052: Perceived Capacity vs. Actual Capacity

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Hello. Hello friends. Welcome back to freetime. Can you friggin believe it is December already? Where has this year gone? Does anybody else feel like we're in a time warp of 2021? I am recording this on Wednesday, December 1st and that gives me two weeks before I go offline for the second half of December and the first week of January for spending time with family and just resting and recovering. The topic of this solo episode is perceived capacity versus Actual capacity. I'm almost embarrassed to tell you this, but last week, Thanksgiving week, I came down with bronchitis. You can hear it in my voice, the scratchiness. And there is still of course that lingering cough. Thankfully it was not Covid and it could have been worse. But once again, for the second time in a month, I found myself at almost a 10 out of 10 level of discomfort. My asthma was so bad that I couldn't breathe. I would wake up in the middle of the night. Thankfully I do have an inhaler now, but as I've mentioned in recent episodes, I haven't had to use it for 10 years until now. So there I go again. And it started to come down the weekend before Thanksgiving and I was trying to make plans and possibly go see a friend and already I was having suspicions. Maybe I should just lay low and not do anything. And then sure enough, that Monday, I thought it was just allergies from the dust investigations that we've been doing and we did hire a deep cleaning team to clean the apartment. So as the sneezing kind of subsided, I thought okay, it's just the lingering effects of the dust bunnies. But alas, within a day it had turned into full on bronchitis And I just. My lungs were so asthmatic. I don't even know how to describe it, but just the most strained breathing and wheezing. And with asthma you can't fill your lungs to capacity. It's like the greatest effort to take in breath doesn't yield very much. After about a day of this and just being totally miserable using my inhaler with too much frequency, Michael said, why don't you call doctor? I think it's time to get on a Z pack or some kind of medication. Sometimes I don't know why I get. I'm like not stubborn about calling a doctor, but just takes me a minute. I did. Thankfully I could see someone virtually. They prescribed a Z pack. I've never been so grateful for antibiotics in my life. Well, in addition to the couple weeks ago with the crazy ear infection where it felt like someone was drilling into the side of my head 24 7. So I did another course of antibiotics and a steroid and cough syrup and my inhaler. And there I went again, glued to the couch, doing nothing. I had this little checklist. I set up a little station with some books, New Yorker, all my medications and this little checklist of did I take this medicine at the right time? And then this one and not taking the inhaler too frequently. And am I eating yogurt for probiotics, am I taking my vitamins? And I just put myself on this course for six days. It was hard to sleep lying down, so I slept. Once again, I think I've mentioned Michael and I got these custom fabric, like deep rich blue La Z Boy chairs. We each have one in the living room instead of a couch. And I had to sleep on that for the last week because it was too hard to lay flat. I would just bust into coughing all night. So there I was like sleeping practically sitting up, although in a very comfy chair. And then during the day, he and I binge watched the Dexter series from like a decade ago. I think we were inspired because it just restarted and Michael really liked it at the time. That's been my life. And for that reason, I didn't put out episodes during Thanksgiving week. As I sat and reflected on this, I just thought, okay, two knock me out illnesses in one month is most definitely a signal. I would be the first one to say, hey, you gotta wake up, you gotta understand what's going on. The reason I mentioned this theme today, perceived capacity versus actual capacity, is that sometimes I think we perceive what our capacity is. And I'll speak for myself. I Perceive what my capacity is and then it's not until my body lets me know by getting sick or by having these weird things happen. Hey, your actual capacity is different. And in this case, by different, I mean less than whatever you think. Do you remember eating at salad bars growing up? I don't know why. I lived in San Francisco and my mom used to take us to Sizzler. Did any of you have a Sizzler where you are? In Southern California, when we would visit my grandma, she had Soup Plantation and I loved these salad bars. Now as an adult, there are some locations across the country of Fogo de Cho. Have any of you been there? It's so easy to just stuff oneself full at these places because it's exciting. There's this yummy salad bar and then in the case of Fogo de Cho, these delicious meats. If you're not vegetarian, you put this little red light green light card, they give you a little circle card and you put it green if you want them to slice you off pieces of the meat that are rotating around like bacon wrapped something, filet mignon, T bone, who knows what else. And then you turn it red when you're stuffed to the brim