174 Challenge Your Capacity

Challenging your capacity isn’t just “doing more” or being more productive. It’s a higher level of thinking and developing the skill of FEELING emotions in your body given the REAL limitations of life: your time, money, energy, attention, to reach your biggest goals.

You’ll learn:

• The 3 types of capacity: Mental, Emotional & Behavioural and how to challenge each one to get unstuck and get more done with greater sense of joy and ease.

• Shape Shift Program LEARN MORE
• Instagram: @mindful_shape
• Free Self Coaching Resources
• Interested in getting coached by me? Go to my website mindfulshape.com

Transcript

This transcript was auto-generated, please forgive any weirdness.

 Hi, and welcome to the Mindful Shape Podcast. I am Paula Parker. When you hear the word capacity, what comes to mind for you? When I say challenge your capacity? Build your capacity, do you think doing more? That's what I always thought. I thought about my to-do list. I thought about working when I was tired, being more productive, time bending.

Maybe you've heard of that, or just really having more energy summoning up that energy. And this is how we relate to this concept of capacity. You hear people, or maybe you've said yourself, I've reached my limit.

Or with work, I'm at capacity or I don't have the bandwidth. I've said all of those things and I once remember a conversation with a mentor of mine back in Vancouver who said, everyone's busy. It's pretty rare to hear anybody say. I'm not that busy. Even when we're retired or even on vacation, we are human beings who love doing stuff.

We love to do stuff, and there's so much to do, and we want to do all of it. As soon as we cross something off our to-do list, it feels amazing, doesn't it? And then we promptly add three more things. So our activity will never be done until like we are done. We are done with this life, right? We will just find more things to do.

Or if it's not you finding more things to do, maybe it's your work. Maybe it's others who just give you a never ending to do list.

I had a corporate job for a credit union, and you know, after about six months, I got pretty good at the job. And do you think that they said, okay, you know what, you're so. Efficient. You can take Fridays off. No. They said, oh, great. Okay. You have more bandwidth, you have more time. Here's another project.

Here's more work to do. That's like kinda how it goes. Right? And because we have so much to do that we either need to do or that we want to do. It can feel like we are always behind. Like we're constantly trying to catch up. We often think there's so much to do, not enough time, or we notice ourselves rushing even when we don't need to be rushing.

We get in the habit of rushing. I notice this with myself sometimes. I'm rushing with the pushing the kids in the stroller when we're not in a rush, but I'm just so used to being in a rush, right? It's like almost a state, and there are. Limitations of our time. Like that is a reality. And I think that there is an appropriate grief that we need to think about there because there are so many things to do.

So many things we want to do, so many projects, so many trips, and people we wanna meet or see or visit, and there is a limited amount of time, maybe budget. There's circumstances that prevent us from doing all of the things all of the time. So of course there is. So there needs to be, I just wanna say that like there needs to be space to grieve that we're not gonna get to do it all.

Okay? But I wanna talk about challenging your capacity. Despite that there are real practical limitations that we don't all have the same 24 hours in a day.

Some of us are working, some of us do not have, you know, cleaners or. Chefs or whatever it is, right? There's like different schedules that people have. So here's how I think of capacity, because I don't think of it as just doing more stuff. Capacity is a container with a volume. So think of it like a balloon.

I was recently at a. My son's friend's birthday party and there was a, it was at this party center and all of these balloons, and for some reason the balloons were filled like right at capacity, like maybe a little bit past what they should have been filled at because they were just randomly bursting and popping and it was like freaking everyone out.

Of course, eventually the kids started loving it and were trying to pop it intentionally, but there's always like this nervous laughter and kind of. Chaotic environment, right? So think of your capacity as a balloon. It's might be very small, little bit deflated, or it could be just maxed out, ready to pop.

You're ready to go into burnout. I wanna offer that there are three types of capacity. So think of it as like three balloons. There's behavior, there's mental and there's emotional. So behavior is what you're doing. I think of this as like an orange balloon, but you get to decide mental, I think of this as a red balloon.

