Your capacity
[00:00:00] Hello my friends and welcome to another episode. I'm so excited you are here. If you are in the US you are likely gonna be celebrating Thanksgiving week this week. I hope you have a wonderful time with your family and you get some, a chance to slow down a little bit and rest and think about all the things that you're grateful for, and I hope at the top of that list is yourself.
I hope you see. All of the amazing things that you have done this year, all of the amazing ways that you have been. And I hope that you sit and take that in for a little bit. And I, and hopefully like as you take in the gratitude that you have for everybody else I hope you just don't forget how incredible you are.
I am gearing up to do a couple of final episodes before I take a sabbatical. I've talked about this a little bit. I think here and there. I honestly can't remember where I talk about it, if it's just in the community. Have I mentioned it on the podcast? I feel like I have. But if I haven't, [00:01:00] then I wanna let you as all know that I will be taking a sabbatical from my business.
Um, and that includes the podcast. I went back and forth on whether I was gonna do that and, um. I really want to have the space to not think about doing anything, and so I'm gonna do that in starting in 2026. So these last couple of weeks. Are bittersweet because they're kind of the final episodes and I've been thinking about the topics that I wanna talk about, like the things I really want to leave you with, I wanna impart on you.
And hopefully I'll be back. But we don't know. And what I am gonna do is I'm going to replay a lot of episodes that I have already created 'cause. Most of you have not been listening to the podcast for seven years. I don't expect you to, and even if you have, a lot of these topics are things that you should listen to more than once.
It's not one time you're done and you know how to do it. And so even if you've listened to it where you're at in your life now, you likely will find. [00:02:00] Something that is more relevant and that hits home more. And so I am planning on having replays, um, every week. So if you wanna listen to the podcast, still can find a me every week here.
It just won't be anything new for the first six months of 2026. And then we will see where we go from there. Now I will do an episode. All about the sabbatical and I will talk more about how I came to the decision, how I sort of planned for it, what I plan to do, how I feel about it. 'Cause I've been getting some questions from you guys about that.
So that'll come up in the next couple of weeks. But for today, I wanted, one of the things that I have been thinking a lot about, about what do I want these last couple episodes to be and what do I want, like what do I wish everybody understood? What do I really wish I could leave you with as you. Move on to create new goals for 2026.
As you think about what you wanna do with your life as you make big decisions, small decisions, and one thing that has come up, [00:03:00] and I really wish I could drill in everybody's brain, is to think about how your specific brain is wired. Okay? And what I mean by that is to think about. The nuances that make you, you and the fact that you are not anybody else, obviously.
But I think that we forget that. And one of the things I wanna talk about is your capacity, your capacity to handle certain things, to focus to, you know, lift heavy weights, whatever it might be. We all have our own capacities, which is like there's an upper limit of maybe what we can do. And unfortunately for whatever reason, I think that we all understand this with physical capacities, right?
We all understand that like somebody that is twice my size is likely going to be able to lift heavier things. You know that if I go out on. [00:04:00] A field with 20 different people, we are gonna have different abilities in how much we can run and how fast we can run and how much endurance we have. Right? Some of that is your capability and it, it's something that can be expanded, right?
Some of that is, well, this person works out and they've worked out their muscles and they have endurance and they're a marathon runner, and so of course they can run further, longer. Yes. And some people just have a natural ability, the way their body is created. They have longer legs, maybe, maybe they have more lung capacity.
You know, we don't even all have the same lung capacity. Maybe they, whatever it is makes them be able to run better. One of the reasons I've actually been thinking about this topic, and before we get to the mental capacity part, is this last season, my son's soccer season just ended, and it was such a fascinating season to watch because my husband was coaching and it [00:05:00] was like a ragtag team of wonderful children.
But when we started the season. The first game, I was like, oh goodness, this is gonna be rough. This is gonna be a rough season. We lost very badly, and it looked as if like, these kids had never played soccer before and they had no idea what was happening. And our kids seemed like they were much smaller than the other kids for some reason.
And it was just, it, it had the makings of being a very poor season. Now. Over the weeks, I give all the credit to my husband. He really spends a lot of time watching each kid and figuring out where their strengths are and figuring out where their weaknesses are. Now these are, we're talking 11, 12 year olds.
