Ep #288: Increasing Your Capacity and Capability

Welcome to the Make Money as a Life Coach® podcast where sales expert and master coach Stacey Boehman teaches you how to make your first 2K, 20K, and 200K using her proven formula.

Hey coaches, welcome to episode 288. I am so excited to do this episode for you all today. It’s going to really be helpful and open up your minds to a greater potential inside of yourself. Today, we’re going to talk about increasing your capacity, your capability, and your potential. 

So I’ve been teaching a lot on this in the last six months, especially because I’ve been in a deep space of challenging my own capacity, capability, and potential. I’m using these three words because I have been using capacity when I’ve been teaching this the most and then it kind of switched to capability. I was thinking about like aren’t those kind of the same? 

So then I looked up the definition of all three of them, like what they mean as individual things. So if you look up the definition of capable, it’s having the ability, fitness, or quality necessary to do or achieve a specific thing. So this could be like I am capable of signing a coaching client. I am capable of getting paid. I am capable of coaching someone, right? 

Having the ability to achieve efficiently whatever one has to do. That’s the second definition of it, which I thought was interesting because that’s where I think capacity comes in. Capacity is the ability to achieve something. I believe in my experience, not even looking at the definition, it’s to be able to achieve something greater and greater and greater, to be able to do something more and more efficiently.

When I looked at the definition for capacity, it was the maximum amount that something can contain. Then the second definition was the amount that something can produce. So there’s the amount you can produce, and then it’s almost like inside of the amount of what you can produce, then there is the ability to produce something well, right? There’s the efficiency, there’s the amount you can produce, and then there’s the skill at which you produce and what exactly you do produce, the skills you do.

One of the things that keeps all of my students from growing, all of us as humans from growing and reaching our potential or reaching a potential available to us is our belief of our capability and our capacity to take on greater capability. 

So then I was scrolling through all the definitions, like the deep dive of the definitions. In one of them, in the amount that something can produce, a similar word came up of potential. So then I looked at, okay, what’s potential mean? What’s the definition? It’s having or showing the capacity to become or develop into something in the future. 

So if we want to have greater capacity or greater potential to develop into something in the future, the thing we have to challenge is our belief in our capacity and our capability to challenge it. I’m going to explain this in like using all three words in a way that I think will be really useful. I’ve been coaching a lot of my Two Million Dollar group students. I’ll give you an example. 

I’ve been coaching a lot of them on their belief that they have the capacity to make a million dollars, the energetic capacity. Because anytime you have a big goal, and this is even if it’s like I’m going to start my business, the first thing your brain wants to tell you is I don’t have the energy to do that. I don’t have the capacity. I work full time. I have kids. I have a busy life. There’s no time left over. There’s no capacity to do this.

Or sometimes our brain tells us, I don’t have the intellectual capacity. Like I don’t believe I could learn this very intricate skillset. Maybe it’s sales. Maybe it’s marketing. For me right now, I’m working on one of my goals is to bring my ads in house and have us just run them and never work with an ads manager again.

I love that I’m facing this challenge now and not earlier. I teach this. I teach delaying that challenge as long as possible because I think there are so many other things that you could be working on. Like I have spent the last 10 years just challenging and increasing my skill sets in organic marketing, in selling, in delivering, and those three things have taken all of my energy and focus.

But now I feel like I know there are definitely different levels of the skill, but I’ve really run into the point after 10 years and $30 million of sales, I’ve really felt like I’ve run into the point where I can 100% keep selling and making money with the tools I have, but I recognize if I want to go to the next level, I have to figure out selling through ads and funnels at a new level. 

I keep running into issues with ad managers that just can’t take me there. Instead of like finding the perfect ad manager, now I’m ready to be the ads manager. Like that feels like the next thing available for me to really go to the next level is if I could do their job. That’s my thought. I could do this job. I have the capability to learn this job and the capacity to take it on. 

I’ve done this earlier this year with taking over my business operations and management of my employees and my company, which was two people’s full-time jobs that now I do on top of my job as the CEO and head of marketing, head of sales, head of delivery, full-time coach, head visionary, strategizer, head budgeter, and moneymaker, all of those jobs. Now it’s also head manager and head person making decisions around operations.

Now I do have an amazing person that is working for me as like kind of a fractional COO. But even in that, I’ve made sure I’m a part of everything, every meeting, every decision, every planning session. I’m the one really overseeing the decisions, and I need to be. That’s what I think is also my next level. 