full, can't possibly eat anymore. This buffet style eating reminds me of what I've been experiencing recently as it relates to time, which is that everything looks really good sometimes. I'm super excited about my projects as I am with the book and preparing everything behind the scenes, getting the audiobook ready, getting the pre order campaign ready, all of it. It's fun and I keep reminding myself how much I genuinely enjoy creating things like the freetime toolkit that I just am finishing up creating PDF resources, a free time leader toolkit. If you want to run a book club or mastermind. There's so many fun things happening and it's like I'm back at that salad bar where everything is so yummy it's tempting. And I tend to go fast sometimes when I'm on a roll and then boom, all of a sudden, as at the buffet, you go, oh my God, I'm so full. Someone's gonna have to roll me out of here. I can't even move. In my case, it's getting knocked out twice in a month with a gnarly ear infection, which is a bacterial infection, and then this bronchitis infection, which I think is bacterial as well. So maybe the bacteria moved, maybe my immune system was already down from the antibiotics. But one way or another, this was my body saying, you're not listening. To me, you're still doing too much. As I've been reflecting on this, there are a couple of reasons that I think this can happen. When we have what I call the capacity gap, where our perceived capacity is just not quite accurate to what our actual capacity is. One of them is taking on invisible roles. So I often joke to Michael that we need a wife. And I actually don't. I don't even like saying that because I don't want to pin the role of house manager on women only or gender or assume that that's something that a wife would do. But let's say typically in the past wife connoted some job roles, and now where you have 40% and some studies say up to 50% female breadwinners, things are changing so much. And yet that doesn't mean that either person, either A, has the skill set to manage the house, or B, the desire. And then C, of course, is the issue of time. So in the case of Michael and I, you know, I'm the super organized one. But that doesn't mean I want to deal with all the frigging house and life admin like, oh, reordering a microwave, scheduling the delivery, scheduling the person who's going to come install it, fixing the leak in the kitchen sink, paying the bills, figuring out why riders itching all the time, making the vet appointments. I mean, these are things that technically could fall easily under my systems, but even things like cooking and cleaning on a regular basis. This is all part of a role that I now call house manager. So even though we don't have a house manager yet, there is a role that exists of managing all of these things in the house. Again, just something as simple as grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning, dishwashing. You know, these have to happen for all of us. What do they say? The only sure things in life are death and taxes. But then we can also add laundry to that list. And I know a lot of entrepreneurs are good about hiring help and having people who are around the house doing all of these things. My godmother, she said, I bring home the bacon, I don't cook the bacon. And I feature her in free time as saying that. So I realized that sometimes invisible roles are taking up space in our actual capacity. That if we don't acknowledge them and define them, then our perceived capacity is going to be inaccurate. I really appreciate it. There's a couple books about this topic that are geared toward women. And this conversation doesn't have to be just toward women, but drop the ball, do less Life admin. Was a good one and Fair play. These are all books that address how many things have to happen on the home front. And when you have one or both people working, it is a challenge to figure out who's going to do that or who you're going to hire to help with all of that. So that's the first one. Recognize, define and at least outline what is involved in in the invisible roles that you might be taking on or neglecting. Why did I come down with that crazy ear infection and the allergies and the asthma and then the bronchitis? Well, part of it was we weren't cleaning our house enough. We had a ton of dust everywhere. I didn't want to be the one cleaning, but then I got sick. So now I have to be the one to solve the problem. Even if that means which I now have done, I've reduced the friction by instead of hiring a cleaner on a one off basis, I finally set up a recurring appointment. It's something so simple as that. Just this shift from an as needed basis to a recurring appointment. I think in the past I would always tell myself, oh, I don't know if we need weekly or I don't know if we should pay for weekly. And now the fact that I've been sick twice, it's like pay for it, just figure it out. And the fact that it's recurring means there's not scheduling friction of making it happen or deciding when to hire the person, when are they available, when should they come? Maybe this is already obvious to many of you listening, but it's a very simple shift that I've been trying to notice in one area and then apply it to many others.