Okay? So a lot of them hadn't played soccer before. A lot of them are new to this. Some of them are very good, have played from. A lot of years and are very skilled. Some truly cannot even connect with the [00:06:00] ball half the time. And that's okay. They're just learning. They're here for fun. And some of them are there 'cause their parents make them and they don't even wanna be there.
And it's very apparent that's also okay, this is what I mean, like a ragtag team. I'm sure if you go to any rec sports for kids, this is, you sort of see this kind of group of kids where some are very into it, some are very athletic, some are not. Right. But what had happened that was interesting for me to watch and it sort of led me to thinking about this topic, is that my husband started realizing like.
This kid, no matter how much we want, is just not gonna be fast. And he can't run a lot. He doesn't have a lot of endurance. And I, when I say that, I say my kid, Keon, my son, love him, is actually really athletic in certain ways. He's very strong, very powerful. He has a very powerful kick. He's a great goalie.
He's like I said, he has a lot of, like, he's, he was bigger than most the other kids. He also has a really good knowledge of the field and soccer iq. He can read things, he can understand, like he has. He can see the game. He watches a lot of soccer. [00:07:00] The poor kid cannot run for a long period of time. He just can't.
Three minutes of running and he is gassed and he just cannot like he gets side cramps. He just, no matter what we've tried, he works out a lot. You know, like he's in a lot of sports, he just can't do it. Fine. Another kid we have on the team can run four quarters. Without a break, does not need to sit down, runs back and forth.
It's like the energizer running. It's like nothing I've ever seen. The kid is on wheels. He's just sprinting back and forth. Full speed. Right? The fastest kid on our team, and it's fascinating to watch, right? If you compare these two kids, it is very easy to look at one and say like, oh, you're not good at X, or You're not a good soccer player because you can't do X.
Or for that kid to say like, I'm. Terrible because I don't have a powerful kick or I can't punt the ball all the way up the field, or I can't run for 45 minutes or whatnot. But when they were put in the places where they thrived. Where that skill was needed. The team [00:08:00] came together. It was a beautiful thing to watch.
We started winning every game like halfway through the season. We started either tying or winning and we were losing bad in the first half the season. And it was really interesting to me for me to watch that. Like you would never think that like, well, all these kids should just all be able to do everything the same.
They should just all be able to run the same amount and they should all have the same dexterity and they should all have the same hand eye coordination. And they should all have the same endurance and they should all have the same speed and the same power and the same. I mean, like, that's obviously ridiculous.
Like there, it wasn't like a surprise, like one kid is double the size of the other kid that's gonna impact things. Right. And I think when you see that and then you start seeing like, it, you know, I, you know, I'm gonna butcher the the quote, I'm gonna come up with it, but the Albert Einstein quote about, if you judge, uh, fish's, uh, ability. Uh, to like, I dunno, climb a tree. It'll live its whole life thinking. It's dumb when you compare, when you put someone in a position they should not be in, then they can spend a [00:09:00] lot of time thinking there's something wrong with them. Think there's thinking that like there's, that they're just not good or that they're not good enough, or that if they were just like this other person where they have their own skills, they have their own ability.
And one of the really beautiful things about watching this team was like, we didn't need. Nine kids that could run sprint up and down the field, that would've been chaos. Nobody even wants that. Right? We needed one that could play midfield, that could bring it up and down. We needed, there was, we had some really great defenders who like had no interest in playing strikers.
Like they didn't want to be the ones that attacked, they didn't want to be on offense, they wanted to be on defense. Like, that's what made the team right. That's what made it beautiful and, and again, I think when you look at yourself physically, you don't sit and wonder, like I, I'm a very short. Woman, I'm five feet tall.
I know that my capacity or my capabilities even are limited in athletics. There's, I'm just not going to ever be able to run as fast or as long as [00:10:00] somebody that is six feet tall and has long legs. Right? Of course I can run, of course I can get better at running. Of course, I can improve from where I am.
But I'm never going to be like somebody that might be a natural track star that like just grew up and tried track and was really good at it and is gonna kind of excel in that, right? Like there's a natural kind of ability there. And again, I think like when you look at it as like if somebody said, well, why can't you lift 50 pounds?
