How does a Scarcity mindset hold you or your team back?

Welcome to (un)leaderly, the podcast that looks at the world through an atypical leadership perspective. In this episode, host Barbara Iverson talks about scarcity and abundance mindsets. When we can identify the mindset we're in, we can be aware of the decisions we're making and how they will affect ourselves and our team or organizational culture.

Barbara tells stories from her life and looks at the world through an atypical leadership perspective. Every week she offers a challenge or task for listeners, to prompt reflection or growth. This podcast is the perfect listen for someone who feels like they don't quite fit to the typical leadership profile. 

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Transcript

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You having something doesn't take it away from me. Hello, and welcome to Unleaderly, the podcast where we look at the world through an atypical leadership perspective. My name is Barbara Iverson. I am your host, and today we're going to talk about mindsets again, but this time a different set of mindsets. So we have already done an episode on growth and fixed mindsets. And if you haven't listened to that, go back and take a listen. You don't have to in order to be able to understand this episode, but that's a great episode for getting to know how the way we think really affects our actions. So today we're going to talk about scarcity and abundance mindsets. And I've there's a lot that I see in how teams operate and even how people, how they look at the world. And once you understand scarcity and abundance mindsets, you can really identify so many actions from this perspective. So I hope this is going to be helpful for you. I always hope that. Oh, I understand where my actions were coming from. That was coming out of a scarcity mindset. Or, oh, wow, I really have an abundance mentality going into this. Or you could also identify it in other people. So let's jump into this. So the scarcity mindset is one that sees that there just isn't enough of everything in this world. They see things as, you know, a zero-sum game or situation, which is one where if one person has something, that's less that you could have, whether it's pie or success or money or time or resources or energy, whatever it is, it's this mentality that says if something, if someone has something, it means I can't get my hands on it. Which, okay, you know what? In the case of pie, say I've made a strawberry rhubarb pie, cut it into eight pieces, I ate two, a friend ate two, another friend ate two. There's only two left. Well, yeah, that means in this situation, there is a finite number of pieces of this strawberry rhubarb pie left. But it doesn't mean that more strawberry rhubarb pie could be made. So those resources, even when they look finite, they aren't always finite. A scarcity mindset says if somebody else is doing well, that means there's there's not enough for me to also do well. I don't think I have to give a ton of examples for you to start to think this doesn't sound fun, this doesn't sound healthy, this doesn't sound like a satisfying way to live. And I really don't think it is. As with growth and fixed mindsets, though, I want to stress that we are not 100% one thing. We do not live 100% in one mindset. Just as I have some areas of growth mindset that I'm I go into that mindset very easily, and other areas where I slip also easily into a fixed mindset. There are times that we will feel a scarcity mindset and other times that we don't. So if you're listening, please know that up front. Nobody is 100% one thing. We all slide into different mindsets at different times and also dependent on our situation. Context can be so important in this situation. Okay, but so scarcity says there's not enough. An abundance mindset says there is enough. There is more than enough for everyone. Your success doesn't have anything to say about my success. I can celebrate your success knowing that we can both succeed, we can both succeed together and apart and whatever, but you having something doesn't take it away from me. So abundance says, hey, there is enough money, there are enough resources, there is enough pie because we can make more. There's enough love, there's enough money, there's enough of an audience out there that I don't have to be upset if somebody else is getting something. I don't have to perceive that if they are getting something, it means I'm getting nothing. In many situations, there is more than enough to go around. There isn't always. There are things that are finite, for sure. But we are talking about a mindset. And a mindset is not always based on strict reality and parameters. It's a way of seeing the world. And sometimes a reality has to say, you know what, there's only so many pieces of this pie. I didn't use a recipe, so it's never gonna taste exactly the same again. So yeah, I guess this strawberry rhubarb pie is finite. That's just a reality of what's in front of us. That's not exactly a mindset. We understand the difference between the mindsets. And if we think about where these mindsets come from, especially if you listen to the episode on matriarchy, patriarchy, I don't