A Scarcity Vs. Sufficiency Mindset

In this episode I share why we all need a scarcity detox and what steps we can take to do it.

Scarcity is an epidemic right now and it poisons our way of thinking, being and living in the world.  Scarcity has us thinking that there’s never enough.  Never enough time, energy, money, or that we’re not enough.  With scarcity we become more competitive, constricted, contracted and exhausted.  

Sufficiency, on the other hand, is a powerful way to reprogram your thinking mind in ways that support your own health, happiness and fulfillment in life.  Sufficiency thinking means you appreciate what resources you have within you and around you. With sufficiency we become more compassionate, collaborative, connected, and joyful.  Sufficiency thinking helps us evolve and expand into who we truly are in our fullness.

Scarcity thinking prevails in modern life.  Scarcity thinking is a byproduct of running on survival thinking and it breeds more scarcity and stress.  It is as toxic as any poison you can ingest in how it influences the brain and body.

You can begin to train your brain for a new way of seeing yourself and your life that is rooted in sufficiency.  You can begin right now to appreciate your strength, resilience, and goodness.  Not as a way of forcing positivity into your life, because that always backfires in the end, but as a sincere recognition of what is really true about you and the impact and influence you have on others.  

Your truth will set you free and the truth is you’ve got exactly enough of every resource you need to live a truly beautiful life within you right now.  

Take a listen and share with me your thoughts–head on over on LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com/in/tamiberrymd)  or Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/tamiberry.md) and message me!

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It’s called Project Thrive—and we’re finding out what becomes possible when brilliant, ambitious, big-hearted humans stop postponing their own joy, aliveness, and possibility and start creating from there.

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If a round is open, jump in. And if you missed this one, get yourself on the Priority List for the next round.

