When I was young, one of our family friends introduced me to “transformers.”
We’d go to flea markets in California and find transformers that people were getting rid of, and the collect them. I built a decent stash of Decepticons and Autobots – I still have a couple…
The old versions of these were pretty cool. They’d shape-shift from different animals into some form of a robotic warrior… This was before all of the different missile and trajectory attachments.
I wanted to talk about another kind of transformation though.
When we transform something, we “flip” it, or shape-shift it. In day to day life, this comes through “reframing,” and it’s mostly an internal narrative thing – how we are “thinking” about a situation.
See, a lot of times people like to talk about having either a “scarce” or “abundant” mindset, but that’s not entirely accurate.
What we do have is a mindset that can either transform the perception of the situation, or not.
When we run out of coffee beans to grind in the morning, we’re in a position of scarcity. There is no more. It’s no help to say that there is abundance, when clearly, there’s not.
The transformer mindset notices this, and then uses “reframing” to flip the perception of the situation.
So there’s no more coffee in our house (a spatial constraint) – perhaps the neighbour? Perhaps down the road at the store? Perhaps we can have a couple teas if it’s the caffeine we seek? Perhaps we start a business of roasting our own beans so we never run out?
Interestingly, once we flip into abundance – perhaps we start the business and all of a sudden have too much stock of the coffee beans – we have a new problem set. We need more space to store it, we need more customers to buy it etc.
For the transformer, “scarcity” problem sets lead to creative thinking, and a new solution. This takes us to an abundant situation, and a new problem set.
The scarcity and abundance spectrum is one of flow, not something that is fixed.
So, at a personal level, getting hung up on whether you’re in a state of “scarcity” or “abundance” isn’t helpful beyond finding a nice label to identify with.
But seeing that language and ways of inquiry can shift your mindset into that of a “transformer” can be powerful.
*Recommended reading here is “A Beautiful Constraint” – Adam Morgan & Mark Barden
