#37: Combating Scarcity Mindset and Its Costly Impact on Your Business

Ever wondered how your mindset can shape your business? This week, let's unravel scarcity mindset and its potential to limit us. In this episode, you'll discover how a scarcity mindset can distort your perception, often leading you to overlook great opportunities that may be right in front of you. Unearth the signs of a scarcity mentality and learn how to break free from its stifling confines, a crucial move that can open up new dimensions of growth in your business and your life.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hey there, my name is Corinne O'Flynn and you're listening to the Calm Entrepreneur podcast.

Speaker 1: 0:06

I am a USA Today best-selling author, non-profit executive and organizing nerd with over 20 years experience running my own small businesses. I teach entrepreneurs, solarpreneurs and small business owners like you how to organize your business, find more time and deepen your alignment practice to experience more calm and confidence every single day. If you're looking for that intersection between practical business advice and spiritual goodness, then you're in the right place. So sit back, relax and let's dive into this week's episode of the Calm Entrepreneur podcast. Welcome, welcome to the Calm Entrepreneur podcast. I'm your host, corinne O'Flynn, and this is episode 37. So I just got back from a long weekend conference where I was speaking on panels and I was there in my capacity as an author and on one of the panels there was this conversation that we were having about. The audience was asking us authors questions about authoring and the business of publishing and you know the current state of affairs and how they should think about different things. And I was struck because the question was how? How do I get started? How do I have my novel written? How do I go? And this is not a. This episode is not about being an author. This is about scarcity mindset, because one of the panelists on the panel with me after each of us were talking about, like our advice on how to approach breaking through and getting into the market today, their response was all about how hard it is and how they don't know how long they're going to be able to keep doing this and that the the market is saturated. And you know all of that kind of talk, which isn't true. And I was struck as I sat there and I tried to rebut and give the more uplifting kind of response, not because it needed to be said in another way or anything like that, but because that person's response was steeped fully in scarcity, and I think that we need to have more conversations about scarcity mindset, and so that's what I wanted to talk to you about today. So, scarcity mindset right.

Speaker 1: 2:32

When, when you're running a business, no matter what that business is, if you're operating from a scarcity mindset, that means that you're viewing the world through a lens of lack. Right, you see limited resources, you see limited opportunities and limited possibilities everywhere that you look, and it's not, as it sounds, really simple. It sounds like, oh, that's just looking through the lens of lack, but it's much bigger than that and it's a dangerous. It's a dangerous place to come from because a scarcity mindset that lack sensibility permeates your thinking, your forward vision and how you approach every situation. And if you're in business, if you're an entrepreneur, you're trying to build and create and disrupt right. You need an abundance mindset. That's crucial, and so I want to go through some of the dangers of a scarcity mentality. And you know, hopefully, if you identify yourself in any of these things, like if you see things that you've said or things that you've thought in any of the things that I talk about today, you can, you know, hone in and be like who I need to shine a light on that, and you know, because awareness is key, you put the sunlight on the thing and now you start to see it for what it is, and then you can shift into a different perspective, and I will, you know, preface this entire conversation by saying that I am as available to scarcity mindset as anybody in the world. Like, I think that it's one of those things that we have to learn. It's a habit that we have to break, because a lot of times, it's easier to drop into scarcity.

Speaker 1: 4:26

So I had three main points that I wanted to share with you regarding scarcity and the danger of having a scarcity mindset, and the first thing is what struck me from this conversation that we were having on this panel, and what that is is scarcity mindset distorts your perception, and I wanna say that again. Scarcity mindset distorts your perception. When you operate from scarcity right, you tend to see limitation and lack, even when it's not true, and this causes your field of vision to narrow. Right, because then every business interaction, every interaction like forget, even if we pulled this away from entrepreneurship everything in your life starts to appear as a zero sum right, and a zero sum situation means that if somebody else wins, I lose, right, and that's scarcity. Like, if you think that there's only one small pie that we're all drawing from, you know, then of course you're gonna say, well, if somebody else gets that, then there's not that thing for me, you know. But in reality there's always new opportunities opening up and there's always more market being created and there's new opportunities for collaboration taking shape, you know, everywhere, if you choose to open your awareness to those things, right, but having a scarcity mindset blinds you to those possibilities and you start to see everything as competitive, even relationships that could be collaborative.

