What Most Leaders Don't Get about “Mindset” (Challenge #72)

I've always been a little dubious about the abundance mindset thing. Yes, if you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything. but that doesn't mean you have to accomplish everything. And it definitely doesn't mean that if you don’t accomplished your goals, then it's a sign of personal weakness or failure. No matter how much you focus on self-improvement, there are hard limits to what any of us can grow or achieve. And if I may be blunt, some of us and some of our organizations struggle against narrower and harder limits than others in fulfilling our missions, for reasons ranging from social and economic injustice to sheer dumb luck. The impossibility of simply wishing away scarcity with the right mindset is something I've always intuitively understood, even as I pushed against those hard limits in my own leadership career and grown more than I ever dreamed in the process. Why do I understand that so intuitively? Well, an interesting coincidence helped me realize it's because of a hard limit of my own that I've had my whole life. 

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Welcome to the Kind Leadership Challenge, the podcast that empowers leaders to heal their organizations in ten minutes! I’m Dr. Sarah Clark, founder of the Kind Leadership Guild, where I use my PhD in Higher ed leadership and nearly 2 decades of experience in academic libraries to coach a community of educational and library leaders who are working to build a better world without burning out. 

Kind Leaders aren’t perfect, which is actually as it should be. In our unique ways, we make tough decisions without becoming jerks. We create impactful and burnout-proof systems for our organizations. And we know that once we stop controlling and start collaborating, even the most ambitious vision can become effortless. Kind Leadership’s pretty simple, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. So if you’re up for a challenge, stick around as I teach you how to create a resilient, thriving legacy that will strengthen your community long after you’re gone.

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So, to that coincidence. Turns out I had my annual check-in with my cardiologist the day before the first meeting of the redesigned Kind Leadership Guild. Check out episode 2 for more details, but long story short, I have a corrected heart defect that needs monitoring, just to make sure that there are no weird issues sneaking up as I age. My annual cardiologist visits have both changed and not changed since my childhood in the 80s—the technology’s gotten smaller and better, but there’s no longer a big bucket of suckers at the checkout desk. And of course, the existential worry is still there, though more focused on living to cash in my 401K rather than on flunking the presidential fitness test every year. All things considered I’m doing quite well for my years, but I still often come away from those appointments reminded of my mortality, and feeling a mildly toxic obligation to do something useful with my surprisingly healthy life.

So yeah, even though I got my usual clean bill of health, I was in an interesting headspace the next morning as I approached the orientation meeting for the reboot of the kind leadership guild. I’d recruited a few people I knew well for this beta test, and if things went well, we would grow the charter class through the summer with interested colleagues who also want to build a better world without burning out. The previous iteration of the Kind Leadership Guild, a rigorous 6 week course on decision-making, would have made a lot of the hustle hard and over-deliver entrepreneurship gurus I follow proud. But even though members got great results and gave me great testimonials, the program itself had been such a strain on everyone involved that I ended the experiment after two cohorts. Because, in the real world of educational and library leadership, we may have plenty of ambition, but time, energy and money can be a bit more scarce.

That kind of scarcity has always just been a fact of life for me. I have a lot of energy for someone with my wonky plumbing. However, I also use a lot of energy on the day job, my side projects, and my personal life, in part because I don’t know how many more cardiologist visits I will have before my good luck runs out. To explain how this scarcity impacts me, I’ll use the Spoon Theory metaphor that has become popular in the disability community, which I’ll link in the show notes. Basically, think of a spoon as a unit of energy. I use my spoons to power myself through my day as a healthy-ish person who has a few mostly invisible disabilities that need managing. At this point in my life I’m still blessed with a reasonably full drawer of spoons, and the ability to replenish them through exercise and rest. But my spoons are finite, and I do have to budget them to avoid physical and emotional burnout. 

Because of that essential scarcity that can’t be wished away with mindset or life hacks, my goal is to build a happy, energy-efficient life that leaves the planet better than I found it. But in addition to those scarcities, I’m privileged to have a challenging and rewarding day job that I like, that covers my financial needs and most of my wants. Although the kind leadership guild isn’t a nonprofit, and I would be thrilled if it could grow to become the next chapter in my career in the mid to long term, I care a lot more about making a sustainable impact than maximizing the income stream. 

Because my motivations and scarcities are different than your typical entrepreneur, and because I know that many of you listening to this also have less time and energy than you’d like, I opted to keep the kind leadership guild reboot simple. To start, we’d have one zoom meeting a month, maybe add a private discussion group down the road. The minimalist format would also make it possible to charge a more accessible price. Also, I realized that I didn’t want to use the guild to teach kind leadership—I’ve got the podcast and my linkedin livestreams for that now. Instead, I would facilitate a space where we could all support each other in our growth as a community of leaders, creating almost everything in the guild collaboratively from the core values on up. My theory was that this approach would spread the work more evenly, give every member of the guild more ownership, and keep the project more sustainable. 
 
 So, with all that in mind, and emotions still a bit high from my annual glance into the abyss, I fired up zoom and started the orientation session for the new and improved Kind Leadership Guild. And…it was a hit. One of the core values we agreed on in that first meeting is to keep our conversations confidential, but everyone was engaged in developing our principles and goals, and we ended our first session eager for more. I’m excited to see where the kind leadership guild goes, and a little nervous too. I think I’ve finally figured out how to sustainably facilitate a space that empowers educational and library leaders to collaboratively build a better world.  And the amusing thing is how much this new project resembles my initial vision back in 2019, before I fell into information overload around business models and high ticket offers and non-toxic sales tactics. Yes, I’ve pulled a lot of great ideas from the entrepreneur influencers I follow, and will continue to do so. However, when I embraced a simple approach that made maximum use of our scarce time and money, things started to click. 
 
 Much of my success as a leader and a human has come from embracing the creative opportunities provided by scarcity—creative opportunities I’ve been chasing in my lifelong quest to get the most out of the relative scarcity of my heart’s pumping capacity. Although stubbornness, privilege in other intersecting areas of my identity, medical advances and dumb luck have me allowed to keep a manageable spoon budget into my 40s, like many of you I must budget them well to live the best life I am capable of living. And as useful as I've found the writings of both thinkers, no mindset wisdom from Seneca or Tim Ferris will change that law of fluid dynamics. 

Scarcity mindset is not a bad thing. No, we shouldn’t put artificial limits on ourselves, and we should absolutely test our comfort zones when the opportunities arise. But that said, more is NOT always better. We need look no further to realize that than our changing climate, or at organizations that try to do too much, and spread themselves too thin in the process. And on a more personal level, my knowledge and respect for the areas of scarcity I cannot change about myself has paradoxically made my life more abundant. 

Kind Leadership is found within the limits of our lives, our teams, and our communities. It grows as you learn when to push those limits, and when to honor them. I still struggle to balance the real scarcity and abundance in my life, but the creative tension found between boredom and burnout has helped me heal, and grow, and in a small way, make my corner of the world a little better. So, here’s your challenge this week—what resources in your life feel scarce, and which ones seem abundant? And are there ways you could better balance them to make your life more healthy and productive? If so, do so. 

Thanks as always for listening to the kind leadership challenge. Before you go, here’s a quick way you can spread the word of kind leadership. I’d like you to take a moment to think of one friend or colleague who could most benefit from this week’s challenge. Got their name in your head? Good. Open your app or head over to kindleadershipchallenge.com/72 and share this episode with them. Add a friendly note as well. Never doubt that day by day, you’re building a better world, even if you can't see it yet. So until next time, stay kind now.