think you'll be surprised to hear that a scarcity mindset comes from patriarchal systems, where there are just a few people at the top. We have this triangle shape where the masses of people are at the bottom, and there's just a few people at the top of patriarchal systems. And in that situation, the resources are an inverted triangle. So the most resources sit at the top with those few people, and the few, the smallest amount of resources stay at the bottom for the masses. Okay, so there's not enough, or there's certainly a mentality that says there's not enough, but it's it's a created situation. In these patriarchal systems, the people at the top are grabbing, they're exploiting, they're taking. It doesn't mean that there aren't enough resources for people, it's just how they've been allocated. There's not enough resources for people. So, in that, it's very common to have a scarcity mindset. We are programmed by our cultures and our societies and the systems that we live in to really believe that there isn't enough. Absolutely. So, if you have a scarcity mindset, I also want you to know it's not your fault. You are caught in systems that create that. The abundance mentality, the abundance mindset is more aligned with the matriarchal system. And for that, we had a circle where knowledge was shared, wisdom is shared, know-how is shared, power is shared, resources are shared. So when you have that circle, we can think about resources, whereas in patriarchy, it was an inverted triangle. In matriarchy, it's another circle laid over the circle of how power is shared. There's resources enough for everybody. Everybody has what they need to reach their potential. So there isn't a need for jealousy or concern because there's a peace in knowing we all have what we need and I can access that which I need. Let's think about that now. We've talked about it in a really abstract way. Let's talk about this and what it looks like in a company or a team. Because when you have a scarcity mindset that says money is finite, resources are finite, recognition is finite. When you believe all these things are finite, the main emotion you will feel is fear and a desire to protect those things that you have or believe you have, or sense that you have access to. You'll behave out of fear and you will, for one thing, become very territorial. You will want to, like I said, protect those things that you have a sense that are under your control. Collaboration will become very difficult. Siloed thinking will become very common. You'll have people that stick to what they know and they don't share know-how or information because they're afraid of what might happen if they do. What if I become redundant? What if I'm no longer necessary? I'm gonna hold on to what I have and what I know and not collaborate and not share because I'm afraid of that might hurt me in the end. What that does is it creates this self-fulfilling prophecy of not having enough. If you don't believe you have enough, you you will behave as if you don't have enough, and then you may not have enough. So when I think about this, I'm reminded of a situation that one of my potter friends in Spain told me about. So he's in a community in Mesis, it's part of Valencia, Spain, and it's this whole community of potters, and they do a lot of stuff together. They have lots of contact, they collaborate on projects together. It's a really fun community to be part of now and then. And there's a guy, a potter, within that area. He's got his studio there, and he discovered a glaze technique. Now, if you don't know anything about pottery, that's fine. All you really need to know is glazes are made from recipes of minerals mixed up with water and then put onto dry pottery, the water evaporates, and you're left with the minerals sticking to the clay, and then it becomes a glaze. And this guy discovered a technique that gave him this really beautiful kind of rose gold glaze. It's I actually have a piece, I can see it from where I'm sitting, and it's really lovely. It really is like this bronzy rose gold. He paints with it, he can do, he can cover whole pieces with it, it's really metallic. It's it's absolutely lovely. But this friend of mine who's part of this community said the really unfortunate thing is this guy won't share the recipe, he won't share the technique with anybody that he discovered. And maybe he discovered it by accident, maybe he really figured it out from a chemical point of view. I have no idea. But he has it and he won't share it. What that does in this community, I mean, the people are frustrated about it because everybody tends to share techniques and things within this community. This guy kind of is the standout that has something very special and won't. And the thing is, his success with this glaze, if he shared it with others, his success with it would not be diminished. Because everybody has a different style. Everybody would use the glaze differently. Nobody's would look like his. And if you liked his, if you liked his style of glazing, painting, forming figures, making shape. Like if you liked his, you would continue to buy his. And even if somebody else was using the glaze, if you didn't like everything else about that piece, it