Is your Scarcity Mindset Serving You?

Is your scarcity mindset serving you?

Is your scarcity mindset serving you? Scarcity, the fear that there is not enough is a concept driven by scarcity.

How is scarcity showing up in your life? So many of us live in a scarcity mindset and we don’t even realize it. We just don’t even know a lot of it is just our upbringing and sometimes how our parents have raised us.

Our society embraces this never enough scarcity mindset. That’s driven in the business world in our personal lives in many, many aspects of our lives. So what is scarcity? Let’s talk about what is scarcity? So scarcity is a mentality that embraces the idea that people see life as a finite pie.

If you can imagine like a pie chart so that if one person takes a big piece of pie, then that leaves less for everyone else. Okay. So most of us have been conditioned to have a scarcity mindset, and it’s usually that scarcity mindset that is keeping us from achieving our goals. Scarcity is what keeps us from living the life that we ultimately want and desire and hope for it is scarcity that Robs us of all of those things.

Stephen Covey talks about in his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, he is the one that confirms this, that scarcity mindset keeps us from achieving our goals because we think that if someone else is successful, that there’s only a finite amount of success. And if someone is super successful, it means that we cannot be – isn’t that interesting. Another person that has researched this scarcity mindset is Stanford psychologist, Carol Dweck. She is the author of mindset and she talks about the growth mindset, and she refers to scarcity as a fixed mindset.

She has looked at different mindsets among students, and she has found that children with a growth mindset that’s based in abundance thinking, um, that intelligence can actually be developed and they’re, they’re actually able to overcome academic challenges and those that have a fixed mindset, rooted in scarcity that they believe that their intelligence is predetermined. And so therefore they do not try. And that is why I know what my kids schools, the growth mindset is taught. In every class in all age groups, because it is such an indicator of success and academic success, throughout their life and through their academic journey, but also throughout their entire life.

How Scarcity Shows up in our Lives

So let’s talk about some ways the scarcity mindset actually shows up in our. Because I think it’s important for us to have some concrete examples, because some of us may not realize that we are operating from a scarcity mindset. As we look at these examples, I want you to call out that this is fear based thinking.

That’s what it is. Scarcity is a form of fear and it takes courage to overcome that. But just as we go through these examples, I want you to think about how fear is showing up in these examples. Then you can ask, is your scarcity mindset serving you?

FOOD

So the first one I want to talk about is food. So many of us have. A scarcity mindset about food. So when we, we have a scarcity mindset about food, it grabs the focus of the hungry. You do not have enough or fear that you won’t have enough, then you will have scarcity around food. And that’s all you will think about.

COMPANIONSHIP

For the lonely person. It might be a lack of companionship. And instead of focusing on that, they don’t have companionship. They don’t create their own experiences, um, to allow for the companionship, they just focus on their lack thereof. See what scarcity does. It creates fear. And then we focus on what we lack. Those are powerful things that drive us in our lives. Do you see this?

TIME

Time is often associated with scarcity. How often in your life do you feel like you do not have enough time? How often do you say that? There’s just not enough time in the day. What are the thoughts that you have? There’s not enough time. There’s no, there’s no way I can get all of this done. And we’re, we just create so much stress and hurried thinking by thinking that there’s not enough time and approaching our time and how we structure our day or our week or our months. From this stressful and, and hurried approach. And then we’re more prone to mistakes. Because we’re hurried. We think there’s a lack of time instead of thinking there’s plenty of time.

MONEY

Money is where scarcity really shows up for most of us. So many of us make decisions, believing that there is not enough money, and then we are unable to achieve our long-term financial goals because we’re so focused on the here and now. And how do we get from paycheck to paycheck or making decisions about investments or business things or personal investments that. I don’t have enough money. So I have to just hold onto what I have, or, and I’m not, I’m not a proponent of wild out of control spending, but when it’s fear-driven and scarcity driven usually does not help us in any way.

