Peak Crab Season on the Coast of Georgia is August through October. That means good eating.

But when it comes to people, being crabby usually means bad behavior and a bad attitude. If you’ve ever seen how crabs behave after they’ve been caught and tossed into an open 5-gallon bucket, you’ll understand this…

Crabs, are by nature, totally out for themselves. They will steal from each other. They will climb over each other to escape a bucket. Not one of them is often successful because each will grab the one above, pulling them back into the bucket, ultimately sabotaging everyone’s struggle for freedom. Generally, no secure lid is required because the crabs will keep themselves contained. This allegory in psychological circles is known as the “crab mentality” .

Have you ever experienced this in your life before? You’re part of a group. You seek to improve your position in life and so begin to expend personal effort towards your dreams and goals. Unfortunately, instead of supporting you or encouraging you, the people you’re closest to actually become your biggest obstacles to success?

Family, friends, colleagues, and co-workers who see you rising above their expectations of you, can become critical, even nasty. This can, and does, happen in any tight-knit group. People can knowingly (or unknowingly) sabotage your efforts to succeed beyond them, or even simply beyond what is ‘expected’ of you within the group.

But Why would anyone, who is supposedly on your side, do this?

The most shallow reasons include envy, competitiveness, pettiness, mischievousness… basically any short-sighted, selfish motivation, can cause some to undermine others and feel justified in doing so. More passionate feelings such as hate, fear and jealousy, can provoke this kind of subversion as well. In any case, it seems the worst part of human nature to abase, or actually cripple, the actions of those we deem unworthy of achieving what we ourselves, have not, or will not.

Mindset.

When we come from the perspective of scarcity, inadequacy, or deficiency, in our own lives, our feelings of want may overpower our ethical standards and moral behavior. When we don’t feel we’re “good enough”, we might do nasty, or simply unsupportive things to others we normally wouldn’t consider in some vain attempt to feel better about ourselves. Well, as most people discover entering into adulthood, it is never truly satisfying attempting to make ourselves look, or feel, better by making others look, or feel, worse.

When we come from a perspective of abundance, however, it is simply amazing how much easier it is to help, support, even celebrate others’ success. I’m not talking about ‘pretending’ to be excited for others, I mean actually BEING excited when those around us succeed. How can this be? Well, it starts with who we surround ourselves with.

What companies have you worked for that actually encouraged you to feel, and participate in, abundance? Financial abundance? Lifestyle abundance? What companies have you worked for that actually helped you find MORE FREE TIME in your life or more CONTROL over your life?

What companies have you worked for that, more likely, have needled, or pressured, you into spending even more or your precious time at work? Longer hours, extra shifts, year after year of ‘paying your dues’ in hopes of achieving some prize? How many employers have encouraged competition between you and your co-workers for coveted promotions, small incentives, temporary praise, or a hollow title? How many people buy into this mindset and become willing to lie, cheat, and hurt others in their own pursuit of ‘bettering themselves’? Why would an employer allow such behavior?

Many corporate business models rely on exactly this type of “crab mentality” in human behavior to keep employees in their collective ‘place’ and not strive to improve their lives beyond the scope of what that business is willing to offer in the form of remuneration or compensation.

If you’ve ever felt like a crab in the bucket, it was probably easy to focus your anger and frustration at the other crabs pulling you down. However, instead of blaming the other crabs, let’s look for a moment, at who **owns** the bucket.

Employment.

Every one of us needs to make a living, so we seek out a particular job or career. This makes common sense: if you have no money, and want money (legally)… get a job. To get that position, however, we must meet the expectations of those hiring (have the right education, experience, appearance, etc.). This is the contract.

Once there, we accept the constraints put upon us by those who built (and perpetuate) that employment paradigm (i.e. the ‘reality’ of that situation) mostly out of fear of losing it, or losing all we’ve worked for. But have you ever stopped to consider WHY we’re all doing this?

What does EVERY employment paradigm have in common?

• NONE of them are designed to make you independently wealthy (otherwise you’d all leave forever).
• ALL of them are designed to keep you just hungry enough (motivated enough) to stay there and do what the employer wants you to do. For this, they know…
• You will exchange your TIME for a paycheck.

Employers/Employees.

When you work for someone else, you’re exchanging the most valuable, perishable, non-replenishable thing you have (TIME on this Earth) for whatever amount of money the employer is willing to pay you… and you’re willing to accept.