Speaker 1: 6:08

It changes how you view people, jobs, investments and you know it, discounting great opportunities because of your scarcity filter. Because that's what it is. It's a lens, it's this thing through which you're seeing everything. You know, when you discount all the good opportunities around you because you're seeing things through this lens of scarcity, you start to focus on the flaws. That's all you start to see right, and abundance is the opposite of that right, and this is the expansive thing. This is the thing that broadens the horizon, so that all you see is opportunity.

Speaker 1: 6:46

So, for example, like you, let's say you have this potential partnership and you start to look at it through scarcity. You're only going to look at how this person could take advantage of you or compete with you down the road, and you won't see that. You know combining forces could open up new possibilities to benefit both of you. Or you know you might have a talented person that you bring on in your team and you know you might look at them as a threat and then not take them on rather than as somebody who can help your team thrive. Right? This is something that is actually quite common in entrepreneur land. Like, we have a difficulty bringing people in, you know, out of fear, and it isn't always about, you know, lightning the load and taking on assistance. It's, you know, bringing on a partner in some things or hiring a consultant in some other ways. You know, yeah, you have to be careful about being scammed and you have to be protecting yourself and your business and your you know your all of your assets. But doing that through the lens of abundance versus through this fear lens of scarcity really does make a difference with how you approach these things.

Speaker 1: 7:56

Right, because a scarcity mindset, it distorts how you view everything. Right, you could look at a growing sector and, like this person on the panel, like the author that I was talking with, all they see is how saturated it is already. And then they actually said you're kind of late to the game, to the audience, and it's like whoa, you haven't missed any opportunities. There's always new market, there's always more. It's our job to innovate and it's our job to pivot and it's our job to challenge ourselves. But thinking you missed the window and thinking that it's saturated is putting these external forces on you and then you're no longer responsible for the situation that you're in. Right, but with an abundance mindset, you can see new segments, you can see the space opening up in that market and it helps you spot new ways of doing business that have nothing to do with limit. And I think that that's the main thing about how it distorts your perception, because scarcity mindset it really is, it's a distortion.

Speaker 1: 9:09

The other, the next point that I wanted to do. The second thing about scarcity is that scarcity mindset promotes unhelpful thinking patterns. Right, and as I just said before, scarcity-oriented thinking is often driven by fear. Right, you start overanalyzing everything, getting lost in worst case scenarios, thinking that because something feels safe, it's easier than taking action. Right, than taking a chance, and then you start to feel helpless to create the success that you want, which what this is is. You're giving away your power.

Speaker 1: 9:43

Right, with scarcity mentality, you dwell on what you don't have. Right, versus what you do have, which is kind of like that gratitude piece. Right, the energetic is completely shifted into the void, and the problem here is that the unhelpful pattern is that you start looking at every business decision through this feeling of lack, and lack breeds lack. It's. You're not gonna be coming to this problem from an innovation standpoint and from this possibility standpoint, it's going to feel very closed off and it's going to feel very isolated and you're going to feel unsupported by everybody and everything and, like the universe and like the energy around, these decisions isn't going to be correct for you, right? So, and again, this episode could be all about your life, like, take out the entrepreneurship piece and just think about this in terms of your life.

Speaker 1: 10:43

Like, I know all of us no, people who live in a scarcity mindset, this zero-sum thing, and it's dangerous because you know, when you approach decision-making and problem-solving from this place of fear, because, make no mistake about this, when you're living in a scarcity mindset, that is fear-driven, whether or not you're aware of the thing that you're afraid of, it is a fear-driven place. Well, what kind of decisions are you going to make when you're making them out of this fear? Like these aren't going to be the best decisions, right, and they might not be terrible decisions, but what about the bountiful thing that is available to you if you were able to switch off scarcity and drop into the abundance? Right, because abundance thinking helps you act from possibility and vision, and that gives you courage, because you're willing to take those risks and you're willing to see what's possible, and one of the ways that this looks in practice is like you know if you are about to make a decision. Right, you're about to make a decision and it's going to have a financial cost and you know, or there's going to be some kind of collaboration going on.

