The Scarcity Paradigm and Its Manifestations
Recently, I had the privilege of sitting down with Jennifer Cohen, co-founder of Seven Stones Leadership and co-author of “the 7 laws of enough,” for a conversation that touched the core of what keeps so many of us from flourishing. As we explored why fear, scarcity, and separation dominate our lives, and how we might shift into a paradigm of sustainable abundance, I was reflecting that we are drowning in knowledge but parched for practice.
A powerful insight that Jennifer shared was how our economic model itself is fundamentally based on scarcity and debt. A commodity that is abundant isn’t worth much; a commodity that is scarce drives up its value. We’ve manufactured scarcity, especially around something as fundamental as food, making it a commodity that only some can access if they have enough money.
I see this scarcity mindset manifesting every day in my organizational work. I’m thinking of a conversation with a chief HR officer at a Fortune 10 company who, despite her impressive position, confessed: “All my life I felt I didn’t belong in that room. I didn’t feel enough.” Here was someone at the pinnacle of corporate success, still operating from a place of “not enough.”
This is the distortion field we’re living in. When we operate from scarcity, we’re not confident, we’re not playing full out, and we’re certainly not creating conditions that allow others to flourish. Instead, we perpetuate the very conditions of scarcity we’re trying to escape.
Sustainable Abundance: A New Paradigm
Twenty years ago, Jennifer joined a group exploring the work of Lynn Twist, who had distinguished what she called the “three toxic myths of scarcity.” They began asking: What if my day were created from inside the possibility of enough rather than from the culture of scarcity we’re marinating in?
The result was the concept of “sustainable abundance”, a term deliberately chosen because “sufficiency” made people think they were being asked to settle for less. But sustainable abundance is something entirely different. It’s the integration of two essential truths:
The sustainable: That which is reciprocal, ethical, and just. The sustaining of life means you don’t just take, you give. You consider how people and systems are treated.
The abundance: The spiritual and literal truth that there is bounty available to all beings at all times. Not a scarcity of love, not a scarcity of time, not a scarcity of resources to care for all of us.
As I often remind people: the planet has enough for all our needs, even if it might not have enough for all our wants. And here’s the critical insight and all the research on happiness confirms this. Once you meet a baseline of economic needs (which is much smaller than most think), there is no correlation between happiness and what you have. In fact, for many, there’s an inverse correlation.
The Water We’re Swimming In
One of my favorite teaching stories is about two fish swimming when an older fish passes by and asks, “Hey, how’s the water?” The younger fish look at each other confused: “What’s water?”
This is precisely our situation. We’re swimming in a sea of scarcity, fear, and separation, polluted, toxic water, and we don’t even know it. Maybe that’s why shopping isn’t fixing how we feel. Maybe another car isn’t going to do it either.
Jennifer and her colleague Gina LaRoche spent a decade meeting weekly as a collective, with daily one-on-one conversations with practice partners. This wasn’t casual exploration, —it was rigorous inquiry into how to defy the gravity of the context we’re in and step into the truth of enoughness.
From Surviving to Thriving
The difference between operating from sustainable abundance versus scarcity is the difference between surviving and thriving. We can have it all and still not flourish. We’ll always feel less than, always feel not enough, no matter how much money, power, fame, or possessions we accumulate. Some of the most materially wealthy people I’ve encountered are among the most miserable.
Jennifer shared a story about a billionaire who said: “It’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to me. I’m living in a distortion field so profound now I don’t know whether my relationships are real. It brings me further away from the truth.”
Our happiness doesn’t live in our having. It lives in who we’re being, in our connection to the everything that we are fundamentally a part of.
The Practice of Enoughness
Knowledge alone won’t transform us. As I’ve learned in my work with Olympic athletes and Fortune 500 leaders alike, we need practice. Jennifer shared three powerful practices that emerged from their two decades of work:
- Find a practice buddy. Call the same person every single day to create your day together. Ask: Where am I coming from? Am I situating myself in the toxic soup of scarcity, or am I choosing to stand in abundance?
- What’s happening right now? Develop a simple meditative practice. Notice what’s actually present in this moment. Then ask the follow-up question: How is this moment already enough?
- Gratitude as receiving. End each day by noting three good things that happened. Focus on the good, because your brain’s negativity bias will always pull you toward what’s lacking. You’re making gains every day. Even failures contain learnings.
I would add my own practice to this: each morning, choose an intention for how you’re going to be; mindful, grateful, purposeful, loving.
You can’t choose what comes your way, but you can always choose how you meet it.
The Invitation
The 7 laws of enough that Jennifer and Gina developed, from “stories matter” to “love is the answer”, offer us a map for this journey from scarcity to sustainable abundance. They invite us to turn inward, to master our own inner worlds rather than desperately trying to control the outside world.
If enough of us do this work, we will create different realities. We’ll shift from a paradigm where we’re constantly grasping for more to one where we recognize the bounty that’s already here. We’ll move from surviving to thriving, from separation to interbeing, from fear to love.
Because as Jennifer so beautifully put it: love is the answer, no matter what the question is.
Listen to my latest Flourishing Edge podcast with Jennifer Cohen to learn all “the 7 laws of enough”.
Learn more about Jennifer Cohen on LinkedIn.
Listen to the podcast with Ashish and Jennifer Cohen below, You can also listen on Apple Podcasts.
Access and subscribe to all of the episodes of the Flourishing Edge Podcast here.
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