A Culture of Scarcity is something Brene Brown speaks of through her work. It is a culture that is preoccupied with lack. Not enough money, not enough love, not enough resources. In this culture, we focus on our inadequacies. In this culture we’re afraid of not being enough, and we respond to this ‘not-enoughness’ by comparing to each other, putting each other down, or by attempting to prove how amazing we are. We’re hypervigilant of threats, maintaining an image of our idealized self, and covering up the fact that we don’t feel like enough.
In doing this we’re attempting to hold power over others, to protect ourselves by creating a false sense of safety, that keeps us from having to be vulnerable, and honest about our true feelings. If we’re doing this, we will never be fully seen.
This sense of lack comes from trauma. Trauma can keep us trapped in cycles of emotions such as guilt, shame, fear, pain, anger, apathy, and jealousy. Until we resolve these cycles, cleanse and release them from our system, they will continue to perpetuate scarcity culture. Remember 70% of the United States has dealt with some form of trauma. Until the culture is fully aware of and conscious to trauma – all the effects it has on not just the individual, but on the collective – and how to deal with it safely and effectively, we will be holding everyone back from achieving their potential. Our collective potential.
When we’re in these lower vibrational emotions, our nervous systems, and hearts contract. This holds us back the truth and intelligence that lives in our hearts. As we rewire our nervous systems for safety, our hearts open, and we live more in our truth.
We’ll call it intuition.
~
To protect ourselves from Scarcity Culture is something called The Circle of Safety. This is something that quality leaders do well. They create an environment of safety from the outside world. Where employees, teammates, and managers feel supported, protected, and taken care of. This way they can thrive and do their best work. This is something Simon Sinek talks about a lot. That environments of safety foster trust, collaboration, and innovation.
In these environments people feel more comfortable to take risks, share new ideas, communicate more openly and honestly. In these environments there’s more connection, things run more smoothly, and quickly. Harmony within the system, which means more positive outcomes for the organization.
Leaders create the culture of safety by working for the benefit of everyone within the organization. The question they live by is ‘How May I Serve?’ When this tone is set, people naturally think about what benefits the whole, as opposed to what’s in it for them. It’s a matter of head or heart, me or we, unity or division.
Trauma can’t be fully healed unless we’re existing in the Circle of Safety. Deep external safety allows us to unwind our nervous system, release, and begin to create the experience of internal safety. The more this happens for any individual or community, the less we’re projecting our inner wounding onto the world.
The more we raise the frequency of planet Earth.
~
The Observer Effect speaks of the possibility that when something is observed it can change the properties of what is observed. Looking at something, changes it. This effects holds true for people, that as we see them they begin to change to fit our image of them, if we spend enough time observing.
If you put someone in a toxic, harmful environment, they won’t grow as well. But if you put someone in a healing, safe, and empowering environment – they’ll grow, really well.
Rich Litvin uses the phrase ‘I Coach Kings’. Which is a way of saying the he sees the King in everyone he serves. He draws the ‘King’ out of each of his clients, because he sees them as they could be, and for who they are.
Anais Nin said ‘We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are’.
This is to say, that we can’t truly see someone, unless we’re coming from a place of love. Unless you’ve met yourself.
Fear is an illusion.
I See You.
~
With love,
Broderick