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Transcript

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0:29

Hello friends. So glad you're here. And today we are talking about scarcity versus sufficiency, and I'm going to invite you to embark with me on a scarcity detox. Let me tell you a little bit more about what that is and why it's become such an important part of my own personal work and why I thought it was so important to share with you. I have been personally interested in expanding my own understanding of abundance and playing with this idea of being a non. Having enough and realizing in it was recommended to me to read the book, actually the soul of money by Lynne twist. And I do recommend this book for a myriad of reasons, but it's, it helped me appreciate that this it's like a disease scarcity itself. Contagious. And she speaks a lot about her work in fundraising for international relief work. Her, her passion has been rooted in the hunger project for decades of her life. And she spent so much work with, with very, very wealthy people and with very, very impoverished people. And her stories, the stories that she shares in this book, although the are specific to money as a resource, hadn't he realize that this scarcity thinking is something that can pollute and like spill over into. Beyond the confines of money. And as she talks about money, she describes it as an instrument. And this is the way I think of my own mind. And this is the way I would love you to think about your own mind. And it's an instrument. And it had me realize that everything in our life 10 be seen as a little bit like an instrument and how we use that instrument. The relationship we have with that instrument can help determine the nature of our experience of life. So I think the point that Lynn makes really beautiful. Is that money is neither good, nor bad that that money is actually a carrier similar to water, and that money can be care. A carrier of our highest ideals and our commitments and our lives. And it can be a carrier. Of our guilt or shame and or our scarcity, so to speak and that as we, as we accumulate or as we allocate that resource, we are essentially sharing that, that, that energetic, caring, In, in, in how we handle our money. And I feel the same is true with every resource that we have, that if we want to look at our resources, such as our time, our attention, our energy, our effort, our money, our words. Our being, when that's aligned with our greater soul's purpose, a greater vision or a mission, then we are attached with a sense of sufficiency and fulfillment and meaning and joy emerge from that fundamental relationship that we've assigned to these instruments. And so let's compare that to if I'm living in scarcity or if you are right now, perhaps, I mean, it's, it's so contagious and it's like, scarcity has become a religion in our culture right now. Like there's not enough time. There's not enough energy. There's not enough money. There's not enough space. There's not enough of me. Or I'm not enough. All of these things. Are conditioned into us and it is like poison because when you live from that space, when you aren't allocating your time as a carrier of your soul's expression, when you are scurrying and grasping and clinging, I don't have enough. I don't have enough time. I don't have enough money. I don't have enough space. I don't have enough energy. I don't have enough sleep. I don't have enough prosperity. I don't have a, I don't have enough. I don't have enough. I don't have acknowledgement. I don't have enough respect. I don't have enough. I don't have enough when we're living in that perpetual state. We are exhausting ourselves and we are telling ourselves a story. Over and over and over again. And this has, this is a dangerous story. This is a stress riddled story. And it perpetuates more stress perpetuates more of this energetic contraction, right? Like just in me saying that, like going through that little rampage of like, there's not enough and listing all of the ways that there's not enough, I could feel tightness in my throat. I could feel a contraction of my own energy and happiness. But when we contrast it, like if we challenge that and we ask like, is that even true? You know, one of the commitments that I have to myself right now is like, whenever the words I don't have enough comes up, I'm going, wait a minute, timeout. We don't use those words anymore. It's like, Going, you know, control alt delete on the program of my brain. Like, oh yeah. Right. We're not using that language anymore. What else could I stay say instead? Right. And when I started playing this game and I still play this game regularly I can feel an energetic shift because as I'm willing to release the scarcity story, I can naturally fall into my own sense of sufficiency. And I want this for you because of that feels like home. That feels expansive. That feels fulfilling. That fuels the seeds for collaboration and compassion. It makes me want to contribute to my life and to my work in a bigger way. And there's an emergence of inner resilience that becomes possible when I realized there's exactly enough time. There's exactly enough money. There's exactly. Enough there's exactly enough energy. There's exactly enough attention. There's enough of me. I am enough, right? As I start playing with some of this language, I'm rewiring my brain and this is a huge liberation of inner resources. When we're living in scarcity, we're continually looking outside of ourselves in through a lens of deprivation when we're feeling deprived. This activates very primal regions of the brain that are rooted in stress based neurosurgery. And when you're running on stress-based neurocircuitry, this creates a biochemical reaction in the body that you register as a feeling or an emotion. And that leads to frustration competition judgment in security. Right. Th there's a whole frustration, disappointment, even depression. All of these are like the emotional language of the nervous system, right? Emotions are the language of the nervous system. Thoughts are the language of the mind and. We want to pay attention to these things, because if you can catch the thought, then you spare yourself the whole emotional rollercoaster that goes along with those thoughts. So this is a way of recognizing, oh right. That's a story that I've been telling myself and we are story making machines. Right. And so the brain is continually. Being driven by inputs. So we want to be intentional with the inputs that we're placing within it. So we want to be intentional about looking for sufficiency. We want to be intentional about looking at our inner resources. We want to be intentional about the way that we feel we are enough that there's always enough. And notice how, when you entertain that story, how does that feel? How do you show up? What's the change that, that, you know, what's the downstream effect of just that subtle. It's not even subtle, right? Like this is major. This is like a major rewiring of your brain. To put scarcity at bay and to choose sufficiency as this is a game changer. This is going to change your life. If you start playing with this right now, you are going to experience immediate results in your life. And it's this continual perpetual story of not being enough that depletes us and defeats us day in and day out. And so there is actually a really great story that