The Buzz: The Year of Abundance and Appreciation

For the past several years, I have designated a Winters Group theme for the year. The theme for 2022 is abundance and appreciation. We live in a society where most people operate from a scarcity mindset whether they are conscious of it or not. The culture wars that are escalating right now have their roots in hatred and fear, fueled by a scarcity mentality — “If I give you more, then I get less” — rather than a worldview that there is more than enough for us all if we share.

The Western world takes individualism to excess, which also contributes to our inability to come from a place of abundance rather than scarcity. The preoccupation with “me” and my needs rather than “we” and our collective needs is rooted in scarcity thinking. The scarcity mindset thrives on an “us and them” worldview with the need to blame “them” for everything that is deemed to be wrong in your life. This leaves little room for appreciation and gratitude for what we have and little desire to share with others. 

The government, the workplace, political systems, and our education systems all operate from a scarcity, fixed-pie mentality where the powerful get most of the pieces and the powerless are left with the crumbs. Even if we developed strategies to make the pie bigger, the proportions would not likely change because of the belief by too many that the marginalized do not deserve more. Researchers at New York University conducted a study during the 2008 recession that showed whites were even more prone to a race-determined scarcity mindset during the economic downturn. Asked to allocate a fixed amount of money to different people, the darker-skinned images used in the experiment were given less.

Donald Trump’s polarizing, divisive messaging over the past six years has given permission to normalize a scarcity approach to lure voters, change laws, and even perpetuate violence. “Those others are trying to take what we have, what we care about, and it must be stopped by any means necessary,” seems to be the rallying cry.  

According to many experts, the current culture war between the so-called conservatives and progressives is based on fear of extinction of the dominant. As the U.S. continues to get “browner,” the white power structure thinks it is in jeopardy of losing or at least having to share power with the growing Black and Brown population. Notwithstanding the underlying racism at play, it is also about power hoarding and scarcity thinking. 

The fear of extinction and losing power has gotten so out of hand that “war” is an appropriate descriptor for what we are witnessing. Citizens being threatened at school board meetings over mask mandates (“I know where you live, and I will come and get you”); calls to burn books that tell the truth about slavery and racism in this country; Twitter posts that suggest progressive members of Congress should be killed; gerrymandering to disenfranchise Black and Brown voters; immigration debates; judges who show blatant bias toward white defendants, such as the McMichael (on trial for the murder of Ahmaud Arbery) and Rittenhouse cases. And of course, the January 6 insurrection is the most prominent example in recent history of a “by any means necessary” desperate attempt to uphold and preserve the white supremacist structure. 

Maybe the roots of racism are just too deep to even envision a world where our hearts and minds operate from abundance rather than scarcity. Even so, I would like to imagine what that world might look like. In an abundance mindset world …  

• We would genuinely care about the humanity inherent in every single person, and understand that their existence enhances, not diminishes, our own.
• We would understand that scarcity is an issue of poor allocation of resources, not a lack of resources.
• We would understand that if I am the top 1% of the wealthiest people, I have abundance, and if I share some of that with those who are on the bottom 1% of income levels, we all win. And yes, that definitely could be achieved by more taxes on the wealthy. But wouldn’t it even be more powerful if the wealthy shared without a government mandate?
• CEOs would no longer be paid 351 times that of the lower paid workers. CEOs would willingly and with appreciation take less compensation so that all workers could be paid more. I know that this thinking is the antithesis of capitalism, and I may be labeled a socialist. However, if we could get past limiting political labels, we could see how paying everyone a living wage actually benefits all of us. It fuels the economy to satisfy the capitalists and takes care of the citizenry for socialist leaners.
• Public schools that primarily educate Black and Brown children in this county would no longer be grossly underfunded compared to schools in suburban and rural areas where the student body is primarily white. 
• Our focus would be on cooperation, collaboration, and trust building rather than unhealthy competition and mean-spiritedness.

These are just a few of a plethora of examples of how abundance thinking would change the current trajectory. In essence, if we believed in abundance rather than scarcity, our laws and policies would be designed so that there are no longer the “haves and the have nots,” only the “haves.” We would be able to spend less time trying to figure out how to solve poverty, pay inequality, educational and health disparities, and more time on lifting each other up in gratitude and appreciation.

Our team at The Winters Group is going to be intentional in 2022 about living and leading from abundance and lavishing our clients and each other with immense appreciation. How about you? Maybe we cannot change the systems that perpetuate scarcity, but we can certainly live abundantly and with appreciation in our respective spheres of influence and maybe it will catch on.