Or why can't you like lift this, you know, a hundred pound barbell? And you, you wouldn't berate yourself. You wouldn't think like, yeah, why can't I, I'm so terrible. Why can't I just do this? I should just be able to lift this for no reason, with no practice, with no, like, work on it. I should just be able to, you're like, well, I just don't have the muscles for that.
My body physically cannot do this thing that someone else can do very easily. Right. You got my point. I think I've hammered this enough. But I [00:11:00] think that it's easier to see that for whatever reason, when it comes to abilities that aren't physical, that are more mental or emotional, we somehow think we should be able to do what everybody else does, right?
So we think like, why can't I focus the way that person does? Why can't I just focus for eight hours? I don't know. 'cause you can't, 'cause that's the way your brain is wired, is your brain. As beautiful as it is, likes to do things the way that it likes to do it. I don't have the answer for it. And I think one of the things that we see right now, like with a lot of people that feel a lot of validation when they get diagnosed with A DHD or maybe even now, there's a lot more people that I think are getting diagnosed with autism that weren't, you know, originally thought to be autistic.
Part of what the validation that comes from that is, oh, this is just the way that I'm wired. There's nothing quote unquote wrong with me. I just, you know, fill in the blank. [00:12:00] I just get distracted really easily. I just have a really hard time motivating myself to start on a task. I just have a really hard time finishing tasks.
I just, you know, have a really like. Extreme sense of black and white thinking and like justice and fairness. And if I, and I can't really understand nuance with certain arguments when it comes to justice, let's say whatever the thing might be. And that's beautiful, but I wanna offer that. I mean, you should get diagnosed if you want to and it will help with all these, but what I wanna offer is like, what if you didn't need a diagnosis?
Or what if you didn't need someone to say like, Hey, you're okay. This is why you do this. What if you could just accept like, I just do this. Right. What if it was okay to say, I just can't focus for eight hours straight? It doesn't matter how much I try, doesn't matter all the hacks you can give me. My brain isn't wired that way.
Right? It could also be your nervous system. For a lot of us, somebody [00:13:00] will deal with the situation and not get stressed out. They're kind of chill about it. Nothing really rattles them. They have a different nervous system. They don't get activated. They don't freak out. They don't go into fight or flight for whatever reason, whether that's the way that their nervous system was developed, whether it's trauma doesn't matter.
Again, like it doesn't matter how you got there or why you are the way you are. It simply matters that you accept that you are the way that you are and then work with yourself like it becomes so much easier when you stop fighting. Who you are and how you operate and you start figuring out like, well, what do I need in order to be my best self in order to do my best work?
But I think for so many of us, we just focus for like so much on the question of why can't I be X? Why can't I just get started on this task? Why can't I stop procrastinating? Why can't I focus for longer than 20 minutes? I don't know. I don't care. I just want you to accept that that's [00:14:00] the way that your brain works and your brain doesn't have to be like somebody that focuses eight hours a day with no breaks, and it's totally fine.
I was, I have a kind of stark example of this in my house because my husband is one of the rare, very rare I, I honestly think it's like rare to be neurotypical than it is to be neurodivergent. But he's just one of those people that can sit down. Do work and not need a break and not need distractions and do it for eight hours, 10 hours, however long you need him to, and then get up and go do the rest of his stuff.
He can cut it off. He can super focus every day and he doesn't get tired. I mean, he gets tired like a normal person, but like he doesn't get distracted. He doesn't procrastinate. It's a very annoying quality. Not really, it's a fabulous quality to have, but it's annoying to me 'cause I'm like, how? How I don't even, I've never in my life, not one day in my life been like that.
And I've, and I never will be. And if I was comparing myself like I should be able to be like that, I would spend my whole [00:15:00] life hating myself, which spoiler alert I have until I learned thought work. Right? Is because we just learned that like this. Is not the right way to be and that you should be able to do X, Y, and Z.
Until I started realizing like, but maybe this is just the way that I am. And again, I don't mean to say that you can't work on it. Of course you can, your capabilities, like you can grow them. So just like you can lift weights to uh, be able to lift heavier. You know, and get, have more muscles and live heavier, have heavier weights, you can do that.
But there's also kind of a CA ceiling at that, right? There's also a capa, like a capacity issue. I, no matter how much I work out, likely will never be able to lift what a 250 pound man's gonna lift. It's just not gonna happen. 'cause my body is different, right? And so I can look at like, how does my brain focus and how [00:16:00] can I.
