How Abundant Is Your Life, Really? Here's Your Abundance Assessment

Manifest the year of your dreams by going inward. Renew You 2017 is a month of mindfulness during which we’ll share content that guides you to create a deeply rooted intention for the new year. We’ll help you navigate inevitable obstacles with the latest science on habits, motivation, ritual, and more, and equip you with tried-and-true techniques to outsmart even the toughest inner critic.

Welcome to Day 3 of your weeklong guided introspection. By now you have a better understanding of where your body is energetically and how you got to where you are in life. In one more examination of the inner world before we start thinking about the future, today is about abundance. This is an important exercise because in whatever we resolve to achieve, doing it from a place of love and fulfillment is key to success. It's simple: You cannot overflow from an empty cup.

Abundance includes finances, of course, but it's so much more than money. According to trusty Merriam-Webster, abundance is a very large quantity of something. Most of us will have a little bit of a lot of things instead of a massive volume of one thing. You feel like you belong to a community at your yoga studio, or have a few great friends you know can count on, and a career that either fulfills you, or pays the bills, or dare we say both?

Conversely, you may feel lacking in some areas. Perhaps you have a great balance sheet but don't feel connected to your friends because you spent most of your time working. In fact, it's rare to feel like nothing is lacking—after all, research shows we're programmed to find what's wrong about a situation—but more often than not, the secret to achieving your goals and inviting abundance is a combination of a mindset shift in the context of your obstacles. This technique, called mental contrasting1, has been shown to be more effective than pure positive thinking to help achieve goals.

From here, there's usually an event from childhood or deep-set insecurity that's firmly tied to our feelings of abundance. Obviously, we cannot change what has happened in the past, but it's helpful to have an awareness of how it's affecting our lives. Once we know that it's a childhood insecurity affecting how we feel about work or love, for instance, we can release that habit and act intentionally to manifest something that's more in line with what we desire.