Abundance vs. Scarcity: Choosing the Right Mindset for Success

Author: Whitney Munro

The mindset we bring to work can significantly influence our own success and the culture we foster in our teams and organizations – and it starts at the top. I strongly feel executives must choose between two approaches to growth: one of abundance, or scarcity.

A scarcity mindset operates under the belief that success is a zero-sum game. When someone else achieves something great, it feels like a loss for you. Information-sharing feels risky, external partners can’t be trusted, and you start focusing more on war games than work.

Sure, you could set yourself apart from the pack with innovative and excellent services and products. But instead, you let fear take the wheel, trying to knock competition out of the running with things like non-competes, secrecy, and outright trickery.

There is another way.

With an abundance mindset, you have faith that with billions of potential clients and customers in the world, there is more than enough success to go around. Because you are confident in the value you’re providing for clients and colleagues, you are quick to lend a helping hand, share information, and teach people what you know.

Abundance fosters a culture of collaboration over competition. Your clients and customers are drawn to you not because you’ve shut the door on others, but because you consistently deliver exceptional value. They return not just for the product or service you provide, but for the trust and relationships you've built.

It’s not always easy to choose abundance. I remember when FLEX partnered with a client, and we learned that one of their other consultants had stolen our proposal for a unique core function of our business and was pitching it to new business. It was a bad feeling.

The plan they stole had been tailored to the needs of a specific client by our team. It was never meant to be mass distributed to prospective businesses as a template (if you’ve been here for a while, you know we don’t do those). They tried to take a shortcut by shoehorning new business into misfit solutions, and it didn’t work.

It was a difficult lesson to learn but a necessary one. The abundance mindset requires us to ignore these loud distractions and put clients and customers first, always.

Stay focused on what you do best, do it well, and enjoy doing it.

When we work hard and produce good work, quality clients take notice and success follows. We don’t need to make the world smaller to make our businesses feel bigger. In the end, the choice is ours.