When Leadership Needs Crab Mentality

Crab mentality is often framed as a people problem jealousy, insecurity, small thinking.
But what if, in some environments, it is structural?

In this episode, we explore how crab mentality can quietly become a leadership ecosystem one that discourages growth, reframes excellence as betrayal, and redirects attention away from leadership accountability.

When people begin policing each other’s progress, leaders are rarely questioned. Over time, individuals shrink themselves not because they were told to, but because the cost of standing out becomes too high.

This is not an episode about bitterness.
It’s about clarity.
And once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

Crab mentality is often misunderstood as jealousy, but it is really about what happens when someone confronts a shared limitation. Using the image of crabs in a jar where any crab that tries to climb out is pulled back down this episode explores why movement unsettles people more than success ever does.

Through five focused reflections, the episode examines how limitation becomes normalised, why movement provokes resistance, and how fear, scarcity, and loyalty are used to keep things the same. The aim is not to accuse, but to create clarity about what resistance is responding to when it shows up.

Reflection questions explored in this episode:

1. Which limitations have I accepted simply because they are shared?

2. What does someone else’s movement out of limitation awaken in me?

3. Where might moral language be disguising discomfort with change?

4. How does scarcity shape the way I interpret other people’s growth?

5. What am I being pulled back from — not because it is wrong, but because it disrupts familiarity?

We often enter a new year with renewed intention and the hope that things will finally change.
But for many of us, growth begins internally while external conditions remain the same.

In this episode of Evolve and Elevate, I reflect on what it means to start a new year as a different person in unchanged spaces the same environments, systems, and relationships that once drained us. I explore the quiet frustrations that arise when growth comes before change, and the responsibility we carry in how we show up while navigating that tension.

This conversation is about learning how to grow without making others pay for what they didn’t do, how to avoid becoming emotionally unbearable when we’re dissatisfied, and how to sit in spaces we’ve already outgrown with integrity. It’s also about managing transition well — without burning bridges, withdrawing care, or exporting frustration onto people around us.

This episode invites you to reflect on how you carry yourself in seasons of waiting, constraint, and internal change and how growth can be practised responsibly, not carelessly.