10: You'll Never Know What Your Capacity Is If You Don't Keep Pushing Yourself Forward

Welcome to the Women's Success Coach Podcast. A podcast created to inspire growth and to help you learn, achieve, and evolve in your life ongoing regardless of your age. I'm your host, certified coach, and licensed therapist Karen Vincent, and I'm here to guide you and provide you with concrete tips and strategies you can implement in your life. I'm also here to inspire you, challenge you, and cheer you on so that you can create the life of your dreams and beyond. In today's podcast episode, I'm talking about your capacity, which is different from your abilities. The definition of ability is the possession of the means or skill to do something. Your abilities are your talents, skills, or proficiency in a particular area. The definition of capacity is your potential to develop a skill. Or the maximum amount that something can contain or the amount that something can produce. Your capacity is unknown. It's not about what you can do today. It's about what you can do tomorrow, the next day, the next day, and so on. In this shorty episode, I will help you understand the difference between ability and capacity, and I will give you strategies that will help you continue to build over time. Well, hello. I hope your week is going well. I wanted to do this shorty episode for you since I've been thinking about ability versus capacity quite a bit the last few weeks. As I mentioned in the introduction, the definition of ability is the possession or the means or skill to do something. Your abilities are your talents, skills, or proficiency in a particular area. Your abilities are what you can do as of this point in time. I'm going to use some basic examples. However, these concepts can apply to any area of your life. Let's take cooking for an example. You may have a certain ability for what you can cook at this point in time. Maybe you are really good at cooking one pop meals for your family, but you don't know how to bake a cake. Maybe you're really good at air frying chicken, but you don't know how to make beef wellington. Does this mean that you'll never be able to bake a cake or make beef Wellington? Of course it doesn't, right? If you made it a priority, focused, and did a little research, and practiced, you could learn how to bake a cake and make beef Wellington. Your capacity or potential for what you can do in the kitchen would grow. And as a reminder, the definition of capacity is your potential to develop a skill, or the maximum amount that something can contain, or the amount that something can produce. And let's say, that now you can cook one pot meals, you can bake a cake, you can cook chicken in the air fryer, and you can make that beef wellington, have you reached your capacity for what you can do in the kitchen? Of course not. With more prioritizing, focusing and research, you could learn to make so many more things. This is because, as a human, your potential to continue to learn and grow is infinite. The key to increasing capacity is that you need to keep pushing yourself forward in whatever area of your life you're trying to grow. Most of us, if maybe any of us, will ever know our full capacity, because it's human nature to want to avoid discomfort and stick with what we already know. We look to our past to tell us what we can do today, and to tell us what we can do in the future. However, if you keep testing your limits, you will continue to increase your capacity, and this can apply in all areas of your life. If you want to push your strength capacity, you can do one more rep when you feel like you're maxed out in the gym. Then, once you can do that one more rep consistently, you can add one more, or you could increase your weight by just a couple of pounds. If you want to increase your endurance, you can walk, run, bike, or hike for 30 seconds longer than you think you can. Doing this on an ongoing basis will continue to grow your endurance capacity. When you think you don't know how to do something in your job and you do some extra research, you ask for support, and you keep trying until you know how to do it, you increase your professional capacity. You can also increase your capacity for love by sharing more and learning more about someone else, by being more intentional about your time and the focus you put on a relationship, and/or by allowing yourself to love fully, even at the risk of being vulnerable or getting hurt. When you learn how to make money in a side hustle business or in an automated way, you increase your capacity to earn money beyond your standard nine to five job. When you journal, meditate, work with a coach or therapist, or attend silent retreats, you increase your capacity to know your true self. This list could go on and on, but I hope you get the point. Your abilities today don't define your capacity, which is always available for expansion. You'll notice that with some of these examples I talked about just doing a little bit more, rather than going all in and doing 10 times more of something. The reason for this goes back to your brain wanting you to be comfortable. Too often if we try to take too big of a leap with something, our brains freak out and end up pulling us back to our comfort zone. However, if you increase a little bit at a time, set the new baseline, then increase more. You are less likely to talk yourself out of what it is that you want to do. So as always, I'm going to give you an action item to help you consider where you can increase your capacity. First consider if there's an area of your life where you've either stalled out or you've just accepted that this is as good as it gets, even though you wish it was different or better. Then I want you to consider what more you would like in this area. What would it look like if you were to increase your capacity in this area? Once you're clear on that, I want you to consider what is 1% more that you can do in this area of your life. Remember, just that 1% more so your brain doesn't freak out and try to pull you back. Once you identify this, I want you to take action on that 1%. And when that becomes the new baseline, consider if you want to take another percent more, and keep repeating this process until you're satisfied with where you are. I know I went through those action steps quickly in the shorty episode, but all the information is in the show notes, so you can go check them out there. And also, if you're interested in reading about more tips and strategies for how to improve your life, check out my blog. You can find it at www.karenvincentsolutions.com/blog. That's www.karenvincentsolutions.com/blog. That's a wrap. You should be proud of yourself for investing time in you, which is so critical for success and for overall life fulfillment. I look forward to having you join me for my next episode. And in the meantime, go click that subscribe button so you'll know when it's released, and you can also follow me on Instagram at Best Boss Lady Life. That's at Best Boss Lady Life on Instagram. Also, remember that whatever it is that you're working on, you've got this and I'm here cheering you on.