According to Deloitte Insights “our brains are wired for survival and instinctively focus on what we lack”

This

• Narrows your focus

• Reduces your mental bandwidth

• Results in decision fatigue (making poor decisions)
  

To overcome this? 

Start with understanding it: 🧵👇

The results of making poor decisions are - more poor decisions.

And once this cycle has started it is difficult to stop. 

Here’s why:

Our focus on what we perceive as urgent - what we most strongly lack from an emotional perspective - leads us to disregard other important life-changing decisions. Every decision comes with a trade-off. Trade-offs that you can’t clearly see because of scarcity in your thinking. 

Often, there are fewer trade-offs and more to gain. 

As an example: 

Working the first job you can find out of high school because you are focused on getting what you lack.

Which may be:

• Independence

• Emotional security 

• Stable environment

 Then staying in that job because it is familiar - and you fear losing what you gained (see above). You don’t want to rock the boat, but still want more for yourself - just not badly enough to take risks. 

This is because there is a perceived trade-off of losing ALL that you have.

This is unrealistic. If you take classes, or skill up you will not be losing anything but time. Which is likely spent in distracting pursuits to avoid risking improvement. 

(See the pattern here?)

This is called delay discounting - Taking a lower payoff now instead of a much larger reward in the future. Like earnings for a skilled vs a unskilled laborer.

In addition, you likely are making planning fallacies by telling yourself you can always take that course, or learn that thing in the future. It won’t take long to do anyways right?

This is putting off what you can do today for tomorrow. Except tomorrow rarely arrives and you are either depleted from decision fatigue or focusing on avoiding minor stressors. Because, hey, you have what you Need now right?

Now, there are some upsides that emerge from Scarcity Thinking:

• Hyper focus on what you need results in action

• That hyper focused action can result in expertise

Unfortunately after the need is met the action slows, or stops, and the scarcity mindset remains. 

One way to overcome this is through what Deloitte Insights calls “Slack”. 

Slack is adding intentional time in between tasks to think, plan, and course correct.

One way of accomplishing this is through “pre-commitment”, or committing to a single small task on a regular basis and slowly expanding it into something greater. A great example of this in a course is the Ship 30 for 30 commitment to write 1 thing for 30 days. 

Bottom line:

• Overcome Scarcity by doing things differently -start by taking small risks

• Use pre-commitment to ease into a new habit - and let it build slowly

• Use existing Scarcity habits - like hyper focusing on what you immediately need - to build expertise

Source Article: https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/focus/behavioral-economics/scarcity-mind-set-improving-decision-making.html