Speaker 1: 11:58

A scarcity mindset has you focusing on the potential downsides right, you're going to play through every worst case scenario and you're not going to spend time focusing on the upside, because the upside is not realistic to you. The upside is like this pie in the sky Pollyanna thing that isn't real, right? And so this scarcity mindset is becoming unhelpful to you because, instead of looking out down, like let's imagine, you're looking at this big, long hallway full of all the potential outcomes, when you are living in a scarcity mindset, all you're doing is closing doors, like all the opportunities that are available to you become smaller and smaller and smaller, because you're making a decision out of fear. The other thing that happens here is we tend to catastrophize things, like thinking that one setback means that everything is doomed, and you again, this is giving away your power. You have now turned yourself into a victim, right, and you're unable to find your way through it and out of it, because this thing happened to you. It was caused by the forces outside of you, and then you're not the person who made the thing happen. The way that it happened, right, it's like well, I knew it, the market was saturated, no wonder my thing failed. I knew it, that person was going to take advantage of me and no wonder that thing failed.

Speaker 1: 13:18

I think that it's really important to analyze how the sense of lack in your decision making, in the way that you view the world, in that scarcity mindset takes away your power. And if this is something that resonated to you, take a pause, take a breather and kind of reanalyze, like draw the whole thing out on a whiteboard, figure out where it is that you can switch things around, because the potential and the positivity are always there. This is kind of one of those things Like if you think you can't do it, you're right, and if you think you can do it, you're right. Like the mind matters in this one.

Speaker 1: 13:58

So the other thing that is really dangerous about scarcity mindset is that it also makes you start diminishing your skills and discarding or dismissing your talent and the talent of your team, because you never believe that you're going to have enough of whatever to accomplish the big vision. Well, what is that doing? That's becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. And then it's also making your vision smaller. You don't want to dream small, you want to dream big. But when you live in scarcity, thinking you're dreaming big is unavailable to you. So abundance mindset, again, is the counter. It's this thing that helps you accurately weigh risk versus reward and staying solution focused and building on existing strengths and building on existing successes and trying to recreate the things that brought in the success in the first place and maybe try to identify where it was that you fell into this negative thinking, because it's really a mindset thing, it's not real.

Speaker 1: 15:05

And so number three for me. So the first point that I wanted to make was that it distorts your perception. And the second thing that scarcity does is it promotes your vision. It promotes unhelpful thinking. And the third thing that it does is it leads to unproductive actions. And this is the big one, and they're all connected. Neither of these things happens in a mind, in a vacuum, but operating from scarcity has very real, real world outcomes.

Speaker 1: 15:33

You might overly fixate on a competitor rather than focusing on how you can become creative and make something new. In this moment, you may hoard your connections. You may be unwilling to be like the person who does outreach and shares and uplifts other people. You may withhold resources or withhold ideas out of this fear of lack rather than collaborating to unlock new value. This is nickel and diamond costs rather than looking at the bigger revenue picture. I think the worst thing of all is that you start making selfish, short-term decisions to protect what you have, rather than thinking long-term because the scarcity mentality has stunted your ability to take a risk and the desire to do so.

Speaker 1: 16:27

Now again, contrast that with the abundance mindset, where you share your ideas freely to get feedback, or you offer feedback and ideas to somebody else so that they can grow and learn. You then would surround yourself with talent to people because you know that makes the pie bigger for everyone. You help others because you believe that there's more than enough success to go around. You think steps ahead, with visionary strategies rather than reaction and reactive tactics. This is what fuels innovation and strong partnerships and smart investments. An example of this would be you might be not sharing your business challenges with peers or mentors.

Speaker 1: 17:16

On this podcast, I talk a lot about mastermind groups and the importance of having a mastermind group. To bounce ideas off of A scarcity mindset would prevent you from doing that. The cost of that is just. It's really a bummer to think about it, because the potential is right there. You've just closed the door on yourself. By letting yourself sit in scarcity, you lose out on constructive feedback to help develop your stuff further. Scarcity could also tempt you to underpay your staff or hire based on the cheapest contractor just to save money. I'm all for a good bargain, but there are going to be places where you get what you pay for.

