Abundance Mentality — Your Choice is Your Life

Will you rather choose scarcity when there is so much to go round?

As sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing all things. (2 Corinthians 6:10)

~ Apostle Paul

Merriam Webster dictionary on my phone defined abundance as, an ample quantity of, relative degree of plentifulness, profusion, and wealth. From the same source, mentality is defined as; mode or way of thought, mental power or capacity.

In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, author Stephen Covey described abundance mentality as the character of a person enthused with “the paradigm that there is plenty out there for everybody.”

A person with an abundance mental attitude lives life with the consciousness that there is more than enough to go round — for everybody.

According to Stephen Covey, most people are deeply scripted in the scarcity mentality. People with this opposite mindset see life as having only so much, as though there were only one pie out there. People with scarcity mentality go through a zero-sum life paradigm. They see every other person’s gain as their own personal losses.

Ours, been an age of narcissism, almost everyone is striving to outdo the other in the attention seeking economy of the social media landscape. Competition, as is often said is at the heart of the engines that drive innovation and the economy. These days, collaboration drives progress in the global scientific, technological, and economic sphere as much as competition.

Wisdom is in knowing that others don’t have to lose in order for you to win.

In any company or business, the supervisors and managers are the ones calling the shots. But a manager or supervisor afflicted with a scarcity mindset could even fall so low as to be envious of his subordinates.

Also, a subordinate with a scarcity mentality may respond with a, “Yes sir, Yes sir” to his immediate boss (or a superior member of his team or organization) while secretly seeking to undermine his progress or even out rightly plan the downfall of those further ahead of him in the hierarchy.

Recently, my team had an experience that underscores the importance of having the right mindset. We had to team up with a former colleague. The goal was to facilitate a training program his company was about to conduct for some customers.

Part of my team’s expected contributions in the mutually beneficial arrangement was to review and make inputs to the slides being prepared for the forthcoming class. The engineer in charge of the training has got little practical background. And that was exactly the gap my incoming team came to augment and make contributions from our field experience.

My team freely shared our ideas with the engineer in charge intoning that if the authors of these books and the associated technology and information (that are freely accessible on the web) had kept their know-how, overly secret, we wouldn’t have had access to them. All our pleas fell on deaf ears. To him, all his “copy and paste” ideas were original and everything must be kept secret even from people who were trying to help him succeed.

Unfortunately, he hasn’t read Tim Denning’s admonition that, “Your ideas aren’t original. You’re not special. Your ideas can be googled for free. You didn’t invent email marketing, automation, newsletters, webinars. However, you make your money, someone else is doing the exact same thing.”

We were met with stiff resistance by the in house engineer. Every time his boss (who was not an engineer) instructed him to share and review his prepared slides with us, his answer was, “Yes sir.” to his boss and to my team, but repeatedly he acts contrary to his boss’s instructions — withholding information from us and ensuring we never see his slides or took part in the training program.

On our side, we were more than willing to share the information we had. The samples of our previous work and all the sources and the credits for our materials were out in the open. Having had all our cooperative gestures rebuffed. the only option my team had left was to leave. In order to have our respect and dignity intact, we quietly edge ourselves out of the promising partnership. Shortly after we parted ways, bigger opportunities opened up for my team. The new opportunity afforded my team more diverse experience. The uncooperative engineer we parted ways with is still the “lone ranging engineer” in his organization.

Scarcity Mindset — How to Identify It

• People with scarcity mindsets are competitive about everything even where competition is uncalled for.
• Be it in business or in actual life, people with scarcity mindsets see life as a zero-sum game. They always see others gain as their own personal losses. As a result, they are always scheming to be one step ahead of their perceived competition.
• They rejoice when others fail or have setbacks. They will even insidiously work to undermine or hinder others' successes. Their morbid satisfaction is, “If I can’t have it, others must not have it either.”
• Because of their fixed mindsets that there is not enough to go round, they hoard information, credit, profit. They are always scared of others outshining them.
• An overly competitive spirit locks them in a comparison trap. They are always comparing themselves vis-à-vis what others have, how much they earn and they are always trying to outshine the Joneses or sabotage them if they can’t overtake them.
• People with scarcity mindsets always operate from a transactional perspective in all their dealing with others. With this mindset, they are always looking for what they stand to gain from their interactions with others even if such interactions involve manipulation, using or betraying people that trust them. As soon as they feel their former friends or colleagues no longer have anything to offer them, they turn cold-turkey and dump old-friends. Like swimmers that sear through water to propel themselves forward, they see and use others as tools for their own advancement.

A withering desert or an ocean of abundance? — Your choice is your life.

• People with scarcity mindsets invariably self-sabotage themselves. Because they focus their attention unwholesomely competing with others, they miss the opportunities that abound all around them. They focus so much on the green grass across their neighbor’s fence that they fail to tend to their own turf.
• A scarcity mindset makes people oblivious of their potentials and all those capabilities they possess if only they were willing to try.
• A scarcity mindset has the debilitating impact of making such people miss life transforming encounters. Because they are always in unending zero-sum games with the whole of humanity, such people succeed at transforming their potential friends and allies into unhelpful enemies.
• Instead of counting their blessings, people with scarcity mindsets focus their attention on what they do not have all the time. Such morbid focus on their inadequacies paralyzes them from making the efforts they need to effect changes that will help to transform their lives.

Will you rather choose scarcity when there is so much to go round?

With a life scripted in abundance mentality of, there is more than enough to go round and meet the needs of everyone one of us, you realize that the actual worth of your life is not so much in what you have acquired.

Your life's worth is best measured in how better the world has become because of, even just one person who smiles with hope for another day through your reaching out and creating space for one more person.

Having an abundant mindset doesn’t offer an overnight cure to all of our world’s ills. Neither is it a willful denial of life’s imperfections and the rough edges we have to navigate in all of life’s journey.

An abundant mindset will help you realize there are times, when, even if you lose, you win, and at other times the victory of others is your victory too.

A mindset rich in abundant mentality, keeps you humble. You recognize that whatever level of success you may have attained today, whatever trail you might have blazed in your paths, surely, others before you ignited the spark that lit your fire. And with that mindset, you march through life with a spirit of empathy, forbearance and gratitude.

Final Thoughts

In all of life’s quests, there is always more than enough to go round, except for the one who insists on grabbing it all because of greed. Where do you stand on the scarcity to abundant mentality continuum? You are the only one who can make that choice, and your choice is your life.

Thank you for reading my story. Please connect with me here and share your insights.