Expanding Your Capacity

So many people, especially those who are purpose-driven and put everyone before themselves, are stretched too thin. We have commitments at work, family and friends to spend time with and support, major life events and holidays to attend, intentions to prioritize our self-care... and it all feels like so much...

I'm noticing that people have way too much on their plate, they're already getting crushed by all of it, and they can’t take anything else on for fear that it will push them over the top.

I really empathize with that. It’s sad to be so busy that you can’t enjoy life as much as you want to. That you’re so worried about ‘doing all the things’ that you aren’t present when you’re doing them. That your own personal sustainability is a bottleneck keeping you from showing up with the quality you want at work and at home.

Unfortunately many people accept this as their permanent reality and are unwilling or unable to disrupt the current pattern and create something better.

The reason life feels so full and overwhelming is because it literally is - the current demand of life is greater than your capacity to fulfill it.?

In order to fix that, there are only two things you can do. You can try to decrease the demands of life by saying “no” more often - Removing yourself from commitments you’ve made, and scaling back the size of your personal and professional goals. But I’ve found that’s either a bottomless pit (with more things that fill in the space you create) or it's a version of life you’d enjoy less.

The other thing you can do is expand your capacity. To become capable of taking on more in life so that you can rise to the occasion and exceed the demand. When you create more energy in your life you become more efficient with what you do. When you’re more efficient with what you do, you compress time and can fit more things more effortlessly into the time you have.

But counterintuitively, to expand capacity you first must add more demand. You need to invest time and energy into building the life-systems that create efficiencies, and building routines that improve your output. But the payoff is, once those systems and routines are in place they work for you and make everything else easier to do.

For the New Year I’m leading a 21 Day Challenge to help people implement a new life system, the same one I've used for a decade, called the Super Habits System. If you want 2025 to be the year 'doing everything better', and not another year of 'too much to do'... Then this is for you!