So to take on all of these jobs on top of the ones I already have within a, it used to be a three-day work week. Now it’s like constantly changing. So I almost don’t even feel an integrity to say it’s a three-day work week anymore. It’s more like a five-day work week like using all of my child’s nap times and then also three days of full-time work. It’s like a weird mix. 

We get a two to three-hour nap every day, and I go ham during those hours and then I also work other hours throughout the week but it allows me to be even more flexible and take my kid to his little toddler classes that we do and go to the park on days. So now I will just say it’s probably more like a 15 to 20-hour work week.

So it requires a deep amount of challenging my capability and my capacity and accessing a new level of potential inside of myself. Okay. So that’s kind of the opening. I want to deep dive in.

I’m going to really walk you through what I call a capability or capacity challenge. What you need to know, thoughts to think to help you do this to increase your capability and your capacity for more, whether it’s your capacity to coach more people in a container, to go from 10 people to 30 people, to go from 30 people to a hundred people, from a hundred people to a thousand people. Maybe it’s your capacity to make more money to go from 300K to a million, or your capability to become better at sales and increase your conversion rates, whatever it is.

So this is the first way I want you to think about it. I’ve titled this increasing. The way I refer to it is increasing my capacity because I think that that’s what people understand and that’s the way they would frame the problem. When I’m coaching people, that is typically the way they say. I just don’t have the capacity, and we’re talking about increasing it. 

But another way to think about it is challenging it. Okay. So when you’re like I want to increase my capability, or I want to increase my capacity. I want to be able to do something that I can’t currently do, or I want to be able to do more or get more results from my energetic or physical time. If I want to do that, what I really have to do is challenge it. I have to challenge my capacity.  I have to challenge my capability. 

The reason I really love challenging it in order to increase it is because you are really challenging your brain’s thoughts about it. Your brain’s thoughts about your capacity, your brain’s thoughts about your capability. You’re challenging your brain’s thoughts about your capacity and what you are capable of taking on. 

I think you’re doing this for four kind of major areas. So you might be challenging your brain’s thoughts about your capacity and what you’re capable of taking on intellectually, tangibly with a skill. It could be with volume and production of work and/or, in all of these cases, it’s challenging what we are capable of and what our capacity is energetically because that’s typically what we say. I don’t have the energy for that. I don’t have the stamina for that. I don’t have the time for that.

Anytime we say we don’t have the time, really what we’re saying is we don’t have the energy, right? Because how we use our time and what gets done in the time we have has to do with the energy we bring to it. 

Okay, so let’s break this down. So intellectually, this might be you believing I am capable of learning this thing, right? Like when I think of an intellectual capacity issue, it’s like I don’t have the capacity to be smarter. I don’t have the availability inside of my body and in my brain to be smart enough to understand this or learn this, or I don’t have the ability, enough information and resourcefulness inside of me and knowledge inside of me to make these decisions or to think through this. 

Any of the ways it shows up like that. Like these are the ways it kind of shows up for me is all my brain will say I’m not smart enough to learn this, or I don’t have enough knowledge to make this decision, or I’m not capable of making this decision, or I literally don’t have the smarts to think this through. 

Especially like when I think about ads. Like anything that has to do with technology, my brain wants to short circuit. Even when we did our data study. I mean, I cannot tell you how many questions and how many hours and conversations that Patrick and I had for me to understand the numbers and what he was telling me and like to understand how he ran the data. 

Because like every time he starts talking at his level, which is like extraordinarily high, my brain would want to check out and be like I’m not smart enough to understand this. I’m not a data person, and I am not a tech person. When he would talk about like all the software that it was used to run the study, it was like my brain just wanted to completely check out. I had to constantly challenge my ability to stay in that level of intellectual conversation. 

My brain used to do this with money and budgeting and money management and like learning my P&L. I went last November to a good friend’s house and her husband used to be, I think a COO, CFO of a huge fast food chain.

I went in knowing it was going to be a very hard day because I was going to be challenging my capability to look at the numbers and look at a P&L and understand four different viewpoints of a P&L and to really like become an expert at it, to become very proficient in it. I always wanted to just delegate that out to bookkeepers. That’s what they do. That’s what they do. Except they kept making mistakes, no matter how many I worked with, that would cost me lots of money.

So I had to choose to challenge my intellectual capacity to be capable of looking at a P&L and knowing how to use that to guide my business decisions or to be able to have a conversation with a neuroscientist who has become a software developer and works in the tech field and like believe I can intellectually keep up with that conversation. So that’s what I mean by challenging your capability and your capacity on an intellectual level. 

