Bridges Newsletter: December 2007

A Culture of Abundance

By Richard W. Cronen & Angela C. Gonzalez

The Power of One

Each workplace holds a wonderfully unique culture—a rich diversity of human talents, customs, ethnicities and generations—that reveals itself in daily work activity, with each person contributing in their own way.   Contrary to popular opinion, culture cannot be dictated by corporate policy nor mandated by leadership.  It is both created and expressed by how each person goes about his or her daily activity.  The creation of a Culture is every person’s responsibility, and the care and nurturing of your culture begins with the actions you take everyday. 

Recognize that the power of one—your unlimited potential to contribute—is the dynamic force supporting a positive, productive, abundant workplace culture.  A culture that elevates individual ingenuity, believes in possibility, and boosts business success - A Culture of Abundance.

As an individual you can make a difference in every thing you do
when you generate abundance in yourself and others.

What Do You Believe?

Abundance (or scarcity) is a choice that is entirely up to you, the individual.  If you think it is possible to create and work in a culture of abundance, your thoughts will lead to actions that will make this happen, and you will attract the support of like-minded people.  Wallace Wattles, a pioneer thinker and writer on the topic of prosperity believed that:

"A person's way of doing things is the direct result of the way he thinks about things.
To do things in the way you want to do them, you will have to acquire the
ability to think the way you want to think."

If you are a workplace leader, do you cultivate an attitude of possibility and inclusion, one that believes in your employees' abundant potential?  Do you believe in your own potential?  Are you motivated by scarcity or abundance?  Your beliefs affect your actions and your results.

A culture of abundance emphasizes possibility.
It favors membership over mere employment.
It is future focused.

Remember This

The most formidable obstacle to abundance, to seeing possibility in any form, is your mental attitude.  Tennis coach Timothy Gallwey, author of The Inner Game of Tennis, realized that all of his students had the physical ability to play tennis, but what truly influenced peak performance was the positive mental attitude some players possessed.  Is it possible that you sabotage yourself and others with negative or counter-productive thoughts and attitudes?  Negative thoughts and attitudes will result in a crisis of reduced expectations that, like an attitude of abundance, will become a negative reinforcing cycle.

The key to an abundant mentality starts with your thoughts because what you think about, is what you bring about.  Holding positive beliefs and positive self-talk about yourself and others, means that like attracts like.  Here are eight actions you can take every day for generating abundance in your life and workplace:

1. Cultivate an attitude of gratitude. Be grateful for where you are, what you have accomplished, and that today gives you the opportunity to be, do, have, and give more.
2. Ask for what you want. Be straightforward and honest about your needs and expectations.
3. Act with confidence.  Know your strengths, talents and challenges, and be comfortable with what you find.  Extend that confidence to others.
4. Trust others.  To gain trust, you must first give trust and assume that others act in good faith.
5. Be accountable for your own actions before you shift accountability to others.
6. Focus on the results, not on the process or doing it your way.
7. Remain open to influence.  Model the behavior you want to see in others and be prepared to change!
8. Learn to give constructive feedback that gets the job done AND preserves the business relationship, stick with the facts and don’t make it personal.  Learn to eliminate the word "but" from your vocabulary when telling people what you liked.

Every person is 100% responsible for the results they get.  You have the opportunity to choose between alternatives that are presented to you over and over again (abundance or scarcity?)  You make choices that lead to the results you get.  Make your choices count for you and others!

 

Surrounded by Abundance

In the days of the mighty sailing ships, when brave souls voyaged into the unknown, dependent on the winds and their as-yet incomplete knowledge of geography and navigation, one of the greatest and most dangerous challenges was to traverse the area known as "the doldrums."

Extending about 30 degrees on either side of the equator, the doldrums are subject to days, weeks, even months of no wind at all. After a long and difficult crossing from Europe to South America, lying becalmed in the doldrums — with no land in sight and with the ship's supply of fresh water dwindling — was a terrible and life-threatening situation.

But history and legend offer us some fascinating insights into the power of our own thinking and belief.  Back then no one had yet figured out how to determine longitude, although latitude was easily calculated.  So if you could not see recognizable land, you could only know in what band of latitude you currently were.  Exactly where you were in that ring around the earth was, at that time, unknowable.

And so it happened that at times a ship would fetch up off the coast of South America, out of sight of shore, fresh water supplies exhausted and death knocking at the door.  Then, with what must have been the sweetest sound those sailors could ever have hoped for, the lookout would suddenly call out that a ship was approaching in the distance.

Once the ship was within hailing distance, the cry went up: "Water!  Give us water!" And the reply would come back, "Lower your buckets over the side."

You see, although the sailors didn't know it, they were afloat in a virtual river of drinkable and life-sustaining water flowing from the mouth of the powerful Amazon River, which carries nearly 20 percent of all the earth's runoff water into the sea with such force that the fresh (or brackish but safe) water flows as far as 100 miles out into the Atlantic.

The sailors, dying of thirst, only THOUGHT they were experiencing lack.  The REALITY was that they were afloat in a literal sea of abundance. Exactly what they needed was within their reach the whole time, but the APPEARANCE of scarcity and their BELIEF in that appearance threatened to overpower them.  They could have died — and many certainly did — believing in lack while surrounded by abundance.

This story was reprinted with permission from the “Science of Getting Rich Network.”  http://www.scienceofgettingrich.net