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Another reason that I think our perceived capacity of what we think we can accomplish differs from our actual capacity is role fit. Sometimes if we're not in the right role or we're not doing the right activities in our business, then the role fit, it doesn't fit. And that creates friction. So, for example, I'm just going to keep using this role of house manager.

On the one hand, I probably, if it's all I did, I could probably be a good house manager. I've always thought I would make a good chief of staff for somebody. A right hand, you know, at the end of the day, I like to be the one creating content and out there speaking. And so it's kind of a shadow, sliding doors career that I don't think I'll ever do, but I think I could be good at it. However, the role of house manager, I don't want it. I'm not that good at it. I'm not good at cleaning, I'm not that great at cooking. Michael is much better in the kitchen than I am in terms of his culinary skills and his taste and his interesting dishes and presentation. So the whole role of house manager creates friction for me and I get annoyed at bills or mail or, you know, I try not to. I try. Of course, we all have to deal with this stuff, but I can just say that the role of house manager, cooking, cleaning, monitoring services, fixing things, getting things delivered, it's just not. It's just not my ideal role. So there's friction there that drags on my capacity. Because anytime we experience friction in any area, that's going to drain more of our resources to address it than when we're in a state of flow. Whereas when I'm in my role of creating this podcast, creating things like the free time toolkit, building the leader toolkit in Canva, you know, I have a lot of fun with that stuff. I can just sit there and fiddle and there's no real friction and nor does it drain me. It's kind of soothing to work on those types of activities.

Another reason that our perceived capacity can differ from our actual is when we take on new projects without significantly cutting back some else. Here's what I mean by this. If you say to me that you want to write a book the next year, I would say, go for it, you can do it. But it's very rare that you would start working on your book and proactively. In fact, before you even start, you go, well, then I better get rid of three things on my plate that are pretty good or good enough just to make room for writing a book. What I tend to do and what I think a lot of us tend to do is we take on that new project, one that we might be really excited about. But it's not like we proactively edit down our life first. A parallel might be expanding your family. I know a lot of new moms say that once their kid arrives, they have such instant clarity on what they want to say yes, which is very little say yes to, and what they want to say no to, which is most things, and a much higher threshold for what they'll say yes to than it would have been previously, but without something so dramatic as welcoming a child into the world. Sometimes we just add projects or we add responsibilities or roles or relationships, and we have not made big cuts in any area. So all of a sudden one day we wake up and we go, what the heck? I'm totally full, as in the buffet. You're gonna have to roll me out of here. The fourth reason for the difference is context. We are all living, breathing organisms. That is stating the obvious. But I do think that age can play a role. Hormones can play a role. The season of the year, that it is the season of our life. That it is for me, living in a big city and sort of the chaos that has been in New York a little bit with COVID and the neighborhood we live in, what's happening in the global economy and world and news cycles. So I think the fourth contributor that is almost. It's weirdly invisible in its own way for me. I've noticed, okay, well, ever since I, you know, got married, got a house, got a dog, just my. My perceived capacity of what I used to be able to do when I'm my sing solo single self, as I call it, is just different than the season of life that I'm in or than my age. Maybe I could, you know, maybe my actual capacity was bigger in my 20s because of age, because of hormones, maybe partly. I was working out all the time because I had so much time. So I was just going to yoga and Pilates every day, going for really long walks in New York, and I'm not doing that right now. So these environmental contextual factors and just the. Again, the season, not just of the year, but the season that our body is in, that our life is in, that our relationships are in. I think also can.

