Episode 1: Abundance

You may be asking what abundance thinking has to do with leadership development?’  We offer you the opportunity to consider skillfulness with abundance thinking as important in your leadership development.  Thank you for making use of this opportunity. Our intention is to support you in developing your leadership.

The greatest blocks to abundance for an individual are to be in a state of fear, worry, and paralysis. Fear, worry, and paralysis are never a good formula for wise decision making.

This is magnified when a group of people that make up an organization stay in a state of fear, worry, and paralysis. The collective, in a state of fear and paralysis cannot get their jobs done. When businesses are full of distrust, anger, resentment, and fear àthere is a struggle to survive. They struggle to overcome fear, to overcome their anger and resentment. This is not a state that leads to abundance and positive results. These organizations have poor staff morale and high staff turnover.

Now imagine a formal leader who is able to focus on balance, harmony, and abundance. When there is hope, trust and positive expectancy and positive action, the business has the conditions to flourish producing abundance. The job gets done, positive outcomes and wise decisions result. The business has the conditions to flourish and produce abundance.

The leader sets the pace for the rest of the organization. If the formal leader believes in lack and scarcity, the followers/workers tend to shift into alignment with this belief. Struggle follows.  On the other side of this belief, when the formal leader believes in balance, harmony and abundance, the people involved in the organization tend to align with the belief. This creates the conditions for possibility thinking, which is much more likely to result in abundance and positive outcomes.

We have had experiences in which two organizations had the same amount of resources to work with. One is experiencing abundance and positive outcomes. One is experiencing scarcity and lack. We can track the difference back to an attitude and an energy field that has its roots with the leader at the top of each organization.

How do we develop the capacity for abundance thinking?

1. Get to the truth of what you believe personally about abundance. You will come out of this personal exploration of beliefs recognizing either that you believe that this is a world of abundance, or it is not. Simply put, do you believe that there is abundance or that there is not abundance?
2. Take the time to reflect and to look around you. You might say “I believe in abundance” and yet this is not your experienced reality.  If this is the case, even though you might think the ‘right’ answer is to say you believe in abundance, it is actually more important for you to be true to yourself. This is not to be judged by anyone else. This is about you getting in touch with your true beliefs. A question that can guide you in your exploration is “do you like what you are experiencing?”.  It is imperative that you do the hard work of getting honest with yourself…no one else can do this for you. It may be helpful to journal your thoughts to develop clarity.
3. Find a trusted friend or personal development coach to talk this over with. It may take several tries to get in touch with your beliefs. Usually when you bring it out into your voice and speak it, when you hear your voice, it is clarifying to hear what you are saying you believe.
4. An exercise that might help you to grow your capacity for working with abundance thinking is to go outside in nature and take note of the abundance that you see, hear, feel, and smell. Do your best to get away from commercial property, going into a forest or a park and get as close to nature as you can. If you really look at the ground around you, you may notice things you didn’t notice before: an abundance of insects, of plants, maybe trees and animals. You can experience the sense of abundance in the heart of a city; you just have to pay attention to notice. Abundance is always there.

Strengthening Your Leadership Capacity with Abundance Thinking

Once you have your personal belief about abundance in place, you can grow your capacity to strengthen this belief…in yourself…and through your leadership, in others. Others will pay attention to how you behave, speak, and act. Consistency is important and others will be drawn in, referred to as being in rapport. The more genuinely positive you are, the more you act out of a belief in abundance, those around you will be affected enormously.

The inner work you do with your beliefs about abundance grows your leadership capacity for creating and sustaining an environment in which hope, trust, positive expectancy, and positive action can flourish.

If it makes sense to you, add growing your capacity with abundance thinking into your personal leadership development plan.