How to Cultivate an Abundance Mentality
Stephen Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” is a book that needs little introduction. Since its original publication in 1989, “7 Habits” has been translated into dozens of languages and sold millions of copies worldwide. You probably have an edition at home or the office, whether or not you’ve ever read it. The nuggets of advice doled out in the book’s main chapters remain as relevant today as they did 30 years ago, but I’d like to talk about something else from the text today.
In “7 Habits,” Covey coined the phrase “abundance mentality,” to describe a particular way of looking at work and the world. Covey didn’t realize it at the time, but urging people to develop an abundance mentality may end up being his greatest contribution to leadership theory and workplace harmony. If you’re finding yourself competing with your fellow team members rather than collaborating with them, an injection of abundance is just what your office needs.
What is an abundance mentality?
If I were to define the abundance mentality in with a single phrase, it would be, “There’s enough to go around.” Whether we’re talking about resources, opportunities, accolades, or anything else, a person with an abundance mentality believes there’s more than enough for everyone. Compare that with a scarcity mindset, which views everything desirable as finite. For somebody with a scarcity mindset, work is a zero-sum game. Every plaudit that goes to a team member is one that doesn’t go to you, and so on. If you possess an abundance mentality, you’re more likely to collaborate rather than compete with your team members.
Whether a person projects a mindset of scarcity or abundance doesn’t just say a lot about how they view the world and workplace; it also reveals a great deal about how they view themselves. As Covey himself writes, “An abundance mentality springs from internal security, not from external rankings, comparisons, opinions, possessions, or associations.” Those with a scarcity mentality, on the other hand, believe life is a rat race where everyone is in eternal competition. They compare themselves to others at every turn, they are more likely to suffer from self-serving bias, and they define their success based on external factors. You can sum up their view with another well-worn phrase: Me against the world.
Why abundance works better
We live in an increasingly collaborative workplace environment. The promise of technology is the promise of connectivity, of bringing us together no matter where we are. It’s not much of a leap to see how much more compatible a mindset of abundance is in our tech-centric reality. In 2020, nobody succeeds as a silo, and it’s a lot harder to work together if, deep down, you view your team members as adversaries. Creating an atmosphere of scarcity is also a problem of leadership. Leaders who promote scarcity-based thinking never bring their teams together, because they don’t share openly and freely with their teams.
I recently spoke to Gino Blefari, CEO of HomeService of America, for an episode of my Breaking Beliefs podcast. He related to me that even in sales, a world-famous for commissions and other scarcity-style incentives, the consensus is shifting toward favoring abundance. “As sales start to see, you see a mindset of abundance as opposed to a mindset of scarcity,” Blefair told me. “In a lot of the older salespeople, it was scarcity, ‘If I helped that person, I'm getting less.’ That's changed. That's evolved over time as people have studied. It’s a universal law that you don't get until you give. Good salespeople are starting to learn that more and more.” And what Blefari says of sales is true of every department.
Abundance outside the office
Cultivating a mindset of abundance is equally beneficial outside of a professional context. Social media forces us to compare our lives to those of others at all times. Worse still, we’re comparing our actual life to the idealized versions other people present. If you fall into the trap of defining your life based on these external voices, and especially if you do so from a perspective of scarcity, you can end up hurting your mental health in a hurry. However, if you have an abundance mentality, you are much less likely to feel this way.
There’s more than enough for all of us to grow into the people we want to be. Once we acknowledge that fact, we can start to see abundance where we once saw scarcity. That shift in perspective can change so much, and it will definitely make your more highly effective at whatever you do.