Limit or shift capacity in ways that are not always conscious where we might be looking at the exact same to do list or set of projects, but all of a sudden only be able to tackle 50% of it, rather than what used to be the normal amount. And I think so many of us felt this with COVID There was a new normal. And, you know, 2020 was all about stopping everything and slowing down and staying home. And then 2021, it's almost like we were willing ourselves to get back to normal, yet with all the fatigue and weird stuff piling up, that just continued into 2021. So we still have just as much uncertainty and fear and doubt and media insanity and polarization, and that's a lot to deal with. So I definitely think that there's environmental factors that create a strain on our cognitive capacity that might be invisible to us until these physical things happen to go, hey, whether you like it or not. And this is what I felt my body said to me recently. Whether you like it or not, your actual capacity is not as high as what you think right now. So once again, cut back to 50% or 25%. My friend Laura, who's a mom and a business owner, she calls it survival mode. And I love thinking about this, that when I'm in survival mode, I'm not putting pressure on myself to make plans, to pick up the phone, to do anything other than what is necessary for work, if even that, being more radical about what I can drop and how I can give myself more time and more spaciousness. And as I did last week with Michael, just giving myself permission to literally sit on the couch for five or six days doing nothing. And I have to say, as tough as it was some of those nights, especially at the beginning before the meds kicked in, it was also a lot of fun. As I was planning this episode, I happened to hear a conversation just the night before. I'm recording this today with Oprah interviewing Brene Brown for her Super Soul Conversations podcast. I'll put it in the show notes. They're talking about Brene Brown's new book, Atlas of the Heart, and they talk about this exact stuff. So in the book, Brene talks about her days as a server and bartender. And she said that because her whole thing is that language can change how we think about things and how we problem solve and give ourselves permission to work through things. So when she was a server, she used to say she was in the weeds. And that would mean people would kind of help out or, I'm blown. And when she would say, I'm blown, quote, they wouldn't even expect you to help them help you, they being her fellow servers. So if she just went to the back kitchen and said, I'm blown, people would jump into action and just go Ask the hostess who, what tables does Brene have? And they leapt into action. This is the equivalent to the episode where I talked about drowning, treading water or gliding. Like, I'm blown. My language was, I'm drowning or I have bronchitis and I can't breathe. When I can't breathe, or with my ear infection, the tremendous, tremendous pain that that caused. I couldn't do anything thing. It was just, I'm blown. I am sitting on the couch. I needed Michael to do double down on Ryder stuff. I didn't do any work. And I just love how Renee phrased it that her peers wouldn't even expect you to help them help you. And I think this would be a good, whatever you call it, be a good thing to have with your team too. Like, I'm blown mode or I'm out for the count. It's that you don't even need to tell anybody what to do to step in for you or to reschedule things or to delegate the work because you can't when you're in that mode. Like, I found it. I find it hard to even ask my team or tell them how to help me. I need to just say, I am out. I am knocked out by this thing and I need you to step in. Oprah kind of confirmed when Renee said that. She said, yep, when you're in the blown state, you really just need to be able to come back to yourself and do nothing. And Renee said exactly what I described about my couch week. Researchers say nothingness is the only way to come back from overwhelm. And she cited John Kabat Zinn, which I love this line too. She said, well, John says overwhelm means life is unfolding at a rate that neither my psyche or my nervous system can handle.