What you are thinking, the thoughts that you were having, and then emotional. Maybe this is like a blue or a green or a purple balloon. This is how much you can feel. The capacity to which you can feel the vibratory sensation of emotion in your body, energy, emotion or process, what you're experiencing, what you're feeling.

So challenging. Your capacity is challenging the bounds of your current container, the balloon in those three categories. So let's talk about each in detail, what increases your capacity mentally, and let's talk about what is mental capacity, like what am I talking about? Of course, it's your thoughts. It's.

Your expertise, it's how you think about something. So if you can think about somebody who say's an expert in something. I've been recently watching Philomena Kunk, I think. I think that's her name. And it's like this show where she plays this really like dumb interviewer and she's interviewing these.

Like experts in their field and it's like hilarious. The really like dry English humor, which is just my style of humor. So if you haven't looked it up, look, you can find it on YouTube. It's like so funny. If I'm feeling low, I will watch that. It's just very lighthearted and very interesting and hilarious.

But she interviews all these experts and you can think of it like that. They have a very, um, robust. Capacity, mental capacity for their area of expertise versus, versus an average person that you would just meet walking down the street, and you can think about yourself, an area in which your mental capacity has changed over the years.

So think about something that has changed. Maybe it's something that you've accomplished. There was a point in time when your mental capacity for it was smaller and then you accomplished it, and all of a sudden your mental capacity for it was bigger. It's like a higher level of thinking. You can think that a higher level of thinking is your mental capacity, or maybe it's your relationship with money.

That's always an easy one to think about. What were you thinking about it before? How were you thinking about money when you were, say, 16 years old versus when you were 40? Very different level of sophistication and understanding. You have more mental capacity with money now, more trust because of your thinking.

Maybe there's more ability to make it based on your thinking and your skillset and your knowledge, and there might be a case where you're just more positive in general when it comes to money. So when your brain goes to. I'm exhausted. This is too hard. This is not sustainable. I can't handle this, or it's too much.

This lowers your mental capacity. This deflates the balloon. It puts you in a state of despair and hopelessness. Maybe just general unease. And when we're in those states, oftentimes we feel a need to distract. So we turn to distraction to escape the state that we've created with this mental capacity. So mental capacity to grow it, to challenge it is intentional thinking.

It's really remembering who you are. Like I've got this. Remembering who you are and what you've overcome. So you are somebody like all of us who has had very challenging and even traumatic experiences. You've likely experienced heartbreak or a longing or heartache for wanting to be in a relationship and you haven't, or there's struggles in which you felt the most intense of all human emotions.

Humiliation, shame, grief, the big ones. Right. And yet of course you are still here, I heard recently, and I just love going back to this thought that so long or you are moving forward, you are doing it right, right. In quotation marks of course. 'cause I don't think there is a right or wrong way, but there's something reassuring about reminding yourself.

So long as I'm moving forward, I'm doing it right. So you've persevered already, which means you already. Are resilient, like this version of you is very resilient. When I was in grade five, my dad is Danish and he took us on a trip to Denmark the first two weeks of the school year in grade five and the last two weeks of the school year.

And at the end of the year, the teacher will give you a certificate and mine said something to do with like most resilient. And my response, I remember, you know, the kids would all say, oh, what did you get? Or What did you know? What was on your certificate? And I remember saying to my friend, oh, you know, like Mr.

Wilkes, he didn't know what to say, so he just put this, and I believe that. So isn't that sad? Like, doesn't that just kind of make you wanna cry? Don't be that version of me in grade five, where you just don't see your own resilience. So resilience is the sacred act of rising. Again, resilience is your capacity to recover, it's to recalibrate, it's to remain rooted, knowing that you can and will get back up eventually, even if you need to, you know, lick your wounds for a little bit.