wouldn't, you wouldn't buy it. So his success would not be hampered by the success others would have with his glaze. But what it really does is it pulls him out of that community because he has isolated himself by actively not sharing something that he has that others aren't like demanding from him, but they're curious about, but he refuses to share it. So he's created this really kind of unhealthy environment for himself by not sharing it because he has a scarcity mindset with it, which is really unfortunate. There are also situations I can remember for myself, there was a woman that I worked with. She was not an easy person to work with. She stepped on a lot of people's toes. She said a lot of things that were very, very frustrating to hear by a lot of people on the team. So she was not well loved. She had a few people kind of in her corner, but there were some issues. And she was really worried, though, about keeping her contract and having it renewed. And she started saying some weird things about me to other people within the community. And she also really tried to control some of the ways that we would approach the teaching that we were doing or the training that we were doing. And it became really, really uncomfortable because she wouldn't share information. If she heard something about what somebody else, like she wouldn't share it, she wouldn't tell me. And I was the person who worked the most closely with her. And it became this really awkward like, hey, are we on the same team at all? Because I thought we were, but you it feels like you're actively working against me, saying things to people that aren't really true, claiming that I said something. So you're gossiping and passing it through, trying to make me look bad, and also keeping information from me that would be really helpful and certainly not existing in this very collaborative spirit that we had at the beginning, but that's gone. And that felt really terrible from my part on this team. It was so stressful and so frustrating because I had a lot that I could really learn from that woman. And I was really appreciative of the things that she had to offer me. And I thought we worked really well together, and so did she at the start. But I think it was as she realized that she wasn't very well liked, and she started to feel that scarcity of appreciation or being liked, or really feeling that maybe her contract wouldn't be renewed. And you know what? It wasn't, which was super unfortunate for her, but it was a great thing for the department because we could work in a more collaborative way after she was gone. But it but it felt really bad at the time. And I remember thinking, like, gosh, she doesn't have to be so territorial. There is enough work here for both of us. It doesn't have to be one or the other of us. We can we can both do this together because there is there is definitely enough work for the two of us here. So her fear and that scarcity mentality created a bad environment for both of us and may have led to her getting her contract canceled. I'm not really sure. People do not perform at their best when they're afraid. They become territorial, they don't want to collaborate, they don't want to share, they alienate themselves from parts of their communities. And that is bad enough when it happens on a team, but when it's the whole organization not sharing, not talking with each other, not coming to each other's aid with the resources or helping people get unstuck, like all the things that we've talked about before as part of performing teams, that trust, that ability to say, yeah, I have something that you need and I want you to have it. Let's do this together. Because at the end of the day, we are working together. We're part of one organization or we're part of one team. We have common goals. If you're in this kind of situation on a team or even in an organization, I think it's really quite easy actually to slip into. It can happen because of some sort of piece of information that's going around where people start to get scared. Maybe they feel like layoffs are coming up, and now everybody has to prove that they're the most inexpendable. But the point is, once you are in a scarcity mindset within a team or an organization, it's really difficult, I think, to shift out of it in one sense. In another, I think you really can. And I'm really interested to hear from people who've been in these situations and have shifted out of them. Because when you're in a scarcity mindset, trust and ability to collaborate and work together can be very difficult to rebuild. But if you have been in a and also because of how mindsets work, right? If you've been in a scarcity mindset, the first step is recognizing that you're in it for yourself and saying, I don't want to be here. I have enough, I am enough, I have everything that I need, or I can get my hands on everything that I need. And if we tell ourselves that, if we start to believe that, we can start making decisions and taking actions that come from that. And it is in essence a self-fulfilling prophecy. I'm not super woo-woo about this, but I can tell you if you tell yourself you have everything you need, you will believe you have everything you need. If you are watching reels