How can you reach what you want with what you have?
I just spent a lovely few days (and drank a lovely few Guinness and Murphy’s, just to be fair) in Dublin at one of our Metronomics meetups with fellow coaches and clients. As often happens, there was a topic weaving its way throughout the two days, largely uninvited and not necessarily on the agenda; popping its head into various conversations.
It was the concept of the Limitation Mindset.
Dr. Ben Hardy and Dan Sullivan dig into the concept in their great “10x is easier than 2x,” book (highly recommended, by the way), comparing what they call the “scarcity” and “abundance” mindsets, respectively. We discussed this book a lot with my fellow Metronomics coaches, but then I also spoke to a few CEO’s. I came to the realization of how deeply ingrained the “Limitation” (which is the term I prefer to the word “Scarcity”, ) mindset can be. And how much this thinking limits its disciples.
The most common way the bastard of Limitation presents itself is in the CEO’s thinking “we can’t do that, because we don’t have…”, “this is hard because our people don’t…”, “forget about it, the labor available…” etcetera, etcetera; you get the gist.
The Growth Mindset, on the other hand, could be summarized using the old adage “When there’s a will, there’s a way.”
As I work with clients around the world, I’m starting to detect patterns in the propensity to either way of thinking. Those patterns are obvious once you think about how we are mentored or raised. Did we or our parents grow up in an “everything is possible,” or in a “get in the line at 4AM to have any chance to bring some bananas home for Christmas,” culture? From that foundation, we can say “one thing led to another” and we have vast differences in the density of successful businesses in different areas around the world.
How do we train ourselves to abandon the Limiting Mindset and switch to Growth?
First, we need to be aware. You’re reading this, so good on you, first step done. Then, start with the WANT. What do you WANT to happen? What do you WANT to achieve? Realize your goals are truly possible. Ignore what you have now. Start at what you want. Then start working backwards, to what needs to be true for your want to become reality. Then and only then look at the gap between what is true today and what needs to be true, and work on ways of closing the gap.
The ongoing struggle is to catch yourself, or the members of your team, when you slip back into the Limiting Mindset. A coach can and should help here, too.
Don’t expect this mental switch to be easy. You are effectively rewiring your brain here (for those interested, read up on neuroplasticity – fascinating, and relevant).
So, which mindset do you have most of the time?