Then there’s the tangible kind of skill-based level. So I can do this skill set, this action, or this physical thing. So this could even be like challenging your capacity to change your body composition. I could go three sizes down and change the way overall my body looks and how toned it is and how it fits into clothes. Sometimes you might want to challenge that. I have personally done that. My physical ability to lift weights and to do certain physical activities.

Challenging, again, your skill set for marketing, for sales, for anything really. Any skill set you want to learn, your ability to coach. So that’s like a tangible skill set. The way I want you to think about it is I can do this skill set, this action or this physical thing.

Then there’s production. I can work this hard. I can get this much done. I can produce more than I currently am. That’s where my three-day work week came in, or my really 15 to 20-hour work week now, and make more money. 

When I was making 300K, I could not believe it was possible because I was working so much. I didn’t believe I could work any harder. In fact, I remember actually, I’ll take it even a further step back. When I first started coaching, before I became a coach, I told my one-on-one coach that I just knew it was impossible to make more money pitching and doing my demos because I couldn’t work any more hours. I was like I physically cannot work any more hours. It’s impossible. 

So there’s no way to make more money because I have been making the same amount of money. I’m the best of the best. I think I’m getting out of the store what’s possible in the store. 

So we worked for an entire year on me telling myself that I am the potential inside of me. I am just in my energetic being with all of the atoms that make me up. I am the potential of making. So at the time, my money ceiling was 60,000. So we said, I am the potential. Not I have even, I am. My entire being is the potential of making $78,000 without the feeling of having worked harder, like just in the time I’m already working. 

It’s such a crazy, very specific distinction. But believing that my molecules make up a potential that has the ability to produce more money in the same amount or less time or without feeling like I’m working harder was mind-blowing to me. I don’t know where $78,000 came in. That was just the number that came to my brain. It was like, if I could do that. I don’t even know why it wasn’t 80. It was 78 specifically. 

What’s so crazy is at the end of that year of challenging that belief in my capacity, I made like exactly that. I started my business and got my first couple of clients. I think that was the year of 2015. Or I made something very similar, but I just remember being like oh, holy crap. This works because the amount that I made was so similar. 

What I did is I actually did work less hours pitching and made more money. My sales actually did go up in the hours that I was working because I was coaching my brain between every show. Then I made some money coaching, which didn’t feel like work to me. So I actually did work more hours in my life, and I didn’t feel like I was working more. I made more sales in the time I was working, and I worked less. So I scaled my time that year.

So I think this has always been a key thing for me to challenge my production because it is the only way that I can become more and reach a greater potential and grow my business without having to work harder and work more hours, especially now that I’ve become a mom. I get that so many of you are like, I don’t want to build my business and miss my kids’ lives. I get that. I truly do. 

So if you have limited hours where you are working because you are spending time with your littles, or even your bigs that about to go off to college. If that is you then the only answer to making money while doing that is increasing the skill, the thing you can tangibly do, your intellectual capacity, the decisions you make, what you learn, and how you think through things and then your production, what you get done in the hours you work.

Then the fourth thing is the energetic capacity, which is I have the energy for this. I think that is the biggest lie that we all tell ourselves is that we don’t have the energy for it, including myself. If you asked me, what is the number one thing that you have coached your brain on in the entire last 10 years that your brain has been coached? 

Or even if you ask my one-on-one coach now who I’ve worked with for three years, what’s the thing that over the last three years that Stacey has coached the most on in her coaching sessions? I guarantee she would say this and I would for sure say this is my energetic capacity. My ability to look at my calendar and believe I can get all this work done.

Some of that is production, but the reason we tell ourselves that we can’t produce everything on our calendar is because we don’t have the energy to. This was like my biggest transformation right after I had my baby, and I came back from maternity leave because my child, I love him so much. You guys know how I feel about my child. I know we all do, but like sometimes people complain more than others about their kid. 

But the only complaint I have about my kid is that he has not slept through the night in two years. He is not a sleeper. He struggles with naps. He struggles with nighttime sleep. He’s not a sleeper. Listen, we’ve tried everything. Don’t message me about sleep training. I love you. Don’t do it. We have tried all the things. He can sleep. He has the capacity and the capability to do it because he does do it. Sometimes he goes weeks on end. Like he’ll go three or four weeks in a row sleeping through the night. Then we get used to it. Then he stops sleeping through the night. 

