'm not saying don't hang out with people who don't make money.

What I'm saying is if you hang out with people who complain a lot, who have very little gratitude, who see everything as scare, who are holding on to every aspect of life with their Kung Fu grip because they're so desperate and afraid, and a lot of times it's imagined desperation and fear, then you have to really think about, “Who am I letting into my psyche on a daily basis?”

A lot of times, it's not even the people in our lives. It's the media we're consuming. How can you, like my friend Susan says, do an environmental detox and really detox your social media channels and what you're watching on TV and what you're reading so that you are really flooding yourself with positivity and abundance rather than scarcity? Now, when we think about really shifting and having an abundant mindset, what can we do to approach that?

What are some of the practical action steps that we can take? There are a lot of them. A lot of the advice around shifting your money mindset can be really trite and really… Some of it is very woo-woo. I'm not necessarily against woo-woo, but I think there are those of us who want something just really practical that we can sink our teeth into action steps that feel real, I guess, and that really make a difference. One of those things is gratitude.

Everybody talks about gratitude when it comes to scarcity mindset and how to correct it. It's true. It just works. Gratitude is that advice we always get. I know it sounds basic, but it does work. One of the things you can do is at night or in the morning, just having a gratitude practice, whether it's in a journal or whether it's something you just say to yourself, but really reviewing those things that you are grateful for. It has become such a practice for me that I do it all the time.

I'll do it when I'm on a plane. I'll do it whenever I'm alone. I notice I do it. I could be lying in bed, and I'll be going through things that I'm grateful for, and saying a prayer. Your spiritual practice might be different and that's cool, but either way, just expressing gratitude for all that you have makes a big difference. It really shifts your attitude out of, “I don't have enough. There's never enough. There's not enough time. There's not enough money. There's not enough anything,” into a really positive place.

What can we do beyond just developing a gratitude practice? There are a lot of things. What I've decided to do is put those things into a new course. I have created a new program called Worthy. Worthy is my new money mindset course for women at all levels. It's really designed to help you develop an abundant mindset along with the kind of attitude and thinking and habits that lead to big bank accounts.

I really believe if you can shift your mindset, you can make a lot more money. I'm really excited to bring a money mindset program to the market that is from the perspective of a woman of color, because as far as I know, there's not allowed out there if anything. It's going to be feminist and intersectional and focused on all people who identify as women and who want to build serious wealth.

It's going to be extremely practical and have lots of action steps. It's really about shifting your daily habits. How are you showing up in your daily life in ways that are making you experience scarcity? Scarcity can be related to all resources, not just money, but time as well and other forms of resources. I really want to just help more women become more abundant. This was a huge part of my journey.

As many of you listening, if you've been listening to the podcast for a while, you already know that I grew up poor and my parents were on welfare at different times. My parents struggled with addictions at different points in my childhood, and there was a lot of scarcity, actual real scarcity in my childhood for a variety of reasons. My parents are really smart, capable people, but they just struggled with certain things, and they both had really, really challenging childhoods.

Of course, some of that played out in their adulthood as well. That's what I grew up with. I grew up with scarcity as a very real reality in my life where our lights would go out on a regular basis, or where we didn't have money for food at certain times, and yet we were okay, and yet there was such abundance. It's almost like there was this dichotomy when I was growing up of there was real struggle at times, but there was also real joy and real celebration of life and just family and the ability to be together.

But I definitely grew up with a lot of fear around money and this fear around having it and holding onto it and whether I would be able to have more and feeling like I had to hold on to every dollar that I had, and then feeling like I had to spend everything once I had it because I couldn't be trusted with money.

There's all kinds of money stories that I had in my head around money, and a lot of things that I did, a lot of action steps that I took over the years as I was building my business to really help me shift out of that. That was so essential to becoming a millionaire and building a seven-figure plus business. I want to share that with you and those lessons that I have with you. I will do that in the form of my course called Worthy.

Here's the deal on Worthy. If you're interested, you can go to helloseven.co/worthy to sign up for the prelaunch list. The course won't begin until February, but I'm opening up registration on December 1st, and we will have 100 spots available. You will have three days between December 1st and the third to sign up. Then after that, it's over. I may offer Worthy again in 2020, but it will not be at the price point that I will be offering it on December 1st.

You won't get the special bonuses, including the behind the scenes look at how we are creating and launching this program. That alone is going to be worth the cost of the course. Just being able to see sort of how my team and I approach creating a program, launching it, doing all the marketing for it, we're really going to show you all the behind the scenes along the way as we prepare to launch it in a bigger way and as we create this course.