Okay. I think an abundance mindset, which we’ll focus on next week helps us to actually achieve our financial goals. That abundance is there and available to you. That there’s plenty of money. And it, it also comes back to if someone has a lot of money. It means that someone else will have less and that’s not necessarily the case.

There’s plenty of money and we just need to make choices and decisions about how we use our money wisely and how we can create more of a flow of money in our lives. So another area that scarcity shows up in is in our re resources, we’re in our belongings. Things that we feel like we need to hold onto because we’re afraid we would lose them sometimes for a sentimental value, but sometimes that you would need this later on and it creates this need.

See how fear creates need. It creates that neediness to hold on to unnecessary things. And that’s what scarcity does when we have scarcity around our resources that we have, or our belongings that we have. It just, it actually like tightens our grip and we’re not able to let go.

SUCCESS

A common area to find scarcity in is success. Just thinking that if one person is successful at something, then it means another person won’t be. And specifically the other person is us. Right. That’s me. That’s what scarcity tells me is that if this person over here is successful, then I won’t. And that is fear-based thinking, did you recognize the underlying theme of fear?

How to recognize Scarcity in your life

You know, all of those examples. So I want you to think about some powerful questions. What happens to your mind when you feel like you have too little? What comes up for you? And how does this scarcity shape your choices and your behaviors? We just talked about several examples. How is it showing up in your life for food for companionship, for time, for money, your resources or belonging? Or in your success or in your career, how is scarcity shaping your choices and your behaviors?

Because it’s those choices and behaviors that determine your results because when your action is driven by fear and scarcity, your action is going to be very different than when you operate from abundance and. This abundance and growth mindset. Okay. So scarcity is not just in our physical resources, but it’s also in our mindset.

It affects our thinking and our feelings. So scarcity focuses the mind automatically and powerfully toward our unfulfilled needs. It robs us of feeling grateful. It creates those feelings of lack and fear rather than grateful and abundant.

Scarcity also makes us very myopic. It focuses us on the here and now. It robs us of obtaining our goals and our aspirations because we’re unable to look forward to where we want to be. All we can focus on is the here and now scarcity makes you myopic. So, because the mind is just focused on the present scarcity, whatever it is that you don’t have or whatever it is that you left.

It makes us overvalue our immediate benefits at the expense of our future ones. And it makes us procrastinate things like medical checkups or exercising, or, um, putting in the work and time necessary needed for building a business or getting a promotion. So we only attend to those urgent things, then we fail to make small investments, even if the future benefits are huge. The last thing that I want to talk about what scarcity does: it depletes our cognitive resources. We only have so many cognitive resources. It’s just a fact. And when we don’t. Use them to look to the future and what we want to become.

We’re only focused we’re hyper-focused on the here and the now then it robs us of our hopes and our dreams, our aspirations, and living the life that we want to have. And it robs us of those things. So here is how you emerge empowered this week. I want you to identify at least one way, one way that you are letting scarcity drive your life and call it for what it is that it’s fear based thinking, and that you are hyper-focused on whatever you lack.

Is it in success, or your resources , belonging, or money? It’s a common one, but there’s never enough money or time. How do you approach your life? Are you always putting out fires? Are you able to be proactive? Not when you’re coming from a scarcity mindset that you simply don’t have enough time. Is your scarcity mindset serving you?

I’ve got to manage your resources. What about for your connections for other people? Is there enough Companionship. What about food? I want you to identify one way. I want you to identify one way that scarcity is showing up in your life. And then I want you to ask yourself this powerful question and, and just thinking back on.

“The mind is everything, what you think you’ll become.” And that is so true. So I want you to ask yourself two really powerful questions. What happens in your mind when you feel like you have too little? And then this next question is how.

Is that scarcity shaping my choices and my behaviors. Those are your powerful questions for the week. And that is how you Emerge Empowered, by identifying where scarcity mindset is showing up in your life. Is your scarcity mindset serving you?

I would bet that it’s not. I know anytime that scarcity shows up in my life and I allow things to hold me back because I don’t think there’s enough, It never serves me as well! Is your scarcity mindset serving you well?