Now, there's another side to this conversation, which I wasn't even going to talk about today. But as I was going in to record, Michael asked me what the topic was and I told him. And he said, well, what about when your perceived capacity is less than what you are actually capable of? And I thought, you know, that is true sometimes for me lately it's been less with physical stuff. But let's say project wise. What is imposter syndrome? It's that our perceived capacity or our perceived capability, Imposter syndrome is that we perceive ourselves less capable than what we are actually capable of or in a physical setting. You know, I don't do CrossFit anymore, but I did CrossFit at one point in my life for eight months. And what I absolutely loved about it was that every single time I went to the box, the workouts were so extreme and so insane and so far beyond anything I would have ever either made myself do or imagined that I could do. That I left every single time having exceeded my perceived capacity of what I was capable of physically, emotionally, energetically. I mean, it was just nuts. Some of these circuits that they have you do. And it was a cool exercise and always surpassing what I thought I was capable of. It's Bill Gates. I'm pretty sure it's attributed. Who said what? I'm sure so many of you are familiar with. Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in 10 years. So that's true. I mean, this is Dori Clark. I interviewed her on this podcast about her book, the Long Game. I do think that we often overestimate, from a time margin sense what we can do in a day, in a week, sometimes in a month, in a year, like the crazy times we've been living in. But over the long term, we are capable of so much more, I think, intellectually, creatively, than we might give ourselves credit for. I can't tell you how many friends have said to me, oh, I'd love to write a book someday. And then, like, once they just surround themselves by people who have written books. And I've seen this happen over 10 years. I've seen people go from I doubt I could ever do that to, okay, it must be possible, because my friends are authors, and then they make it happen. And their books are always unfailingly awesome. I've just seen it happen over and over and over for 10 years. I've seen it happen. And partly it's me being there, rooting them on, saying, I know you can do this, and I'm just an example in their life that says, I know you can do this. I'm here, I did it. Here are some templates and tools, and they make it happen. So it's rewarding to see something and someone who thinks something is impossible, that they don't have the capacity and then to just get going on it and realize that their actual abilities are totally. It's totally possible.

There's a book that I really appreciate the title called 10-10-10, 10 minutes, 10 months, 10 years by Susie Welch. She is the wife, although I wonder if they're still married. Former GE CEO Jack Welch.

She talks about this in the context that any choice you make, any decision will benefit from. 10-10-10. So she says when you're facing a dilemma, all it takes to begin are three. What are the consequences of my decision in 10 minutes, in 10 months and in 10 years.

We could adapt this to this capacity question. So we could say, what is my capacity in 10 minutes in 10 days, in 10 months and 10 years? Now for me, 10 years, it's so overwhelming. I'll just be lucky to be alive and healthy in 10 years. Like I really don't, I don't know, I don't think that far out and I'm not that motivated by a ten year plan, at least anymore. But I do think it's interesting to consider our capacity for 10 minutes, 10 days, or let's say 10 hours, you know, what is my capacity for the next 10 hours today in home and work in 10 days? So two weeks in 10 months, and then what if we change the last one to two years or one year? I think with so much change happening right now, that's what makes most sense to me. But I encourage you to think about this. If you find yourself just hitting up against this friction of everything at the buffet looking yummy and then getting knocked out or overly full, you're not alone. I think sometimes we have to push ourselves in order to know what those limits are. And that sometimes when our bodies kick in and speak up, as mine has been doing recently, as I've been sharing here, it's a sign that to surface some of the invisible roles or cognitive load taking up some of the capacity, because I think that our bodies talk almost as a last resort. If these issues were conscious, we wouldn't need to get sick on some level. Our immune system wouldn't be down because we wouldn't have the stress and the strain on our system. And so I often do. I'm not saying getting sick is anyone's fault or anything, but it's, it's that getting sick is clearly a wake up call saying, hey, listen, your body's not in top condition.

It's needing more than in my case that I've been giving it. And sometimes it's hard to spot that until it actually happens. And then it provides really interesting food for thought of investigation. What is going on? What are the themes? Where am I taking on too much? Where am I taking on invisible roles that I don't want or that I'm not good at, or that I need to create better recurring systems for? So I hope you found this helpful. I'm just grateful that my voice is back enough to even record this. Thank you. And I really appreciate you being here. Stay tuned. We have so much exciting stuff rolling out with the book. It's all happening. The one thing I have gotten done is just building and tinkering behind the scenes and I was able to do a lot of that while during my couch time. And I can just tell you right now, there's going to be so many fun things rolling out around the book. You can pre order now go to itsfreetime.com book and if you want to join our private community for more conversations just like these. Just kind of the real behind the scenes real talk with fellow heart based business owners, I would love to have you join us@itsfreetime.com BFF thanks so much for listening everybody. Have a great rest of your day.

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