Adopt a Communal Mindset

A popular paradigm in self improvement and business circles is to adopt a growth-oriented mindset. The basic premise is that if you believe that you can grow, then you will spark the desire to grow, which will subsequently drive motivation, produce results, and facilitate positive change in your life. How do you adopt a growth mindset? The conventional understanding is to develop your skills, work hard, preserve, and accept feedback.

This growth mindset, that we supposedly need to adopt, is destroying us, however. The imperative to grow lays the foundation for exponential growth, development, and production at all cost. This doesn’t springboard us into a life of positive change, but rather, it trains us to maximize our self interest and engage in competition so we become winners, and not become those poor, fixed-minded losers that eventually migrate to the slums.

The growth mindset places enormous amounts of pressure to “make something of your life”; for example, to become a doctor, lawyer, politician, business owner, or whatever profession yields a six figure income or more. The pressure to grow generates anxiety and artificial scarcity, which then create unnecessary crises that deteriorate your mental health, relationships, and physical well-being.

The growth mindset doesn’t stop at the personal level. It has a profound effect on our economy and ecosystems, too. The boom and bust cycles. Rising and never ending debt. Replacing relationships with money and technology. Converting rainforests into plantations. Stripping the earth for mining and pipelines. The hoarding and concentration of wealth and resources.

Yep, that all stems from a growth mindset. How much more of nature can we convert into capital and commodities?

Many economists argue that we are at the limits of growth and development—that is, exponential growth and development are no longer sustainable (newsflash: it never was). In other words, the growth imperative is ecocide.

The Communal Mindset

If we want to thrive as human beings, we need to change the context and let go of the dysfunctional need to grow. A more nuanced approach that I have been working with lately is replacing the growth mindset with a communal mindset.

Within the context of a communal mindset, our goals and actions are regenerative. We will focus on restoring that which has been damaged and cut off from our past life of exponential growth and production—to include restoring relationships that have been replaced with money and technology.

Instead of goals that maximize self interest, we will have goals that maximize beauty, community, functional distribution, and fairness. Our goals and subsequent actions will work in alignment with nature, rather than living a life of consumption, domination, and ecological destruction.

What I like most about the communal mindset is that wealth and abundance are a function of thriving communities or social relationships, not piles of cash stored and compounded over time.

Finally, a communal mindset relates to nature and its people as sacred. Where each life form, and each person, is recognized for having an important role in the ecosystem and society. In other words…

No one is left out. And no one has to prove their worth to be let in.

Synonyms for communal: shared, joint, common, general, public, collective, cooperative, community, united, combined, pooled, mass. I thought that might be useful for a further understanding of “communal.”