Lynn twist shares in her book about Bangladesh. And she had been working there across several year. I mean, across decades really. And Bangladesh had. Sort of traditionally been ranked the poorest country in the world. It's been the, a large recipient of international aid money. And they have trained themselves to a mindset that was rather helpless and hopeless. And they had been looking for the next government handout. And when that money was drying up, they were devastated. She talks about working, working with the Bengalis. And there was a very large group that was brought together and they did a really interesting really like thought work with these people. And they invited them to recognize the story that they needed help, that they were somehow helpless or hopeless. And they, the presenters and Lim was part of this. The presentation committee was to invite them to reconnect to the richness of their history, to invite them, to recognize the resilience of them as people, as a culture. There was an invitation to reconnect to the resilience and the strength of them as individuals, and to see themselves through the eyes of having everything, they need to create everything that they want. And then they, as they framed the mind, they sort of, they sort of trained the mind to start to shift from this helpless and hopeless picture to one of possibility. Right? And this is the space of sufficiency sufficiency breeds, possibility, and helps you tap into your exquisite extraordinary human potential. Of which so far, you've touched just a little bit of, and look at how far it's gotten you for real, you have so much potential and possibility within you. It's amazing. And so, and so this, this exercise, so there was, it started with a thought exercise. You know what, connecting them to their inner resources. And then she asked them to close their eyes and to engage in a deeper exercise where they saw their own heritage. They saw their own lineage and the strength of their. And there was this image of that. They were invited to, that they could become self-sufficient that they could provide for all of their needs and all of their needs could be met and that they contained within them the solutions to their everyday problems. These people, these young men, young women, young and old, they were crying because they had finally touched on something that they had abandoned so long ago. And that was their own sense of power and sufficiency. And their tears were indication that they knew the truth of this. They knew the truth of their enoughness of their power, of their strength, of their resilience. They just needed to be reminded. And so I would like to invite you right now to just close your eyes for a moment. If you're driving, don't do that. Please make sure you're somewhere safe, where you can close your eyes for a moment. Close your eyes for a moment. And I want you to look back on your life. I want you to connect for a moment to the strength of your lineage, to the strength of your ancestors on both sides of your family, on all of the sides, beyond that, the strength, the resilience that flows through your DNA, that pulses through your. And now I want you to take a moment and I want you to recognize the strength of your own personal story. I want you to take a moment to recognize all of the people in your life and how you've benefited, how your existence has benefited the lives of other people, the people in your family, the people in your friend, circle the people in your community. The people around you at work, what lives have you touched and let this imprint like, let, let yourself feel this. This is your true strength. This is your true resilience. This is your true you. And I want you to just take a moment and. And recognize how enough you are, how good you are, your goodness, your greatness, how you've contributed to this world in, in small ways and large weights and be with that for us. Because we don't spend enough time being with our goodness. We don't spend enough time being, being bathed in our own sufficiency and our own power. You are powerful. You are enough. And we have to stop telling ourselves the story that we're anything otherwise. We have everything we need. We have everything we need. Our pantries are fall. Our bank accounts are sufficient. Our closets are full. Our roof is intact. Our lives are rich. Our lives are so rich and we miss it when we're caught in a story of not enough. And there is no joy, fulfillment, happiness, like we're robbed of all of the goodness of our lives when we're living in the lie of scarcity. And we've got to be the ones that liberate ourselves. We've got to be the ones that do this inner work that train our brains, that train our minds, that we're not telling that story anymore. And to catch it in the act to begin to tell ourselves a new story about how enough we truly are, how there is enough time. There is enough sleep. There is enough money and to unite with our soul to create a vision and a mission for ourselves that says we are allocating these resources. For the pursuit of this mission or this vision that's aligned with our soul. That's aligned with why we're here in the first place. So we can become an expression of love, generosity, compassion, our lives become an embodiment of our greatest goals and our greatest commitment. This is joy. This is fulfillment. This is exciting. And this is worth doing the work for, right. And this is what we teach our children when we're running around and not enough, guess what they see, guess what they learn, but they're not enough that they don't have enough. This is the time for the breakdown and the deconditioning of structures and systems that creates scarcity in the first place, because guess what a scared person does they consume? They overbuy, they overspend, they covet, they compete. They create a fractured society that can be easily manipulated and controlled. When you choose sufficiency, you are declaring that you are reconditioning your mind and your life and the generations that will come after you. And that you're rooted and something big. When capitalistic consumeristic consumption, it's a huge paradigm shift. And it starts with just choosing that you're not going to use scarcity. It just comes with the choice of defy of deciding you've always gotten. And deciding that isn't like positive thinking. I'm not asking you to subscribe to positive thinking to brainwash yourself. I'm asking you to look for the truth of the fact that there is enough and you're enough because it is the truth. It is the truth. It's your truth. I secret. So, this is part of my work is part of my ongoing work. I know how my life has radically improved from doing this mindset work and to really work with my nervous system on this, because scarcity is a stress response. Right. And we can become stewards of our own inner resources when we make the commitment that we're going to use our mind, our energy, our time, our attention, our money, our lives towards the fulfillment of our soul's purpose of our, of our own greater mission envision. So play with this. I really, I think there's so much available here for you. That's my hope for you. For me, that we enter into an age of sufficiency and we leave scarcity behind one thought at a time. Thank you for being here. Share this, come back to this. Let me know your thoughts. I love, love, love hearing from. Thanks for listening.