The phone rings. He’s a friend of yours who just landed a recurring role on a great TV series. She is ecstatic; her voice sings and screams with high-pitched excitement. She is so grateful to share her moment with you. Despite your genuine desire to rejoice at your friend’s good news, a pang of anxiety flares in the pit of your stomach. Your heart starts racing, your breathing becomes shallow, your face turns red, you even feel like crying. Worst of all, you are ashamed of your inability to enjoy your friend’s success.
When you have a full, visceral response to hearing about another’s achievement, it can be indicative of deep psycho-spiritual conditioning known as the scarcity mentality. The scarcity mentality is a world view rooted in the belief that there is not enough. There is not enough success, not enough wealth, and not enough love to go around. The saying of the scarcity mentality is that someone must lose for you to win.
This mindset is often encoded early in life. If we experience childhoods where there was in fact “not enough,” where our physical, emotional, or spiritual needs were not met, scarcity can easily become the lens through which we view the world. This worldview often motivates tremendous drive, but it also leaves us hypervigilant, incessantly comparing and competing with those around us, and making us fundamentally distrustful of life.
The opposite of a scarcity mindset is an abundance mindset. An abundance paradigm views the world in terms of unlimited potential, where there is the possibility of enough to go around. If you identify with a scarcity mindset, you may view the above sentence with skepticism and denial, or equate an abundance perspective with a misleading utopian vision. Instead of a Pollyanna-style denial of injustice, however, an abundance mindset views the world’s inequalities as stemming from awareness of scarcity on an individual and collective level. World hunger is not the result of a shortage of food, it is a product of national and global policies rooted in greed and scarcity. While there may be a finite amount of oil on earth, there is a huge amount of alternative energy available.
An abundance mindset is based on the spiritual principle of interconnectedness. Abundance allows us to experience ourselves as more than just separate animals at war with each other for the last bit of food, but as part of a collective where everyone has a vital role to play, and we are in this together. While competition still plays a natural role in daily life, when an expectation is disappointed, when someone else gets the job, the sting isn’t immense enough to shake your core. It doesn’t become a Herculean task to wish someone well because you have an innate trust that they will take care of you too.
What is so pernicious about a scarcity mentality is that it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. When you see that the world is scarce and you perceive the success of others as a threat, you project an air of despair that is discouraging toward opportunity. The old adage “don’t network, make friends” comes to mind. When you go into a situation from a scarcity mindset, all you see is what others can do for you. This schedule is transparent and usually makes people run! When you can rest in a place of abundance, you open up to be of service. You are able to authentically connect with others and radiate an attractive and positive energy. Wisdom traditions throughout the centuries reiterate that you only get what you give. This does not mean martyrdom, nor does it mean feigning philanthropy, or repressing jealousy or shadow. It means doing the inner work of dismantling scarcity conditioning and realigning yourself with an abundance mindset that can foster inspiration and generosity for yourself and others. Ultimately, it’s a much easier way to live.
Copyright Meredith Hines MA 2011