We just had one recently. I have no idea. Like seriously, he’s not teething. He’s not sick. There’s no indicators. But my husband and I were up with him from 11, this week. So I’m recording this on a Wednesday, this Monday. 

So Sunday night, he did not sleep. He went to bed at eight, slept from eight to 11, and then was up from 11 until 5 a.m. I mean, the level of exhaustion, and I had to work the next day. I think I got 90 minutes of sleep in a recliner with him sleeping on me. Then maybe another hour and a half at some point after my husband took him to the basement and put Toy Story on.  Like, okay, I can do this. 

So much of what we tell ourselves, if we look at our calendar, or we look at the things we want to get done is I don’t have the energy for this. I don’t have the energy to challenge my intellectual capacity, to challenge the skill set to produce this amount of work. I just don’t have stores of energy available to do this. Okay.

So now that you know the four things you might be challenging, here are the two reasons that we don’t achieve it. If you even try to go challenge your capacity and your capability, here are the two main reasons that I don’t think it happens. Every time I coach people on this, and they’re like I tried. This is what will happen. It’s like the difference of hustle versus hard work. If you haven’t listened to that episode, it’s a really powerful episode. It has to do with the thoughts you’re thinking when you’re working hard.

But when people tell me that they tried to challenge what they were capable of producing, and all it ended is in hustle and exhaustion and burnout. Then they had to take extended periods of time off, and then nothing changed.

That’s typically when challenging your capacity goes wrong is when you end up in burnout that requires lots of time off and when you come back, nothing has changed about your work ethic or your production levels or the skill levels, your intellectual levels, like nothing has actually changed. So then you’re like oh, great. I burnt myself out, and I have no value to add from it. That’s typically what happens.

If you’re successful at challenging your capability and really truly your capacity to do, again, think more, have bigger skill sets, do more, have more energy. If you’re successful, what will happen is you will reach a point that feels sort of like burnout, and you will be very, very, very tired. I’m going to walk you through this. But you will be very, very tired. 

But when you come back from resting and refueling, you will have increased capacity. You’ll be like oh, holy crap. All of a sudden, in general, I get more done in my life. I’m noticing an uptick of what I’m doing as like a standard. Like my standard has changed. When I’m not in increased production mode, just my general workflow and production has increased. My decision-making has increased without getting deep coaching. My skill set has increased just on a normal general day. 

So if you’re doing consults, it goes from being really, really hard and exhausting you to like oh, I just noticed I did one. It was pretty easy, and it was kind of fun. It didn’t take hardly any energy. That’s when you know you’ve actually successfully increased your capacity. 

So the reason that people don’t, I’ve thought a lot about this, like what makes people successful at this and what causes people to burn out with nothing, no value from it, without actually growing and reaching a greater potential. Here are the two things. 

Number one, when it gets hard to sustain and you get really tired, you give up. You take a break, you stop, and you don’t coach your brain and like give yourself a power up in that moment long enough to break through because it’s really painful. Then we tell ourselves the thought, I can’t sustain this. This isn’t sustainable. I have to take a break. 

We tell ourselves I’m exhausted. We tell ourselves our energy is depleted. We tell ourselves I can’t produce more. We tell ourselves I’m not capable of this skill set. We tell ourselves I’m not smart enough for this. I can’t figure this out. It’s not figure-out-able. 

In this moment when we want to give up and stop permanently, not just take like a temporary break to refuel. I mean like stop, give up, say this is no longer a goal of mine. It’s not sustainable. I can’t do this. I’m literally setting this down forever or for a long time. In this moment, this is when I think about humans in history who have endured far greater throughout history, throughout life, throughout the earth than my hard work on my computer in my home.

Like I’ve read a lot of hardcore books about human resilience and the things that people go through. A couple that come to mind are A Long Way Gone about child soldiers in Sierra Leone. These are very tough books to read. So I don’t necessarily like just recommend going out and reading them. But I Am Malala about schoolgirls, and she was shot in the head by the Taliban and survived. Stolen Girls about the schoolgirls stolen by the Boko Haram in Africa.

Like I’ve read a lot of deep stories of human suffering, like what humans have gone through and endured and the resilience and the capacity and the capability they had to come out of that and to persevere. Then I like think about that. Then I think about my challenge at home on my computer. I’m like oh yeah, like this is not the same thing, right? If they are capable of that, it shows me this infinite capability and capacity inside humans. 

I think that’s why I’m like so drawn to those stories is I’m like oh, like the capacity of human beings. There’s another one, Uneducated. Wait, is it called Uneducated or Educated? It’s by a woman, I can’t think of her name. I think it’s a memoir called Educated. 