You're also going to have the opportunity to give us feedback on what lessons do you really want to learn? What are you really struggling with when it comes to your money mindset, and how can we support you in that? How can we help you and incorporate those lessons that address that or those tools that address that in the course? You actually will have an opportunity to shape the course, and that is another huge bonus.

There are also going to be some private podcast episodes with special guests that I'm really excited about and video lessons every week as well as live coaching, because in order to deal with money mindset, we really do need to tell our stories and share and be coached. There will also be a fantastic community. You'll be in community with other professional badass women who are looking to really up their game and increase their wealth, and they want to do that through money mindset.

You'll be a part of that community as well if you decide to join. Go to helloseven.com/worthy to get on the prelaunch list and get early access to sign up and take advantage of the bonuses. I'm really excited to bring you this new program. My team and I came up with this in August when we did a team retreat and we decided to take our Glow Up course off the market. Glow Up is now incorporated into our MDB mastermind.

We have our Million Dollar Badass mastermind, which is our main offer, and that's really where most of my team's time and attention goes these days, but one of the things that I thought about as I thought about how can we respond to people who maybe aren't at $100,000 yet because MDB is for entrepreneurs who are at $100,000 or more? There's a lot of entrepreneurs that email us literally every single day and say, “What advice do you have if I'm at $50,000 and I want to get to six figures?”

“What should I do if I'm not there yet and I'm struggling, but I want to be on my way, and I'm really serious about getting there?” I thought about what do they actually need? Yes, you need business strategy, and that's really helpful, but honestly, the main thing you need to get to $100,000 is a shift in your mindset. That's why we decided to create this program to help you create that shift for yourself. I think that shift alone will get you to six figures.

I'm not going to guarantee it or promise it, but I do think that upleveling your money mindset makes it possible to increase your income exponentially. I think that is a thing that I really want to provide to entrepreneurs who aren't at six figures yet. However, this money mindset course Worthy is actually going to be great for people who are at six figures and want to scale, even people that are at seven figures and eight figures.

There's really no entrepreneur and no professional woman I know that doesn't need to continue to improve her money mindset and improve the ways that she's showing up in her life on a daily basis, how she's thinking about things and the actions that she's taking every single day that determine your ability to build wealth. It has to do with boundaries, with how you spread yourself around in terms of your time, the things that you're accepting, the things that you're working towards, how you're pricing things, what you're investing in.

There are so many different facets to this, and we're going to address all of it in this course. I'm really excited about it. It's going to be very actionable. There will be worksheets every week. There'll be homework, and there will be templates and scripts for some of the hard conversations you might need to have as part of this and checklists and calculators and all of the things. I'm really excited about it. I hope that you'll think about joining us.

That's all I have to say about Worthy. I hope you'll go to helloseven.co/worthy and just sign up for the prelaunch list if you want to get all the details. If you're on the prelaunch list, then you'll get access to the sales page and all the details about Worthy on December 1st. If you're not on the prelaunch list, then you won't get access to that until December 2nd, but you would need to be on our mailing list to get access to all of that.

Go ahead and sign up at helloseven.co/worthy. I hope you guys are excited. I am super excited. Yay. I am so selective about what I create and what I launch, and I really try to limit complexity in my business and keep things as simple as possible. This feels like a really right step. As we move forward in my business, my business model is essentially selling my We Should All Be Millionaires book, which launches in 2021, a traditionally published book that I'm really excited about.

I'm actually going to be writing it over the next couple of months, and then we'll have this Worthy course as a next step for people who read the book or people who are interested in working with us. Worthy, I feel like, is going to get people prepared for MDB, our mastermind. It's the kind of thing that really can help so many women and really helps so many women build wealth significantly. I'm really excited about that. Then of course finally, our flagship offer is my Million Dollar Badass mastermind.

That's it. That's all she wrote. That is a look at the business model and a look at what we have coming for 2020 or what we'll be focused on in our business and how simple we try to keep it and can make multiple seven figures with just one offer mainly, but two offers. Anyway, check out Worthy. Excited to work with you guys potentially in this course. I think it's going to be delightful, and I hope you will join us.

All right, well, that's this bonus episode. I'm going to see you next week for another bonus episode that I think you guys will really enjoy. Then we will be back in January with season two. All right guys, talk to you later. Bye.