What’s Your Capacity?
By: David Freund, Chief Leadership Officer
A few years ago I purchased a new car and I am annoyed by its limited fuel capacity. I want a vehicle to allow me to drive to my daughter’s home in central Ohio on one tank of gas. Is that too much to ask? My wife’s minivan can do it so why can’t my Ford Explorer? No matter how much I want to increase its capacity, short of rebuilding the car myself, I can’t change its fuel capacity. It is fixed at 18 gallons. But how about you? What’s your capacity? What if your capacity was unlimited. What if you could increase your capacity for leadership, productivity, and success in business and life. With some planning and intentional living you actually can.
Charles Shultz, the creator of the Peanuts cartoon, said “Life is like a ten-speed bike. Most of us have gears we never use.” The key is finding out where and when we need to shift gears. In his book No Limits, John Maxwell shares the following equation: AWARENESS + ABILITY + CHOICES = CAPACITY. Unfortunately, we typically think the equation reads ABILITY = CAPACITY. What we are missing is the understanding that if we grow our awareness, develop our abilities, and make the right choices, we develop a process that will allow us to reach our full potential and blow the caps off our capacity. Let’s take a look at just one of our capacities: Energy.
Many people, myself included, wish they had more energy. People may say “you need to exercise,” and you know they’re right. Others would say, “you need to eat better,” and they are also right. Oh, and then some would say, “you need enough sleep.” They are also right. In fact, they are all right, and we just identified three ways to expand our energy. We also need to look at where we may have energy draws. When in the day are we expending large amounts of energy and are those times a good use of our energy. Now let’s think about what might energize us, and can we find ways to build that into our day. We now have five tools available to us, we just need to raise our awareness, make good choices, and low and behold, we just expanded our energy.
Will you be willing to adjust your equation and work to expand your capacity? Please join Marisa and me on The Next Page podcast when we look into ways we can expand our Thinking capacity and our Creativity.
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