But it’s by this woman who grew up in a home environment where they weren’t allowed to learn and like kind of like a cult like environment or like a doomsday type environment where her father especially was highly abusive. I can’t remember the specifics, but she went on to go to Oxford, I think, and she just became very extraordinarily intelligent and successful. 

So when I think of those types of stories, like I live off of those types of stories. It just is profoundly changing for me to like think about those things and then like look at this problem I’m trying to solve. I’m like, okay. 

Now, I never use that against myself. I never, ever use that against myself to shame myself for having the problem or shame myself for telling myself that I don’t have the capacity. Like I don’t do that, but I do use it for inspiration. I do use it to think there are far bigger problems than this current like what we call a first world problem or a champagne problem. There are far bigger issues in the world,  and I do use it to help, in a positive way, see my problem as smaller again without using it against myself.

Okay. So that is one thing that I do in that moment, but I’m going to give you more things that I do. But I just want you in that moment to recognize this is one of the ways people fail at increasing their capacities is they don’t stay with it long enough to break through. 

Then the second reason is because you don’t change your thoughts during the challenging of the capacity and the capability to be in flow of it while you’re doing. So instead, it’s resistance the whole time. I can’t do this. I can’t do this. I can’t do this. I can’t do this. This is awful. This is terrible. I’ll never be able to do this. It’s too hard.

If you keep those thoughts while you’re doing it, nothing will change. You will actually just burn out and be very tired and have nothing to show for it. Then believe that’s the only way to succeed.

Instead, you have to coach yourself enough to keep going through. You have to find energy. You have to change I can’t to literally I can. You have to change it isn’t possible to it is. It’s within me in those moments while you’re doing it in the day to day. 

How you know you’ve done that is resistance will recede like the ocean. It will go out. Allowance and energy will come in. If energy and allowance isn’t there, it won’t be sustainable because your brain will just like keep assaulting you with I can’t. It’s not possible. It’s terrible. I don’t have the energy for this. I’m tired. All the thoughts that wear you down. 

I don’t think we actually experience physical burnout for most humans. For most people, I think we experience mental burnout. I think the mental burnout is what creates most of the physical burnout. 

Now, you can get physically burnt out symptoms, but I think that starts in the mind first. It depends on how much you believe the mind creates what’s happening in the body. I believe it creates I will say most of it. I think there are also things that happen in the energetic world, right? Like you catch colds. You could catch COVID. You’re not catching COVID because you are a negative person, right? That’s not what I mean.

But so much, way more than we understand, starts in the mind and then is created in the body. The body being the physical manifestation of a lot of what’s happening in the mind. So here’s what has to happen. Here are some thoughts that I think will be really helpful that have been helpful for me. 

I have infinite capacity. I truly believe that. It’s the core of the thesis of this podcast. I believe we all have infinite capacity. Just like when I became a coach, we learned at The Life Coach School the idea that we are all just worthy. Like we have infinite worthiness. We are all worthy. There is no worthy to earn. We just are. As human beings, the moment we’re born, even before we’re born, we just have worthiness. It’s just who we are. It’s what’s inside of us. There’s nothing required that you do in order to have it. 

So playing off of that, I believe we have infinite capacity. I believe as human beings, the molecules and atoms or whatever, all the science that makes us up, the energy coursing through our bodies. I believe inside there is infinite capacity. 

It’s the only way it proves all of these miraculous things that people can do, what they’re capable of doing, the intelligence we’re capable of having, the skill we’re capable of achieving, the production, the amount of work we’re capable of doing, the energy we’re capable of omitting in the world. The only way that that makes sense.

I don’t believe there are just certain alpha humans born and others are not. There’s certain infinite humans born. There’s no like this baby was born with 100% more potential than this baby. Now, some babies are born in different circumstances for sure, 1,000%. But as a human being, you could take two babies in a hospital and put them next to each other and one was born with more capacity than another. Now, I could be proved wrong. This thought is very useful for me. 

So what I believe is that we have to learn to access it at greater levels. That is how we reach greater and greater levels of our own internal potential. That’s the whole game of life coaching. The whole reason to hire a coach is to access greater potential for feeling, of experiencing, of doing, of thinking in this world and finding that inside of us. We can do it without coaching. I just think coaching speeds it along. 

