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The Nature of Leadership and Career

read time 6-8 minutes

Welcome to the FIRST ISSUE of The Nature of Leadership and Career.

This is a weekly newsletter where I provide 1 illustration and ~3 ideas to help you connect to your career, leadership, or work journey in a way that is inspired by one or more of psychology, neuroscience, the natural environment and biomimicry.

Today at a glance

• Illustration of the week

  Scarcity and abundance loops

• The Nature of the Mind

  Scarcity vs a scarcity mindset

  The abundance mindset

  3 ways a scarcity mindset impacts your brain and behaviour

• The Nature of Leadership and Career

  Infographics on career and leadership behaviours under scarcity vs abundance mindsets

  3 ways to override your scarcity mindset

Illustrations of the Week

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The original loop is from the Happiness Project. I created the second version because in some circumstances it’s hard to feel grateful. e.g. when in acute pain after being made redundant or after someone’s death.

What is scarcity vs a scarcity mindset?

Isn’t it wild to look back on COVID-19 when humans went a little crazy and started hoarding toilet paper?

Was there actually a shortage of toilet paper?

Or did people’s fear result in hoarding behaviour creating the shortage?

Probably the latter.

The COVID toilet paper fiasco gives us a great way to think about the difference between scarcity vs scarcity mindset.

Scarcity: the mismatch between the shortage of supply and the unlimited human demand or desire for it.

Scarcity mindset: focusing attention on the scarce resource or what we lack. The belief that resources are finite, and that if someone obtains something, it leaves less for us or others.

Here’s the catch…

The Nature of the Mind

3 ways scarcity mindset impacts our mind.

1. Being in a scarcity mindset severely impacts our decision-making abilities

A recent neuroscience study suggests that feelings of scarcity impact the same neural mechanisms in the Orbito-Frontal Cortex (OFC) brain region.

The OFC is used for goal-directed decision making. Specifically how much we value things e.g. how important we think toilet paper is and how much we are willing to pay for it.

The brain isn’t great at multi-tasking. So those neural mechanisms have ‘less juice’ to focus on making clear, considered decisions.

2. A scarcity mindset (especially relating to financial scarcity or poverty) reduces our cognitive functioning as our mental resources are consumed with concern and survival.

A study conducted with farmers showed that they had reduced cognitive functioning before a harvest, when poor, as opposed to after the harvest, when rich.

3. A scarcity mindset reduces our ability to respond with empathy to other people’s pain

A super recent study found a difference in brain function when participants were primed to be in a abundance mindset vs a scarcity mindset. The scarcity mindset participants showed significantly lower ability to respond with empathy.

Brain nerd alert: Scarcity mindset impacted both bottom up processing in the front-central region, and top down processing in the centro parietal region.

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction

..according to Newton.

In the case of scarcity mindset the opposite is the abundance mindset.

Abundance mindset: focusing our attention of what we already have, and the belief that someone else’s gain doesn’t equal less for us or others.

The Nature of Leadership and Career

How can scarcity and abundance mindsets impact our leadership and career behaviours?

We can now laugh at COVID toilet paper hoarding.

But shit gets real when we relate the scarcity mindset to our own careers, and leadership.

Here are attitudes and behaviours that you might see in yourself and others.

3 ways to override scarcity mindset

“Oh shit! I see myself in some of the career and/or leadership scarcity thinking.”

Don’t worry. You’re not alone.

We can all transition between both mindsets depending on the context.

In many of the studies mentioned in the first section, researchers actually ‘primed’ people into a scarcity or abundance mindset through various cues.

Which means you too can prime your brain into abundance thinking.

1. Increase your self-awareness by asking yourself

• How often am I in a state of scarcity thinking?

• Which situations trigger this mindset?

• What impact has a scarcity mindset had on my decisions and behaviours in the past?

• How has this impacted myself or others?

This is an important step. We often need strong evidence to overcome the effort threshold required for behaviour change.

2. Prime feelings of hope or gratitude to override fear

This point refers back to today’s illustrations.

Priming an abundance mindset impacts a different part of your brain. This frees up the OFC for decision making.

2 ways you might want to do this:

• Visualize your ideal outcome and imagine yourself in this state. Visualization fires up the same brain pathways you use when you actually do the task based on research done by Harvard psychiatrist

  Srinivasan S. Pillay.

• Do gratitude meditations or keep a gratitude journal, or write a thank you letter.

• Keep a list of all the times you have been in and acted form an abundant mindset. Read over this when you feel fear of not having enough, or read regularly to strengthen the abundant thinking neural pathways.

  WARNING: the goal is NOT to deny your feeling of fear. It is to recognize and move through it in a way that benefits your brains ability to function optimally.

3. Travel back to the past

…..in your mind that is.

Researchers believe that the scarcity mindset is often triggered by prior experience of insufficient resources.

We are often living by scarcity stories from our past. This can impact the narrative of our present and future.

Explore how you might rewrite this by yourself, with a loved one, a coach, or counsellor.

For an epic read on this I recommend Viola Davis’ autobiography Finding Me.

3 ways to continue the conversation

• Send me a) feedback on this issue b) any leadership or career questions or topics you want to know more about.

• Reach out to collaborate on an illustration, or anything to do with psychology, leadership, career, or social biomimicry.

• Contact me if you would like to explore leadership or career coaching together.

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