But we are all. But we are all gonna experience failure, rejection, the chaos of life, and we are resilient. And don't we just love a good comeback. I watched a documentary a while ago on Simon Biles, and she is wildly considered the greatest gymnast of all time. Okay? So she has multiple skills that are named after her, a lot of them, nobody else can even do.

And during the Olympics, the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, she got what's called the twisties. And this is a loss of. Spatial awareness when you're in the air. So in a sport like this, of course, she's flipping around. She's twisting at really high speed. So it's very dangerous to have this, and it's mental. It's like an emotional, mental, emotional thing, not physical, but of course it affects her physicality.

So during this time, she makes a decision to withdraw from. So during this time, she makes the decision to quit from several events, and then in this documentary, they show how she rebuilds her confidence and her strength, and she decides to come back, but in a different way. Okay. So like she comes back on her own terms and she becomes a real advocate for athletic mental health.

Mental health for athletes.

But also that comeback term is misleading because comebacks aren't about going back to how you used to be. They're about becoming the next version of yourself, just like she did, right? She'd be, she didn't, she wasn't the same person. She became a different person mentally. So that goes for you too. So think of something that you've experienced that if you told someone, they would say, wow, like that must have been really hard, or, that's incredible that you overcome.

That you overcame, that we all have them. We all have them. And remind your brain that you got through it, which proves you are resilient. You have. Which proves you are resilient. So let's talk more about emotional capacity. And this is the degree to which you can feel emotion before you shut it down in some way.

So this could be a positive emotion, and then we find ways to shut it down. So it could be something really good happens and immediately our brains go to, ugh. I don't know if I could handle that. It's like if you get a promotion or you get a job that you are so hoping for and striving for, and then you get it and your brain kind of goes.

Oh God, I don't know if I can make this schedule work. I don't know if I can do this job. Like it will immediately put a wet blanket on your celebratory state, on your feelings of accomplishment. We just, we all do this. Our brain does this. It's loss averse. Okay. And the loss aversion in this case comes through that old identity.

The identity of someone who is struggling or striving. Okay, so it's so interesting how our brains work. And also, of course, we do this with negative. When we have a negative emotion, when we are in unease or anxious or we feel dread or sadness or boredom, anything like that, we will find ways to seek out pleasure and escape that negative emotion.

Okay? If. Our capacity, our emotional capacity is a tiny little deflated balloon. Okay? So we must train our bodies, teach our brain. That our body can handle those physical sensations because how do you know that you're sad? The only way that you can know that is how you are feeling, so you are tapped into your body.

Even if you are someone who tends to be more on the thinking side of things and intellectual, you still are a feeling a human being who feels stuff. Otherwise you wouldn't even know that you are feeling sad or you wouldn't even even know that you are.

Or you wouldn't even know that you're feeling sad, right? So it's just a matter of cultivating that skill of embodiment where you know what you're feeling and you also know what to do with it. So embodiment is. Equivalent to emotional capacity. It's the capacity to feel the vibratory states within your body.

So again, we have to teach our brain that our body can handle all of those sensations. And this is, I know corny, but if you want to live a sensational life, you've got to get good at experiencing sensations. All of them and your body is designed for it. Our bodies are designed to feel sensations. Okay? So we just don't utilize it.

We try to numb. We try to, we're delusional. We try to pretend we don't experience the sensations of erasing heart. We label anxiety or butterflies in the stomach we call nervousness or a sinking sensation in the gut. A hollow sensation we call the disappointment or heaviness in the chest. Of course, we call that sadness.

Instead, what we typically get really good at is distracting by ordering something online, buying something, scrolling on our phones, having a glass of wine, watching another show, or eating something. So we don't give our body a chance to fully feel what it's meant, what it's designed to feel. So that's emotional capacity.

Let's talk about behavioral capacity. This is action. How much action will you take? What's your capacity for taking action? What if you don't see any results the first week, the first two weeks? How many attempts before you give up? If it's few, then that's okay. You just know your behavioral capacity is.