But that is like, what’s the purpose of being on the planet? I think one of them is to challenge our capacity and to innovate as humans, right? To access new levels of human innovation. So if I believe I have infinite capacity and then my job is to just learn to access it at greater levels, then that’s what I’m thinking when I’m like oh, I don’t have the energy or I don’t have the smarts for it. I don’t have the energy for it. 

I don’t have the ability to work more. I don’t have the ability to do the skill set currently. But inside of me, I do. So now I have to figure out that equation. I have to figure out the components that make up that greater capacity.

Another thought I think is I am capable of increasing my capacity. I can do this. I can’t tell you how many times the thought I am capable of this has changed everything for me, or I am the potential of this. The potential exists inside of my body to do this, inside of my brain to do this. The chemical makeup of who I am holds the potential for this. 

When I’m challenging my intellectual capacity, I tell myself I can do this. I can learn this. This is simple. I can simplify this. Even if it feels complicated to learn, I can simplify it and figure it out and learn it in the most simplified way. Then once I have that, I have the ability to take it to an advanced level and then take it to a mastery level. That’s how I felt about coaching. That’s how I feel about selling. 

If you think of the way I’ve done my programs, if you come into 2K for 2K, you’re going to learn the simplest way to market and sell your business. I mean like the absolute simplest way. Then when you get good at that, if you come join us in 200K, you’re going to learn the advanced way. Then if you master that, then you’re going to come in to Two Million Dollar Group and learn the mastery level way of marketing, selling, and delivering. 

For some people, they’re capable of just jumping right away to advanced level thinking or advanced level doing or advanced skill sets. That’s great. Some people come into the coaching industry where they worked 100 hours a week as a doctor. So working 40 hours a week in their coaching business is not a problem. They’re like, I got this. I can do this. 

So we all come in from different places. But I really believe if something feels out of your capability, you find the simplest way to learn it, get good at that, then add in advanced, add in the next level. Then when you get good at that, then go into mastery, and then you have it for life. So an additional thought I have is I am capable of getting better each day. If I just work at it every day, I will get better. 

This is why I think evaluating is so important. It feels like another one of those pieces that makes up me is from my pitching days all the way up until now. So for the last 16 years of my life, I have been capable of getting better at sales every single day and worked towards getting better in a very meticulous, precise way by evaluating and adjusting every day as just who I am. That’s just what I do. Not sometimes, every time. 

Another thought I love to think is there is another version of me that is  capable. What does she know? How does she handle these things? What advice would she give me? I know that’s true because there has been a different version of me that wasn’t capable previously that is capable now. 

From going from making no money, from signing my first clients to making 100K, from making 100K to making a million, from making a million to making 10. From going from running a $10 million company or an eight-figure company, a little more than that, running this eight-figure company and becoming a mom. I remember when my baby, like I could actually break him, and I was scared of him. I didn’t sleep for almost six days straight. It was wild, maybe longer. 

I just remember I was up for 32 hours giving birth and then I was up for sure I didn’t sleep in the hospital at all. Then we came home, and the night we came home, Jackson cried the whole night. So my mom and my husband and I were all in bed with this baby trying to figure out why won’t he stop crying. Then we were, I think, alone for maybe a day and barely slept. 

Then my sister came in, thank God my sister works as a nurse practitioner on the night shift. So I remember thinking, I can’t go to sleep because I have to watch him even when he’s sleeping. So my sister was like, listen, I will stay up till 4:00 a.m. and watch him while he’s sleeping and you go sleep. 

I feel like that was like six or seven days after I actually went into the hospital to start labor. It was wild. I laughed, but really it was not funny. It was like tragic. It was so crazy. My brain was like, I cannot do this.  

Now when I think about having another baby, I’m like, Neil, can you imagine? I’m going to sleep next time. I’m going to trust him and myself that he is capable, and I am capable, and we’re going to go to sleep. But I really felt like he was breakable because I didn’t feel like I was capable of like caring for this fragile life. I remember that. Now I have a different version of me. So there is another version of me that is capable. What does she know? So those are the thoughts to think. 

Then you have to create a strong why. When I imagine myself at big goals, like 30 million, I always imagine, and this is why I actually want to go for that goal. I always imagine myself way more capable, right? Like three times more capable than I am now. That’s capable of a lot. Like I imagine myself having big skills, deep skill levels, like being highly skilled, being highly valuable, knowing how to solve big problems. 

That’s what excites me because every day like if you think about our whole lives, the things we don’t like about our lives are just the things we’re not capable of. So I imagine all the things that I’m not capable of now that would be so easy then because I’ve developed that capability and that person, knowing who I am then, is very exciting for me.

