What's up guys, welcome back to Build and today we're going to talk about personal capacity. So this has been something that's been on my mind for weeks. The last podcast I made was on your business's capacity, the potential you have in your business and so I am just on a roll with this theme and I think it's because I'm really fascinated by it and so I continue to study it. I'm continuing to pick up more and more books that I think all kind of relate around this one topic which is how do you increase your capacity? Because as soon as I realized I was Like, oh, whether you reach your potential or not has zero to do with your desire, has everything to do with your capacity, especially in business, which is kind of what we teach at acquisition.com just said differently. We talk about it within the theory of constraints. The same applies to people. And so I think for a lot of you guys who listen to my podcast, you probably want more. You're looking for more. You're looking for more responsibility. You know, you want more growth. You want more opportunity. You want more in your life. And I love that. But wanting it doesn't necessarily mean you're going to get it. And I think that for a lot of us, including myself, I was taught, okay, if I want more, I've got to push fucking harder. I've got to fucking grind. I've got to sleep less. I've got to outwork everybody. And I do think that works to a degree, but I want to talk about why that works and when it works versus when it doesn't, as well as I don't think that the people who are able to work on the same thing their entire life and continue to have peak performance, I think that that is actually less frequently their driver and less frequently how they manage themselves. I think that what actually determines whether you grow and reach your potential or not is your capacity. And I want to define this for you guys because I'm talking about this. I've talked about all these podcasts. I'm like, I should have started with defining it. What am I talking about? And so what is capacity? It is not motivation. It's not grit. It's not wanting something more. It's not desire. Okay. Capacity is your ability to stay regulated and self-directed in the presence of pressure. Okay. So what does that mean? It's how much stress, uncertainty, emotion, and responsibility that you can hold without losing access to your judgment, your values, or effective action. That's the difference between someone who performs under pressure and somebody who folds under it. So how much stress, uncertainty, emotion, and responsibility can you hold without losing access to doing things that are effective, right? Which means how much can you bear and still take action that gets you closer to your goals, not further away? Like at some point, people don't have the skills. And so they start doing things under pressure, stress, uncertainty that move them away from their goals, not towards their goals. And the part that people don't really like hearing is that the thing is, a lot of people think, hey, you know, if I want to get there, I've just got to raise the bar. I've just got to set big goal. But you grow by raising the bar after your capacity has expanded, not before. If you just set this arbitrary goal, it's like, yeah, I'm going to run the four minute mile. tomorrow. Well, I don't have the capacity to run a four-minute mile. And now, what does that mean? Does that mean I can't? Or does that mean that I have not prepared? I have not trained? I could definitely run a four-minute mile if I trained. Now, how long? I don't know. How much would it take? I don't know. Am I willing to do that? I don't know. But regardless to say, it's not that I cannot. It's that I have not trained. This is where a lot of people get stuck, okay? What we do is we raise the bar before we've actually built the capacity within ourselves to meet that bar that we've raised. So we basically say yes to things because we want to be the person who can do them and handle them And our identity is wrapped up in being like oh I can figure it out I can do it I can you know you say yes to everything Sometimes we do have the skills and we like hey I bet it all on black I sent it. I did this. And you know what? It worked. Like I took this huge leap and it worked out for me. Great. But does it work out every time you take a huge leap? And that being said, if you took that huge leap and it worked out, then you probably had skills and you just weren't identifying them. So I'll give you an example for me. Like I realized, and I kept saying for years when I was talking about building a business, I said, listen, if I hadn't gone through everything in my childhood and dealt with my mother and family life, and if I hadn't lost all this weight, I don't think I would have been a great leader when we built our business. and people are like, oh, what's that? And I kept saying, well, the skills transfer over. Now, what did that mean? When our business started, I had so much more capacity that was not being utilized that I didn't have to go through a lot of the normal breaking points as a normal founder because I already had these skills. So I was able to take my business from zero to 50 million in like two and a half years without it being