It is easy to project our own individual meaning onto what we do for a living. None of us wants to feel we’re wasting our time. It is easy to adopt our chosen career as our identity. Look at the very language we use (verbally, and in our own heads) to see how true this really is:

When we meet someone, one of the first questions we ask is “What do you you DO”?…

Too often we answer “I AM a – – -” (doctor, dentist, bus driver, whatever).

Well, that’s not really who we ARE, it is only what we DO. Remember, we are Human Beings, not Human Doings. Yet, our western society seems to value us based on what we DO… or what we’ve done lately. That’s ok for them to do… but…

By making ‘what we do’ equal to ‘who we are’ in our own minds, we’re actually surrendering our true power to a lesser idea… a definition someone ELSE came up with that, at some point in our lives, we aspired to for some reason. Now there’s nothing wrong with aspiring to learn, to grow, to accomplish, to achieve… as long as we remember the truth. The truth is: we did not come onto this earth to balance someone else’s books, or dig someone else’s ditches, or make someone else rich. It is up to each one of us to discover the real reason we DID come to be on this planet. That discussion is for another blog post.

A “Job” should be seen for what it truly is: a means to an end, not an end unto itself. Have you ever worked for a company that underpaid, overworked, or underappreciated you? Of course you have, or you will, it is inevitable. This is because “jobs” are not created for the employees, but for the employers. Unfortunately, the degree to which any ‘job’ is made comfortable or rewarding, is often a function of how many available people are ready, willing, and able, to do that work.

This is the true ‘pyramid scheme’: where the proverbial poop flows downhill… don’t be the bottom bird unless you’re willing to live your life in flux. (please forgive my mixed metaphors, crabs, birds, oh my!)

Expectation.

Most corporate business models establish a hierarchy of job descriptions that need to be performed by “human resources”, who are then hired to do that. There will be inherent barriers, restraints, and controls in place to direct individual behavior towards that which the bosses have determined is in the best interest of the company. Individuals seeking to fit in, survive, even thrive within that environment begin to accept (even ‘believe’) those artificial boundaries. This is true of any organization.

God help the employee who attempts to accomplish MORE than is expected of them… MORE than they were hired to do… or MORE than the bosses told you to do. Antithetical, I know, but the corporate world is mostly based on ‘expectations’. Shareholders ‘expect’ a certain return on their investment. They approve board members who are expected to achieve earnings results. Managers are hired to guide those expectations into reality. Workers are hired to do what managers tell them to, no more, no less. Doing ‘less’ can get you fired. Doing ‘more’ can make your boss look bad… which can get you fired.

Overachievement.

If you’ve ever gotten so tired of being ‘pooped on’ and acted outside the boundaries of your job description, or tried to excel beyond it, you may have experienced some type of ‘blowback’ from those in authority… like getting kicked off the perch you’ve worked so hard to get to. If you’ve ever strived to learn more, accomplish more, and contribute more, but encounters peer pressure to ‘get back in line’, that’s the type of “crab mentality” we referred to above.

So, What’s the answer? Resign yourself to a lifetime of powerlessness? of drudgery? of being kept down by those above and held back by those around you?

What if you surrounded yourself with people who focus on encouraging, rewarding, and celebrating a mindset of abundance instead of scarcity? Does this exist? (hint: of course it does, or I couldn’t have written this blog post).

What kind of a business could possibly profit from people having such a mindset? Well, businesses that have moved beyond the ‘industrial age’ paradigm of treating employees as just another resource (a ‘human’ resource) for the company to use and use up… not unlike indentured servitude. AND, businesses that have moved beyond the ‘ownership’ model of doing business. In other words, empowering individuals to create their OWN reality instead of chaining them to a pre-determined reality where they’re required to give up certain freedoms for the “privilege” of working there.

So, let’s say we -find- a business like that, how do we ourselves, discover (or re-discover) this mindset? The awesome life lesson here is that helping, supporting, and genuinely – Authentically- celebrating others’ success actually creates more fertile conditions for our own success.

So, what does this actually look like? do we need more education? more training? re-training? No, not in my case. In fact, in my case, I discovered too much education made my journey towards authenticity and self-actualization –more– difficult. Too much training made my mountain –harder– to climb. And my limited mindset held me back more than any other crab in the bucket or bird on a stoop above me. What I now know for sure is…

the way to succeed in a world of abundance is to GIVE. To SHARE. To BE (more myself, rather than what someone else expects me to be).

In fact, the more I share, the bigger my share becomes.

What might you accomplish if there were no constraints to tie you down? What would your life look like if you could live up to your own expectations instead of down to others?

Leave all assumptions, pre-conceived notions, and judgements at the door. Click and Enter here:

www.FreedomEffect.com

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