Are You Living Below Your Capacity On Purpose?

Your inner critic can sound like “realism,” but it often acts like sabotage. After a long, exhausting day of mid-year planning, I hit record anyway because that’s the real work: showing up when you’re tired, a little overwhelmed, and still committed to becoming who you say you are. If you’ve been stuck in negative self-talk, perfectionism, or that constant sense that you’re behind, this conversation offers a grounded reset. 

We dig into identity and continual becoming, the practice of stepping into the version of you that handles hard days with more courage and more care. One tool that landed hard for me is “arguing for yourself,” noticing when your mind rehearses everything that could go wrong and deliberately countering it with better questions. Instead of spiraling, we practice prompts like: What if it works out? What does it look like when it works out? How does it feel to finish the book, stand on the stage, become an all-star parent, or finally get organized with your money? Those questions aren’t fluff, they’re a mindset shift that changes behavior. 

We also get practical with goal setting for entrepreneurs and high achievers by separating outcomes from control goals. Outcomes are results you want, but control goals are the actions you can measure, repeat, and schedule. I share a simple reverse engineering exercise you can do on a note card or whiteboard to connect big goals to daily habits, without burning out. We wrap with a reminder to pull one lesson from every meeting or experience, and to build your trusted advisors and community so your aspirations have somewhere to grow. If this helps, subscribe, share it with a friend who’s having a rough week, and leave a review so more people can find Fierce Encouragement.

If you’re tired of doing this work alone, I offer a free conversation to help you get clear on your next steps. Apply Here when you’re ready.

