There are two mindsets that tend to dominate a leader’s life. While they don’t coexist, each leader tends to lean in the direction of one or the other. Furthermore, each mindset has a profound impact on our personal lives, our leadership capacity, and the teams and organizations we lead. If we’re not intentional about how we think, our lives and our leadership will be quickly undermined by the unrelenting grip of fear.
The Scarcity Mindset
The first kind of mindset revolves entirely around scarcity. When you were a kid, did your parents ever order a pizza for you and your friends. If so, did you ever find yourself quickly calculating how many slices each of you would get? A scarcity mindset says, “I better get mine first or there won’t be enough.” Unfortunately, this same mindset shows up in leadership.
When a leader possesses a scarcity mindset, everything is viewed through the lens of limitations. These leaders often say things like, “We don’t have enough money,” or “We don’t have enough volunteers,” or “We’ll never have the same resources the church down the street has.” Their dominant focus is on what they don’t have, and therefore can’t do.
The danger in the scarcity mindset is that it operates from a foundation of fear. Leaders with this mindset are too scared to take a risk, support a new project, or let go of power. Simply put, limitations become their lens for decision-making. As a result, vision fades, the best team members leave, and the faith to try anything new evaporates. In the end, scarcity-minded leaders never live up to their God-given potential, and they often steward resources and opportunity poorly.
The Abundance Mindset
The abundance mindset, on the other hand, recognizes the limitless nature of opportunity. They aren’t worried about getting their slice of pizza, because they believe there’s enough ingredients to make another pizza.
Abundance-minded leaders don’t blindly ignore their lack of resources and limitations. Instead, they refuse to give those limitations the final authority over their future. They look for best practices, innovate new ideas, and search for new opportunities. They’re less likely to take “No” for an answer. They’re more likely to live from a posture of wisdom-filled faith rather than crippling fear.
Instead of saying, “We don’t have enough money,” abundance-minded leaders say, “How can we get the money we need?” Instead of saying, “We don’t have enough volunteers,” they ask, “Who have we not asked to serve?” Instead of saying, “We’ll never have the resources the church down the street has,” they say, “What resources do we have, and how can we leverage them for the greatest impact possible?”
Exchanging Mindsets
If you find your thinking leaning in the direction of scarcity rather than abundance, you can make a shift in the right direction. It’s not easy, but you can deliberately choose an abundance mindset. How? Start with these three steps.
1. Express Gratitude Daily
Why not start a gratitude journal where you record two or three things you are grateful for each day? This practice will begin training your mind to focus on the positive rather than the negative. It will help you see the goodness of God and the blessing He has already entrusted to you. If you expressed gratitude for three things each day, you would accumulate 21 expressions of gratitude in a week, and 630 in a month. That’s a lot to be thankful for. It wouldn’t take long to start recalibrating your attitude toward abundance rather than scarcity. It wouldn’t take long for the posture o your heart to lean in the direction of thankfulness.
2. Give Generously
People with scarcity mindsets are rarely generous people. They’re too afraid of what they might lose or that they’re resources will run dry. The by-product of this mindset is greed. The only way to break the back of greed is to give…generously. Proverbs 11:24-25 says, “The world of the generous gets larger and larger; the world of the stingy gets smaller and smaller. The one who blesses others is abundantly blessed; those who help others are helped” (MSG).
3. Release Power
Finally, to cultivate an abundance mindset, release power to other members of your team. If you have to make every decision, you’ll control your way into scarcity. As author and pastor Craig Groeschel says, “You can have control or you can have growth, but you can’t have both.” Release control today. Share authority. Give away power.
Here’s the strange part of developing an abundance mindset. When you hear “abundance,” it’s easy to think about getting more. After all, to live in abundance don’t you have to acquire more than you currently have?
But the paradoxical truth is that every step toward an abundance mindset is focused on giving more…expressing gratitude, giving generously, and releasing power. The focus is on expressing, not securing, giving not getting, releasing not acquiring. And as you do, God has a way of providing you with what you need. Most importantly, your heart begins to look more like Jesus.
So, why not begin making the exchange today? Why not peel your fingers off the scarcity mindset and begin leaning in the direction of an abundance mindset? Express gratitude. Give generously. Release power. As you do, greed and fear will lose their grip on your heart, and joy will flood your soul.