on Instagram that tell you all the things you don't have, you will believe that there are so many things that you don't have, and you will take action to try to get your hands on those things. And as many of us know, once you get your hands on those things, they rarely give you the pleasure that you think they're going to. Whereas using what you have, believing that you have enough, creates a sense of peace and calm and gets rid of that anxiety about accumulating, accumulating, buying, buying, buying. Because remember, the primary driver of patriarchy is capitalism. Consumerism wants you to keep consuming and buying more, and these systems are self-perpetuating. So trying to step out of them and saying, I have enough. I am enough. I have everything that I need. And looking at it in it from a different perspective, that is partly its own reward, but I think it also brings us to a place where we actually have more than we might have expected. I've got an example for you that may be helpful, may not be helpful, I'm not really sure. But to me, it was a really insightful moment of how a mindset can lead to that thing that you have a mindset about. So a scarcity mindset will often lead to scarcity, but an abundance mindset will often lead to abundance. There is a YouTuber who has yoga videos. Her name is Adrien Misler, and the channel is called Yoga with Adrian. This is not a sponsored ad. This is simply what I know about this creator and decisions that she's made that I'm sharing. If I'm wrong, please tell me. I'm gonna tell you what I know and what I have experienced. So I've been doing her yoga videos for a very long time. From back in the days when YouTube was, you didn't have ads before videos. You could just search in it, search a video, find a video, play a video. You didn't have to see any ads. And that was how it was when I first found her videos. Fantastic. But then, of course, the ads started coming in. And I was annoyed because I had to watch a video before I a video of an ad before I could watch the workout video. What I didn't realize until much later when I actually was trying to watch somebody else's content, it was, I think, a meditation video or something that I was in the middle of this meditation and suddenly there was an ad popping up playing. So how nice. You're in this calm, breathing moment where you're where you're focused, you're very present, and then suddenly there's this other voice coming in bah bah bah bah bah, buy this. You need this. Oh my goodness. Talk about removing you from the meditation experience and taking you out of the present. But what I realized is those yoga with Adrian videos, whether they were 10 minutes long, 20 minutes long, or 50 minutes. Minutes long, there was never an ad break in the middle of them. Interesting. Why is that? Well, then I read an article that said Adrian Michler actually made a very conscious decision not to allow ads to take place during her videos, which in theory is a loss of revenue because it means you can only have ads before or after and not during. So if that's a 50-minute video, that's quite a number of ads that you will not allow to be shown. So that's revenue that she's not getting, which to me is an abundance mentality that says, hey, I'm here because I want to share this knowledge and know-how that I have, and I want it to be available to people. But here's the thing: while doing that, she has created a community where she has something like, I think if you look today, there's she's got over 14 million subscribers on YouTube. That's massive. That is absolutely massive. So she sacrificed ad revenue, but she got subscribers out of it. And she has a loyal community. Now, hey, if you want to pay more, you can and you can get into a different community of hers, but you can see hundreds, if not thousands, of yoga videos and meditation videos without having to pay and without having ads during them. And that has made me actually very loyal to her. And I don't use other videos because honestly, if they have an ad break in them when I'm focused, that just takes me right out of where I am, pisses me off, and makes me just absolutely not want to do another one of their videos. So I really think she's had an abundance mindset to say, I want to make these things available and I'm willing to sacrifice on my end. But in the end, the abundance of her giving things away, which again, she's there are ads, so it's not like there's no ads at all. There are ads, but she's giving more away, but that's coming around and feeding into her goals and her community on the other side. And I'm happy to be part of that, frankly, because I don't feel like she's gatekeeping what she has. You see this a lot on Instagram. I'm not interested in naming people who, in my opinion, have quite a scarcity mentality where they are gatekeeping, there's a lot of content creators that gatekeep recipes. I also saw this um statistic that was talking about news sources and how news sources from a certain political stance give away all of their content. There are no paywalls, or at least for most of their content. There may be really specialized content that is behind paywalls, but for most of it, it's available. You don't have to pay. And for this