Set myself up for success and how can I train myself to maybe go a little bit longer and longer, and how can I try certain techniques? Maybe I do the Pomodoro method, maybe I whatever, to get myself to focus at least even the 20 minutes, 25 minutes, and not let myself get distracted all the time. But I'm never going to be like my husband.
I'm just never going to wake up one day and be like, you know what? I can fully focus. I won't get distracted by anything. I won't have my thoughts be on anything else. This is all it's gonna be. It, that's just not gonna happen. So like I can keep getting mad at myself for not doing it, or I can just accept that that will never be my reality.
Now again, going back to the like analogy of like the, the soccer team, it would also be super. Detrimental and boring to our lives if we were both the same way. One of the other things that we laugh about, and I think this happens a lot for women and men, but I also think, I don't know, it's just the way that certain brains are wired.
My husband's a very one track kind of guy. [00:17:00] You can't, you can't even talk to him about a different thing. When he is doing something, it's like one thing. That's it. He does that one thing really well. I have 20 tabs open in my brain at all times, but it also makes me a much better multitasker, right? I can kind of take on doing a lot of the other.
Ancillary stuff in our lives while also doing a business or whatnot. I feel like my husband would kind of freak out 'cause it's like he just needs to work on one thing at a time and he has to have it as like a checklist and then he can move on to the next thing. And I'm like, Hey, can we walk and chew gum at the same time?
Can I like listen to the podcast while I'm going for a walk while I'm doing whatever? And I actually work better in that way. Like, I like it more. I like kind of the stimulation of having a lot of things happening at once. But I just say that as like a random example. I feel like. It adds to our lives, it adds to the beauty of our lives that like we are not the same and we do not operate the same.
And that's the same thing with anybody else that you have around you. Like you, I'm sure you can look around your coworkers, you can look at your own family, and you can see that like you don't operate the way that other people operate. And that's okay. [00:18:00] In fact, it's probably a benefit if we weren't taught from a young age by corporate America that like everybody needs to be the same.
Right? It came from like this factory model where it's like everybody you know, does the same exact action over and over again, and we somehow, and. I got the messaging that like we're supposed to be robots and we're all supposed to operate the same, and we're supposed to have the same capacity every day of our lives, right?
Like, God forbid that you ha you don't sleep the night before. You just had a baby, or you're sick, or you have allergies or whatever. It's winter and you're just more tired. No, no, no. You should have the same output, same capacity. All day, every day. That's absurd. It's an insane benchmark to try to hit ever.
And I desperately want people to just understand that and let that go and really start asking yourself like, what can I handle? I recently was coaching someone who was saying like. Was thinking about leaving his career and he was saying, you know, I have this shame of like, [00:19:00] other people could handle this.
Like, why can't I handle it? And I remember having the same thoughts when I left the law, when I was working at a big law firm. And it was, um. You know, really intense hours and I was like, I physically can't do this. I physically cannot stay up this many hours. Like I need sleep. I'm not someone that can like operate on like four hours of sleep and maybe I can do it for a day or two, but like I cannot sustain that.
I'm gonna be useless to everybody 'cause I can't. Get any work done. I did not know by the way, that like other people were enhancing their productivity with prescription drugs and other things. And I look back and I think, thank God I couldn't handle it, thank God. Like what a blessing that I couldn't handle that.
'cause I could leave. 'cause I could say like, I know I physically can't do this job and it saved me. From a lot of heartache, a lot of sacrifice, a lot of, um, unhealthy decisions, a lot of, um, putting my health on the [00:20:00] back burner and like really running myself into the ground. And so I, I look at like my capacity now as such a blessing of like, this is, it is gonna be a hindrance in some ways and it's gonna protect me from a lot of things.
And so I want you to just think about Y your body and yourself. The way I think about it lately is like I am the steward of this body. I don't know why I've been given this body and this brain, but I have been right, and this is my one shot at life, and I have been given this body to work with, and I have to deal with those limitations, right?
I have to deal with the physical limitations that I have. And I also have to deal with the mental limitations that I have, and then I get to figure out how do I best steward this body? And that can mean both. Like, you know, how do I treat it, how do I feed it? How do I work my, you know, work out? How do IS.