Speaker 1: 18:04

Sometimes you do need to invest and look at your business decisions as investments in your future so that they will bring back the rewards and the benefits in the future. That takes that willingness to take that chance and that vision to understand that this is actually a good decision, to make an operating decision for your business. With abundance thinking, you become proactive, you become the person who likes to exchange ideas, you invest in top talent and you collaborate for mutual benefit. How can you start shifting out of scarcity mindset if you find that that's something that you're struggling with? And again, like all of us, all of us do this. This is not something that I think any of us has cured ourselves from. I think that there aren't going to be situations, you know, times and places where we get dropped back into that scarcity mindset, for whatever reason. But once we're aware of it, we can start to to work on moving ourselves out of that.

Speaker 1: 19:07

So the first thing that you can do is focus on what you have versus what you're missing. Make a list of all the things, the connections that you have, the knowledge that you have, the capital that you have. Recognize your starting point is likely more abundant than you think. Counter any negative thoughts with gratitude for what is already working. Well, you know. And when you notice scarcity thinking, rise up, shift your focus to opportunities and strengths. This is kind of like when you're a brand new author and your book is out there and you're like, oh my god, oh my god, what am I doing? You know, if you're struggling with abundance thinking and you're dropping into scarcity, go read the five-star reviews. Right, everybody has has a path toward, you know, focusing on and shifting the mindset on the positive.

Speaker 1: 19:54

Another thing that you can do is look for positive possibilities and stay future oriented. Right, do vision exercises to imagine expansive future scenarios instead of limiting present obstacles. You know, set big, bold goals focused on the future and focused on growth, rather than just stability. Right and One, setbacks do happen, and they're going to happen. View them as temporary, because that's what they are. You're like. This too shall pass. Stay focused, like. Like, break down what went wrong, pivot, fix it, identify the thing and then look forward to this larger growth trajectory that's available to you, and the last thing that you can do is adopt a mindset that there truly is enough for everyone.

Speaker 1: 20:38

And, like this, this can happen in so many different wedges of the pie. Right, this looks like sharing credit where credit is due, sharing opportunities with your team versus hoarding them. Collaborating with competitors on industry growth, rather than zero-sum thinking. You know, invest in and uplift other people. Right, view everybody's success as mutually beneficial. Like, imagine that we are all in this together, because guess what we are? The rising tide truly does lift all boats. And even in the places where we do have competitors in our business, imagine collaborative opportunities.

Speaker 1: 21:22

Because, even as authors like if, if I'm writing a fantasy novel and this author next to me is writing a fantasy novel, you know, readers don't read one novel. Let's collaborate, let's do a shared promotion, let's get other authors in on this thing. Let's write an anthology together where we all have little short stories that connect everybody. There are so many opportunities To continue and all it takes is that innovative impulse. It takes that, that willingness to Let go of that scarcity thinking.

Speaker 1: 21:54

Because scarcity thinking just all it does is it closes your doors. It doesn't close anybody else's doors, it closes your doors. So how do you keep all the doors open? You know you open the doors, open the windows, open the curtains, open your arms, open your heart and really do stretch for abundance, because abundance is where it's at. And One of the best places to get you into that energetic of abundance is gratitude, like focus on what you've got, focus on what you've done, focus on where you've been, focus on how every challenge has been growth, you know, and move forward like that because it's it's available to every one of us.

Speaker 1: 22:34

And If you find yourself stuck today, pivot change, then change tomorrow. Like this, you're not locked into any of this. You know, the world that we live in is shaped by our beliefs and our perceptions and, as entrepreneurs, your mindset matters immensely and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy If, if you see the world through the lens of scarcity, then that's the reality that you will create. If you see the world through possibilities of abundance, you unlock that instead. So be aware of scarcity oriented thinking and Cultivate an abundance mindset as much as possible, because it opens up the world for you and it will empower you in every single thing that you do in your business and in your life.

Speaker 1: 23:23

Okay, so that's all I've got for you this week. Thank you so much for listening and I'll catch you next time. And remember, part of being a calm entrepreneur is developing the systems, habits and know-how that lets you know that you are the one in the driver's seat for your business. You get to choose how you think and you get to choose how you work. So you got this, my friends. Thank you for listening.