other side of the political spectrum, they kept most of their content behind paywalls. And you look at that and you go, what is happening here? That the bulk of content from one side of the political spectrum is free. And the bulk of the content, at least from these certain providers on the other side of the political spectrum, is behind a paywall and they're gatekeeping it. Wow. But these are the scarcity mindsets. Abundance looks really different. And abundance isn't just giving away everything, and it's also not the kind of nonsense where you have people saying, like, well, you know, come do our wedding flowers. We're not gonna pay you, but we're gonna give you reach. Like, this is not what I'm talking about. That's not an abundance mindset at all, because that is not generous. An abundance mindset is generosity at its core. It is saying, I am gonna share what I have, whether it's a resource or wisdom or know-how, I'm gonna share it. I'm gonna be generous with it. And I'll tell you something. From my own perspective, I want to be a generous person. I wanna be generous with my time, energy, and resources, believing that if I am generous, others will be generous with me. And that feels so much better than trying to scrabble things and protect them and keep them as my own. That that sounds like dragons hoarding to me. And I don't want to be that. I want to be generous. I want to have open hands. So, challenge for today. I would really love you to think about where in your life you see the abundance mindset and where in your life you see the scarcity mindset. Where are they showing up for you? And which one would you rather be in? If you say scarcity to this, you know what? Great. Live that, be that. I'm not here to try to convince you to not be that. But if you want to move from scarcity to abundance, I'm really interested in understanding what that looks like for you. Because I think it looks different for different people. I do think that for some, just recognizing that they're in a scarcity place will shift them out of it. For others, it takes a lot more. There's a family member that I have who tends to slip into the scarcity mindset and it really messes with her mental health. And it makes her very unhappy and it makes her say things to people who love her that really get them kind of worried for her. And so the last time I went to visit her, I actually wrote a few affirmations on pieces of paper and put them on her bathroom mirror. Things like, I have everything that I need. Really simple and true. And the act of her saying them helps her to believe them. Recognizing where you are and wanting to change is one way to shift. Another way is through affirmations of actually physically having papers or something that you can see to remind you to speak a different truth. Because when we say things, we tend to believe, we tend to believe our own voice and what we've said. We can we can have conversations with people. To step outside of the challenge for a second, I I do think that for companies, if they want to change what they can do, this the first step that many companies need to take toward an abundance mentality and breaking that scarcity mindset within their community, within their organization, is transparency to say what decisions are made by whom and how, and where the resources are, how they're being allocated. That talks about transparency in pay ranges and bands and moving toward gender pay equity. There's a lot of things that companies can do, and the biggest one I really think is transparency to break that cycle and to say we were in a scarcity mindset, and we are now making changes to shift out of that. Not we are trying, not we are attempting, not we're hoping, but we are behaving out of a different mentality now, and we're taking steps, and we need to talk about this together to know what's working and what's not. Getting back to the challenge, I'd like you to think about again those spaces where you slip into scarcity or abundance. And how can you break that scarcity mindset? And take a moment this week. So think about it. As you've listened to this podcast, I hope that maybe some areas of your own life have been illuminated for you. Think about those places that have that scarcity mindset where you might want to change it. And when those thoughts or actions or behaviors come up, recognize them and stop them. Figure out, make a plan for how you're gonna do that. I have no idea what's gonna work for you. Maybe affirmations, maybe like a rubber band on your wrist where you like snap it so that you pull yourself out of a way of thinking. I have no idea what you want to do, but figure out something and then do it. And when you find yourself also in an abundance mindset, recognize it, celebrate it, and ask yourself, how can I live more in this space? Because I can almost guarantee you that that abundance mentality feels more calm, more peaceful, more generous, more joyful, more living in a light space. But I mean like light in terms of not heavy. Let's think about it that way. Thanks a lot for listening. I hope that this has been helpful for you, illuminating in some way. And I hope you have a great week. As always, big thanks to Lily Akees for our intro and outro music.