Lower than it could be. I always think of standup comics like who is braver in this world than a standup comedian? Seriously, think of like how often they have to fail. They have put themselves up on the stage, which is hard enough to do already, and try to make people laugh like, and get that rejection.

To get the crickets. To get the silence. So anybody who has succeeded. Anybody who does standup comedy, you have my respect a hundred percent. That might be the scariest thing in the world. Think of the capacity that a standup comedian would have and just reflect for yourself. What is your capacity right now?

What are you willing maybe to do today that. Yesterday even you weren't willing to do. If there's something that you are willing to do today that you weren't willing to do yesterday or last week or last year, then you've expanded your behavioral capacity, you've challenged it. Maybe it's taking micro risks.

Or like little risks or a big risk, like asking somebody out or complimenting somebody. These are micro risks. Or for some of us big risks, buying like crazy sunglasses or an outfit that pushes your limits of what you see as your identity and you wear it proudly. Or you go to the gym when your clothes are feeling tight.

You know, you're not feeling the best in your body, but you still show up or you get on the scale when you've had pasta the night before and you just know the scale's gonna be up, like that's behavioral capacity. I would offer that. That's a little bit mental and emotional capacity as well, but we're focused on action right now.

Maybe it's something big like asking for a divorce or deciding to stay and dropping that resentment and that self pity. Maybe it's something really silly, like growling, like a lion in the mirror and going into your day, unstoppable, whatever it is. These are actions that are generally whatever it is.

What is your behavioral capacity? How big and how much action? Are you capable of in your current balloon? And is it enough for what you want? Your big goal? Whatever you want most, whatever you are hoping to change. So now the question becomes, how big are you willing to be? How much are you willing to handle?

How much will you challenge your current capacity?

Will you stretch it? Will you stretch your own limits? And this decision will really determine. And this decision will really determine your daily decisions, how much failure you are up for in order to get what you want, how big you'll dream, how much time you'll dedicate towards deliberately reprogramming your brain to think thoughts that inspire you to keep going, that you carve out time, or that you even make that a priority, or you're catching your thoughts.

In the moment and you, you might not be good at that at first, but eventually you start getting better and better and better at it. But of course, if we want to build our mental capacity, we need to prioritize that. If you're not making progress on your dream, I wanna offer that. It's not, if you are not making progress on your.

It's not that it's too hard for you, consider that it's not a big enough dream for you to be willing to challenge your capacity, your mental, your emotional, and your behavioral capacity. But what if you maybe doubled your goal? You went for the body you really wanted, but you didn't, you thought it was outside of your range.

You started the project or the nonprofit or the business. That's been nagging at you to start. We all know that failure is inevitable. We all know we have to fail first. There are what? A thousand platitudes around success. We can drum them up pretty easily, right? But it's really another thing to have mental capacity to go for it.

The emotional capacity to endure the failure and the behavioral capacities you try. Over and over and over again. When I work with clients, this is what we do. We figure out what's blocking your current capacity. When I work with clients, this is what we do. We figure out what's blocking your capacity and we challenge it mentally, emotionally, and your behaviors, your actions, so you can step into a different identity altogether.

And if you wanna work with me, I do private coaching, I offer group coaching, and. I often do free workshops and trainings that you can sign up for. So long as you are on my email list, you will get notified of all of that. You can go to mindful shape.com so you can be sure that if there is something going on, you will know and you can come.

Alright, I hope that was helpful for you today in terms of. Challenging your capacity, building that capacity and thinking of it in these different categories. So if there's one that you're like, this is gonna make all of the difference, whether it's I just need to be taking action, or I really need to get my thoughts in check, it's mental capacity, or my work is feeling work, I need to be able to.

Feel nervous and do it, or I need to be able to feel whatever it is and hold that sensation in my body and take action. So hopefully that will guide you into challenging your capacity so you might even be surprised at what you're capable of doing. Okay, I'll talk to you again soon. Bye.