Like even now, the last two years, I’ve developed like deep capabilities for so many things that I did not think were possible for me. That now that I have the capability, I won’t necessarily struggle with those things anymore. I’ll struggle with new things, but I won’t struggle necessarily with those things, or it’ll take way different levels of it. 

So I love that. I love thinking that next version of me is just going to have so much more capability than I have now. That’s going to open a completely different life and different life experiences and different core memories will come along with that. So that’s my strong why. 

I also have a really strong why and belief that increasing my capacity and my capability is the only way I can make more and be with my kids more. I have to increase what I’m capable of in skill, production, energy, and intellectually in the same amount of time that I have now. That’s the only way. 

Then I always think about, it goes back to the first thing, right? Of like who I’m going to be. I love to think about what I love about the more capable version of me. So this isn’t the same philosophy as like more equals better. I’m not talking about just like constant achievement society. Because one of the other things I’ve become very good at with challenging my capacity is rest and recovery because it does require it. You do have to rest and recover. It’s just like lifting weights. 

But if you go to the gym. Let’s say you go to the gym for like a week straight and you’re very tired, your body feels tired. The difference of one of the things that will keep you from increasing your capacity is saying oh, I’m so tired. I have to take two months or three months off of working out. I have to stop working out. I’m not capable of working out.

Proper rest and recovery and revitalization is I’m going to work out maybe five days and take two days to rest. Then I’m going to go back to working out for five days and then I’m going to take two days to rest. Of course, if I have a physical injury or I’m physically sick, I’ll stop, but otherwise I’m going to keep going. 

Then what will happen is eventually those five days going to the trainer or going to the gym, instead of being tired all day, it will give me energy, and suddenly it will be nothing in my life to keep going. I remember there was a time where my husband and I went to the trainer for 18 months straight. I remember thinking oh, it’s now a lifestyle. I am a physically fit person, and that’s just who I’m going to be in my life because I kept going. So rest and recovery is required, but not extended amounts of it, right? Not two and three months of it. 

Okay. So if you want to increase your capability, increase your capacity, here are the seven things you have to do. So number one, you’re going to define the big thing you want to do. I always like to say within reason. It’s like the big thing you want to do, the challenge that you want within those four things that would infinitely change your life experience to be capable of doing it but isn’t becoming a professional football player in the NFL. That’s just what I mean, within reason.

Maybe not zero to a million dollars in one year. Maybe it’s zero to 2K, zero to 10K, 10K to 100K, 100K to 500K, 500K to a million, right? So within reason, but what’s the big thing you want to challenge your capacity on that will infinitely change your life experience to be capable of doing it? Then the second step is to go to work to challenge it. 

When you’re challenging it, coach yourself and get coached through it the entire time. Change your thoughts to be in flow and an allowance of it. You can’t just go at it and keep the same thoughts and resist it the whole time, but keep going past the point of discomfort and feeling like you don’t have the energy by a lot. 

You have to start recognizing that your brain’s belief about your energy is possibly not accurate because you have infinite stores of it. But the only way you can keep it flowing is by choosing thoughts that create flow and allowance. You will run into a point where you cannot keep going if you don’t change your thoughts from resistant thoughts. 

But then also take defined breaks and rest periods throughout. You choose them ahead of time, right? I know I’m going to go ham working. I’m going to work very, very hard, say from 11 to four, and then I know I get to take my kid to the park. I’m going to get an extraordinary amount of things done in one week and then I’m going to go on vacation, or in one month and then I’m going to go on vacation. There will be a weekend coming up, right? Whatever it is. 

So I had this period where we just reorganized my entire business, restructured and rebranded over 16 weeks. But in that time, I also took two vacations, like two five-day vacations. I took the weekends off, and I made sure in the morning and at night that I had things that felt restful to do. But that time was a period where I was coaching my brain like crazy, morning and night and throughout the day, to let go of resistance, create allowance, choose thoughts that gave me energy and purpose, and to be in flow. 

Then when I did take breaks, this is so important, you have to get back up and going immediately. You can’t ease in. Oh, I’m easing into it. I’m building momentum. No, you got to just go right back in at the same level that you stopped at. So on Monday morning, it’s back at it. Then you go until you break through. 

How you know you break through is you’re working at a higher level, achieving at a higher level. You have a higher level skill set. You have more energy than you’ve ever had before. Suddenly you’re gaining energy. You feel it. You now know. There’s just a sense that you feel in your body that you now have increased your standard capacity. 