absolutely terrible. I mean, it was hard, but I was able to do it. Now, what this meant is that my brain registered what happened as a challenge, but not as a threat. And that's a really important piece here to understand. If you have the skills and you seek out a challenge or you seek out something that's going to be hard, let's just call it that. Your brain, once you do it and it sees that you survived, says, oh, that was challenging, but that's really cool. I was able to do it. And so your brain then says, oh, that's how you grow. Now the opposite computer. What if I hadn't had all of those experiences prior? Maybe I hadn't drank. I hadn't gotten arrested. I hadn't had issues with my family. I hadn't had to acquire all the skills to get through those things. What would have happened when I had started the business? I might have completely dropped the ball, completely fumbled, fucked up way too much shit, and then I would have not grown. My brain would have actually registered starting a business as something very scary and threatening. I say this because I think it's changed a lot about how I see capacity to understand this. You know, for me, for example, doing what I did, I had the capacity before I set the goal. I just didn't know where I had to come from, and I didn't have the words to put to them. So it's a good question to ask yourself is if you have a big goal, do you currently have the capacity or do you need to build capacity to hit it? I'll give you a really cool example of this. So I'm sure a lot of you guys just watched on Netflix. Alex just attempted freehand climb. Like, I think it's like he broke the record or something. I watched it, but I'm going to be honest. I don't know all the details. Anyways, it was amazing. It was really incredible to watch. He climbed that incredible tower. It was like the wildest thing to see this guy with no rope, you know, just didn't even seem stressed climbing this building. well I was researching about him because I was like it's very interesting how does he train how does he think about capacity so I found this which is in 2016 Alex actually attempted to free solo El Cap Don he didn't have a rope and it was like 3,000 feet of sheer granite and so it's basically like you know you make one with stuck and you're dead which is unfortunate and so he trained for years and I do think that he knew the route better than anyone that's what he said and there's a film crew there and the whole world was watching right this was you know 10 years ago so many of you probably don't remember or you were a child. Here's what happened though. Partway up, he turned around. Later when he was interviewed, guess what he said? He said, you know what? One, my ankle was still swollen from an injury. And two, I actually realized I didn't know certain sections of the route well enough. And so because of that, I had some doubt in my mind and I decided to turn around Seven months later he came back and completed what up until very recently was considered one of the greatest athletic feats in human history And this is what a lot of people miss Okay, the version of Alex who backed off was not weaker than the version that succeeded. He was the same person. The only difference was capacity. He had more familiarity. He had prepared more. He had recovered more physically. And because of that, he didn't have any doubt. Now, do we consider that weak or do we consider that smart? I would say it's smart. Now, I kind of want to break down for you guys what's actually happening in these situations that I'm explaining to you because for me, I like knowing the why of like, okay, well, you know what, Leila, explain why this actually makes sense and why I should believe you. This is just behavioral conditioning. So when you take on a challenge and you succeed, your brain basically like stamps into your mind, that worked, do more of that. And then you become more likely to approach similar challenges like that in the future. So it's like, okay, more things like that you try to do. You tend to take on more things like that thing. But when you take on a challenge and it overwhelms you, maybe you're like completely white knuckling, you're super stressed, or maybe you collapse under it, you fold. Your brain encodes something very different. It says that was painful. Avoid doing anything like that or that ever again. And this is the very important difference between the two. Our brains are not built for specificity, built for generalizations, especially when it comes to things that are dangerous. And so your brain doesn't distinguish between I failed because I'm not capable and I failed because I wasn't prepared. It just remembers a very adverse experience. And so what happens is the next time a similar opportunity shows up, you might hesitate, procrastinate, you rationalize why it's not a good idea. And it's not because you're lazy. It's because your body literally learned to avoid things like that. And it's funny because then in that instance, we can start making things, you know, avoidance sound like very good ideas. We can make it sound like it's complete logic when it's just fear. And this is why what I've realized is like people don't lose their edge and lose their drive because they're weak. They