Give love to this body. And also how do I like, figure out where I work best and how I work best and not keep demanding things that [00:21:00] are, um, impossible for me or push me too much or, you know, or make me hate myself because I can't meet those standards. And so I want you all to just really think about like.
What if the issue wasn't that you weren't a robot and that you could just do everything that everybody thinks you should do? The issue was simply that you think that you need to be different, and if you just accept that you are the way that you are and that your capacity is what it is, and that you can expand your capability, like it becomes easier to think like, okay, where is it a capacity issue and where is it something where like.
No, I can work on a little bit. Like for me, I know that I can focus a little bit better. I could likely like, stop being on my phone as much I could you know, do kind of like a dopamine detox. The, you know, I could do, like I said, a Pomodoro method. I could do all that. But I know that I will never be the person that just doesn't need any breaks and can [00:22:00] plow through and can work for hours on it.
That's never gonna be me. It has never been me. Like now looking back, and you can do this, like think about how you studied in school. Think about how you've just naturally been. Throughout your life, like I've looked at like how I have always, no matter what I have tried, I've never, I just can't get my body to be a morning person.
I can get up and I do because my kids have to get up and go to school, but it's just never gonna be the time that I do my best work. It's never gonna be the time that I'm gonna be the most focused because I'm distracted. Like I, my brain isn't on, and yet in the evening is one, I'm the most focused always.
It has always been that way from elementary school. I remember not being able to do my home like work until it was nighttime until now, and it's like, okay, well now I'm not saying that I don't have to like move things around because I have children and. You know, sometimes a nighttime's not the best time to, to get work done or you don't want to, but I don't have to like shame myself and I don't have to, and I can find different workarounds.
I can realize that like, hey, early morning is not [00:23:00] gonna be the best for me to like get really like important deep work done. For myself. Maybe it's when I do admin work, maybe it's when I have some phone calls, whatever it might be like later in the afternoon. I have to give myself some time to kind of wake up and I feel like, again, when I stopped fighting, like you should just be a morning person if you just.
Set that alarm and you just get up and you do whatever the five second rule or whatever else. It's like, no, that's just not the way my body works. Which by the way, evolutionarily like, they've like now done ton of studies that like some people's natural circadian rhythm is later, like goes to bed later at night, wakes up later, and other people's don't.
It's the opposite. It's like the way that your body is wired, right? I feel like you're, you're understanding the theme. This is gonna, you're gonna see it in really everything that you do when you look for it. And so my hope for you as you guys go on, is to just really think about like, how does my body and my brain work?
What is, what is true about the way that I [00:24:00] am? Right? What skills do I have? What am I really good at? It might mean that like I'm not really good at doing maybe detail oriented work 'cause I don't like to focus. Maybe I'm better at big picture stuff. You know, like I said, like what time of day do I work better?
What environment do I need it to be quiet Or do I need some background noise? Whatever it is. Like the more you start realizing like. This is the way that my brain naturally likes to work in or does better, and you can set yourself up instead of spending all of your life telling yourself that there's something wrong with you or telling yourself that you need to be different.
Or trying to force yourself to be different. It's such a painful way to live, and I don't want you all doing that. Now, again, I will caveat this. I understand that some of your jobs require you to be a little bit different. Some of your jobs require you to work a certain way. You have to be there at eight.
I understand that. I'm not saying that you. There's, you know, like you can be like, well, I don't work well like this, but like I said, you can start figuring out, okay, what are ways that I can set myself up? Right? Can I do things in the morning that don't require a [00:25:00] lot of brain capacity? Can I try the Pomodoro method and let myself focus and then give myself a break, even though, you know, usually like my boss doesn't care.
I'm the one that thinks I should just be glued to my desk for eight hours. So you wanna just like. Evaluate where is there room for me to change? Where is there room for me to like question this? I promise you that when you start accepting how your beautiful brain and your beautiful body work and you start realizing that you're not a robot and that your capacity will change over time and it will change with your age, and it will change with the seasons.
And you start listening to it, life can be a lot easier and a lot less shame filled, right? We can, instead of hating ourselves for the way that we aren't, we can work with ourselves for the way that we are. All right, my friends. So figure out what your capacity is and learn how to work with that and love yourself through that.
It can make life a lot easier. I hope this was helpful. I hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend, and I will be back next week with another episode. [00:26:00] Okay.