I had a 16-week period of challenging my capacity and my capability. After the 200K launch, I took a couple of weeks of where we intentionally down-regulated my body and my nervous system. I’ve never challenged my capacity for that long. So we had two weeks where I was very clear on the time I was working and what I was doing, but I was giving myself lots of rest. Then I went on a three-day vacation that was amazing with lots of rest. 

When I came back after that rest, I noticed oh, I’m just getting a lot more done than I’ve ever gotten done without feeling like I’m challenging my capacity again. It just is challenged. It’s just at a different level. So go until you accomplish it.

Here’s what you need to know while you’re doing this. Your brain will tell you all the reasons you can’t do it and should quit the entire time. You will question your why like crazy. You’ll want to quit really bad. You’ll feel very tired. You will want to take temporary breaks from time to time, and that’s okay. 

But you will have to push through when you think you can’t do anymore. That’s the whole point. You will have to entertain your internal and external resourcefulness a lot more than your reasons why you can’t. All of that will be deeply uncomfortable. All of that, you will feel like you don’t have the energy for. You’ll have to tell yourself you do. You’ll have to remind yourself of your infinite capacity and capability, your infinite energy that resides inside of you. 

The end result is you will come out the other side more capable with new skill sets, new thoughts, new levels of production. I’ve gone from seven hours to create a podcast to two hours to being able to do one in 25 minutes. I’ve gone from needing 90 minutes for a call to get someone to a resolution to 10 to 20 minutes to give profound coaching. 

There was a time where I went from I don’t know how to get a client, and I don’t know anyone who wants coaching to signing 16 back to back while working a full-time job. I’ve gone from 300K a year working 40 hours a week to 10 million a year, 12 million a year working three days a week. This year, I went from having two multiple six-figure employees who were experts at their job to me learning their job and doing their job on top of mine. This is the process every single time.

So I want to finish this episode with an email I wrote to all of you that are on my list. If you’re not on my list, we’ll link up how to get on my list in the show notes. But here’s what I wrote. 

Overwhelmed only happens when we don’t feel capable, when we don’t believe we have the capacity. The emotion we have when thinking I can’t overwhelms us. This is what causes the overwhelm. This is not the moment to slow down, back up, change the course, lighten the load.

This is the moment to decide I can. What if I really can? What if you really can? It’s the moment to decide you are capable, you will be capable, to find your capability, your capacity. It’s all already inside of us. We just have to access it. We have to step into the belief that we are capable and access the emotion through execution. Bam, we are capable.

I recently took over all operations and management of my business. My brain wanted to tell me that I was not capable, but I am the director. I tell it what to do and what to think. I told myself I am capable of figuring this out. I want to figure this out. I can do this. Then I decided it’s going to be simple. This is how I will do it. My brain wanted to offer me thoughts about how hard it will be, how I couldn’t handle it, how I didn’t understand the scope. I kept directing it back to this is simple. 

So I spent the first two weeks as head of operations understanding every task in my company. Then I started simplifying them. I met with every contractor, every employee. I told myself I can do this. This will be fun. It’s a chance to connect. I learned everything about what they do. I scheduled recurring meetings with them. I brought on two new people to help with workload. I decided to be clear on what work I needed done. 

I started with planning our two biggest launches of the year. We simplified things even further. We went through every step and every detail. We made lots of decisions. My brain was tired. It wanted to stop. It offered me overwhelm. I offered it capability. 

When we finished planning, I looked at every task I was responsible for. My brain offered me overwhelm again. I offered it back capability. I am capable. I got to work. It continues to offer me overwhelm. I continue to offer it capability. I get the work done. Every time I do this, I increase my capacity. I increase my capability. Actually, what I do is increase my ability to tap into my capability. 

You see it’s inherent. We all have infinite amounts. We just aren’t practiced at tapping in. We are practiced at letting our brain tell us we are overwhelmed and then agreeing. We have reinforced this our whole lives, but it’s there waiting inside you, waiting to come out, to do your dreams. The big thing you have always wanted. It’s there. Find it. Not once, every day. Keep coming back until it’s your habit. All right, folks, that’s the podcast for this week. Listen to this over and over, increase your capacity, and I’ll talk to you next week.

Hey, if you’re ready to make money as a life coach, I want to invite you to join my 2k for 2k program where you’re going to make your first $2,000 the hardest part using my simple 5 step formula for getting consults and closing new clients. Just head over to www.staceyboehman.com/2kfor2k. We’ll see you inside.