lose it because they accidentally train themselves to avoid the very things that they want. Now, how do they do that? By doing them before they had the capacity to succeed. Same challenge, different conditioning. So what do we do? We build capacity before we need it. Before, not after. Now, let me give you a great example of who actually gets this right. Okay, people who understand this better than anybody are the Navy SEALs, the people who build the training programs for them. Okay, what do they not do? They don't drop a brand new recruit into combat and say, let me see if he can handle it. Okay, they know that if they're going to put you in a super high stakes environment before you have the capacity to meet it, you are not going to toughen up. You're going to condition avoidance. And so they focus on building capacity first. There's actually a drill called pool competency. Okay, this is when the candidates are basically underwater with scuba gear. and then the instructors are trying to sabotage all their equipment. And so the test isn't whether they can fix the gear. Anyone can really do that, especially in a calm condition. The test is whether they can stay composed when every insect is to freak out. And so here's what most people don't think about, right? They trained for that for weeks first. If you look at their training programs and how they're broken down, they have breathing techniques. They have stress inoculation. They have progressive exposure. It's not like they just throw them in and say, figure it out. They get reps of manageable stress Stress that they can succeed through so their brain starts to build evidence that says I can handle this And then your brain starts to say maybe I can handle similar things to this and similar to that and similar to that And it keeps going up right It like Michael, you start talking about comfort creep. It's like you have comfort creep and discomfort creep, right? The more you do uncomfortable things and you can ingrain them as being growth in your brain, the more you want more of them. The more that you do things to avoid discomfort, the more that you will do things to avoid discomfort. So it's like your brain will go in one of these directions. You just want to make sure that you're very, very purposeful about which one you're leading it to. And so I say all this because most people ask, can I handle this? But the better question to ask is, do I have the capacity to handle this well in a way that reinforces the behaviors I want in myself? If the answer is no, that's not you being weak. That is you gathering information and feedback. And then you don't need to go shrinking your goals because of this. You need to build the capacity to then accomplish those goals. That's it. Now, maybe that means you got to slow down a little bit. Maybe it means you have to add in recovery before responsibility. Maybe it means you need to get reps in much smaller arenas before you go speak on a big stage. And maybe you need more help than you thought you needed. But you're not avoiding the hard thing. You are sequencing it so that when you do do it, you win. Or at least you don't have You don't have such an aversive experience that you never want to do that or anything like that again. Because then your brain is going to make you want to avoid it. So what does capacity actually look like when you're able to apply this to yourself and use it? Okay, it's not really abstract. Capacity looks like staying calm when other people are reactive, taking a hit without letting it poison the next decision you make, recovering much faster instead of dragging yesterday into today, holding stress without leaking in everybody around you, trusting yourself to stay sharp when things are uncomfortable. So please hear me here. It is not about just surviving something hard. It is about staying effective through something hard. The goal is not to suffer more. The goal is to become someone for whom hard things feel manageable. Capacity isn't the reward for pressure. It's the prerequisite for performing under it. If you build at first the opportunities you can say yes to start to expand naturally. And I swear, I promise they will compound. This is probably one of the most important things that you can do for yourself, for your business. Please share this with somebody today. Maybe you know somebody who's trying to do something big, but they just keep setting these big audacious goals and they're not building the skills to accomplish them first. Maybe you know somebody who keeps undershooting their goals and they're not making progress fast enough because they're actually undershooting and they can manage more. Or maybe you know somebody who continues to run themselves into the ground, thinking that's how they're going to accomplish more, when they're actually just continuing to build more and more negative reinforcements linked to their work. Either way, share it with somebody that you think would help today. I hope this helped you guys. I know this is a little shorter, but also if you didn't listen to my last podcast, I did one just a couple weeks ago on your capacity of your business. And this is really a spinoff of that. So if you like this one, go ahead and check that one out too.