Transcript

A Tired Day And Showing Up

Identity And Continual Becoming

Argue For Yourself Against Negativity

Outcomes Versus Control Goals

Take One Lesson From Everything

Build Your Trusted Advisors

Write It Down And Coaching Invite

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hey there. I'm Mark. This is Fierce Encouragement. And here what here's what this show is about. It is for your rough days. It's for those difficult weeks. And it's also about that crappy inner voice that won't shut up sometimes. The one that can get vicious and angry and really take us down. So I'm a certified coach. I'm also a longtime meditator. I'm a middle-aged guy, a dad who's uh worked in IT for decades and who's literally stood in the fire of life. I share tools, I share things that help me. I share things from coaching and from ancient wisdom and even the modern science that now is catching up with what uh all the yogis knew all along. So this podcast is an invitation to connect, to listen, to learn, and maybe just to shift something around and maybe how you talk to yourself or how you think. And that's it. That's fierce encouragement. So today I'm arriving after a busy, busy day of actually sitting down and doing a CEO day with um friends and my coach and going through kind of like that mid-year planning. And honestly, I'm exhausted. Uh I feel the mind kind of wandering. I have lots of things on my kind of notes here to look at and just lots to unpack. And if I'm being honest, I'm a little tired and a little overwhelmed from it, and at the same time excited. There's a big gap for places for me to grow as a coach, as a business owner, and even creating things like this. So I'm kind of off balance right now, but I made this commitment to myself to show up and hit this recording, create something to share with you, my listeners, and the people that support me. So thank you for being out there. And I hope you get great value from this. One thing that I took away from the full day of coaching from my coach, and maybe it's something that helps you. And it's something I've been diving into a little bit more as some of my coaching friends and a few other people around me. It's the synchronicity of the same thing showing up in the teachings and the learnings that kind of approach approach you when you're trying to learn about something. But, anyways, what I've been learning about is that identity, practicing that continual becoming, stepping into that identity, how can you be that thing you want to be? And maybe how can you, at least I speak uh from my perspective, how can it be something that's intrinsic and motivated by being noble and helpful? And at the same time getting better, right? It should be a little bit uncomfortable. I'll be honest, stepping into an identity or kind of feeling myself in that, I guess, a superhero role or an all-star dad, or whatever, um, something spiritual, something loving. Or maybe the biggest thing is that seeing myself in that business identity, like that high achiever. In many ways, I do connect with people like that. I love to help high achievers kind of find that gap that they might be missing and really get better in their life, go up one more level. Ironically enough, or paradoxically enough, it's something that I have a hard time kind of envisioning for myself. So I took from my coach today this practice of arguing for yourself. Number one, catch yourself if your awareness, your narrative is just reinforcing everything that's going to go wrong for you. Maybe it's you wake up early in the day and you find yourself repeating inside all the things that are not good about this morning and the things that you have to do, and all the struggles and the troubles. When we find ourselves like in that continual defensive or negative narrative, while it's really hard to make any progress. And especially as entrepreneurs, we have to counter that negative voice or the one that wants to be taking us down with other ones. Like, well, what happened if it what happens if it works out? What does it look like if it works out? How can I listen for those moments where I could get a little bit better today? How about I just take those one or two or five steps today just to get a little bit better? Push myself just a little bit past that comfort zone from yesterday or last week. So maybe just to bounce that or reflect that back to you as you listen, what's the one area you know you could get a little bit better at, just one or two percent? And how could you step into the identity of that person? And maybe this is a bonus question if you're like me. If you're an overachiever or somebody who just has really high standards and is really good at being negative with themselves, how can you just let go of that negativity and counter it with like continual positive questions? What if it works out? What does it look like when it works out? How does it feel when that thing is happening? How does it feel when I'm standing on stage? How does it feel when I finally finish the book? How does it feel to be an all-star dad or a great mom? How does it feel to support somebody, a friend who might be struggling? How does it feel to get organized with your finances? How does it feel to grow your business and help? So finding those that pathway through for you. So I hope that helps. But it was this idea from my coach about the idea of the outcomes we want to have from our business and our life, of course. The results, you could say, when we cross the finish line. We can also have the control goals or the controls you could say that lead to those goals. So, what are the outcomes you want to have? And kind of reverse engineering them or thinking what needs to come before that outcome happens. What is one small thing you could take action on today or this week, or put on a list for this month to make progress on? She had a good practice and she talked about just taking those outcomes and writing them down on a uh note card or even a whiteboard. And then underneath them, write two or three, maybe more, control goals, things you can control, things you you can get done and uh accomplish that'll lead to those outcomes. So, for instance, if we want to have like 10 new sales calls booked the next 90 days, well, the best thing we can do, we can we can't control the necessarily of getting those sales calls, but we can control how many people we reach out to and practice listening and offer time and kind of give back and create value. We can control that. So if we measure that, that's a goal we can control that'll eventually lead to that outcome we desire. So, how or where are your control goals versus those outcomes you want in your life? Another example could be if you're looking for a new work. If you have that goal of finding a new job, we don't necessarily control the outcome of that job arriving, but we do control how we show up with our energy, how we look actively for work, how we might be talking to ourselves during that process. We control kind of the some of the self-image work we can do, and literally kind of getting in a good positive state before we look for work and having good self-talk. Those are things that can be control goals that will affect the outcome of that process. So, what are your control goals? And how do they contrast or at least connect back to those outcomes you seek? I thought that was a really powerful thing for me, at least to sit for a little while and have a place of blank paper and really look at those outcomes I want. And then underneath, really pushing myself to write down one or three or even five control goals that would lead to those outcomes. And if you're a business owner, if you're trying to create your own clients, that is the way to start pushing yourself into those uncomfortable zones without overdoing it. In a sense, it's connecting those outcomes we want with the daily actions and weekly activities we need to put on our calendar. So it's a very, very powerful practice. Kind of inside that, as my coach continued to teach a bunch today and give us a bunch of great tools and really help us break down our next six months or seven months, was the idea of any teaching or any book or any podcast you listen to really taking the time to learn one skill or one big idea from that time. How can you carve out one lesson or one learning point from anything you go to at work or even any meeting? And sometimes it might be just practicing that patience, right? Listening, maybe taking some notes, being light about it instead of uh having that negative um narrative come on in the background while we're attending the meeting, just being patient with ourselves, trying to be more open. Or maybe it's also having that bravery or that courage to be like, hey, you know, in a respectful way, hey, could we get an agenda for this meeting? I do have something that's conflicting with it, and I'd really appreciate that time to get some um other work done if there's not a high priority for this meeting. So there's different ways we can show up with our courage and our compassion, especially as it relates to how we want to accomplish something. But what is that one skill, that one lesson you could take from those moments of your day with your family, with difficult meetings, or even with good times when you're out with friends. And to kind of end on this point, and it was something that I noticed today, and I guess I wanted just to reiterate it for myself and remind me to continue to keep going back, but it is this it's to build up our group of people, our trusted advisors. If you're an entrepreneur, if you're aspiring to start something new, even just to start creating and helping and using ideas and connecting, it's a priority, I believe, at least in the last three plus years for me. It's a priority to find your trusted group of advisors. That can mean a lot of things. That can mean friends you create with in your own choose an art form. If you want to play music, hang around good musicians, put yourself in those situations. If you want to create and help and coach and lead and get better at presenting and speaking, it's a priority that you put yourself in those situations and make sure to sit down and study the masters and connect with people who are going to support you in that goal. Because it's always easy to default to the negative that your dreams or your aspirations really can't happen. And it's something I wrote on my marker board to start this week. I think I kind of paraphrased it or stole it from some writing that I've ingested over the past few years. But it's this if if we do less than we know we are capable of, we will feel a gap in our energy. And I think that gap is kind of that gap of regret or loss or even tinged with guilt, that we had the talent and we didn't make effort to take it all away and give it a thorough going. And this, I think, as I get older and look at the things I've left undone and the things that I would like to get done with my lifetime, if I may be blessed enough to do so. But this doesn't get lighter as we age. It actually gets heavier, especially in the ways we want to show up for those that we care about and give back to the causes and the people and the communities that we love, or build those places up. It's important to have your tribe, your community, the people you connect with. You could even say your board of advisors, the people that you pray to in your mind when you get quiet, the places you journal. I guess it's from mediumship all the way to just sitting down with your journal, creating those pauses in your day, especially in the morning and at night, to find time to assemble your board of advisors and then also physically go out and find places to connect with people that share your ideas, share this enthusiasm. And honestly, this is exactly why this podcast exists. It's hard for me to show up and be creative and talk these things through, but I really appreciate you being here and sharing your time. Also, if something landed for you today, please write it down. Sit down with it, use the time to unpack it, use the time to encourage yourself fiercely. Find a reason why it can be successful. And honestly, if you are ready to go deeper and investigate this further, I have a few spots open going into the next month, and I'm giving away free strategy sessions. It be just you and me one-on-one. There is no pitch, just a simple, honest conversation about what might be in the way for you, and two or three things you could work on to remove those obstacles and feel more plugged in and balanced in your life. The link will be in the show notes. Grab one if it's calling you. But again, this is Mark. Until next time, I appreciate you tuning in and listening to Fierce Encouragement. Wherever you're at, have a good day, have a good evening, and take care of yourself. Okay, bye bye.