Marty: Hi, Bill.

Bill: Hey, Marty. I'm glad that we hit record. That was quite a conversation that we had going and you had the idea. Let's make it into a podcast episode. Let's see how this goes.

Marty: Yeah, and by the way, the name of the podcast is Not Your Typical Coaching.

Bill: Leadership Coaching. Not Your Typical Leadership Coaching.

Marty: Exactly. Thank you. This is a really exciting time for me. I'm in a real busy period and there's only, there's 2 different kinds of busy. There's busy and it's a drag and I'm exhausted and I don't like it. And then there's busy oh, my God, there's so many exciting things happening, and both of them need some kind of managing.

Marty: Some conscious designing of time to work for us. And I happen to be in the positive one, but there are times when I'm just like at the end of the evening, I just fall on my face, because it's just all out marathon right now. And when you mentioned that you've been, you're working on an article for your newsletter on.

Marty: Capacity and setting boundaries. I thought, wow, that sounds like something I'd like to hear about because I'm, I could use some of that right now. The reason I mentioned the article when you were talking was because I heard that you're doing what it is I'm going to recommend that others do in the article.

Bill: Ah,

Marty: Let's start there then.

Bill: Okay. What I heard you saying was that you're loving everything that you're doing. You're in the flow. And yet you notice that you need to take breaks and then you distinguish what kind of breaks you're taking. You said, meeting somebody for coffee.

Bill: That's the opposite of what I need. You want to say more about all that?

Marty: I think I picked that up from an old friend of mine. He used to always say, yeah, no. Now I do that too.

Bill: So you're just laughing at yourself now.

Marty: I noticed that if if I do something like, okay, I'll meet you down at Starbucks for a coffee to get away from all this work that I have right now, I come back and, I'm jittery and I'm hyped up and I got more to think about from that conversation.

Marty: It might be good stuff, but it is more. And what I really need are breaks where. I go away from screens. I go away from talk and I really experienced deep peace, even if just like a drop of it, sometimes a drop of nectar from a really nice, plant is going to give you all the nourishment that you need and so even if I only if I meditate or go for a walk in the woods, it doesn't have to be for a long time, but it gets me out of the.

Marty: Mind and that's what I need is really to get away from the mind and it's machinations. And when I do that, then, if even if I only had a 5 minute, deep meditation, I'm back at work. I can I got another 3 hours in me after that. So that's amazing.

Bill: It's just amazing. Isn't it how you can just plug into the right?

Bill: activity or the right pause and be restored. That's right. Right back into the flow again. Yeah.

Marty: Which, like scrolling on my telephone doesn't do that for me.

Bill: So there's something about that and that'd be an interesting thing to pursue and get curious about. But I think what's most important is just noticing.

Bill: Going to coffee with a friend is not that's colder. If we're looking for what is the answer to the question, how do I restore my capacity? So that I can get back into the flow again, or resume the flow. If we're looking for an answer to that, and if we're going to play the game warmer colder, and if going to coffee with a friend is colder, and if scrolling on your phone is colder what's warmer?

Bill: And that's important. To distinguish because I don't know about you, but when I'm out of, when I, when it's time for me to take a break from when it's time for me to pause it, it would be nice to have that list in front of me or memorized somehow. So I can go through the list and say, okay, of the things that I know that work to restore capacity what could I do during this period of time, or what could I stop doing at least during this period of time that, that I know restores.

Bill: This capacity again, and that's a big part of the article that I want to write about.

Marty: Okay. And as you're talking, I just recognize that there's even grab and go stillness in the sense of I noticed this morning when I was talking to a client that was, I was working really hard at.

Marty: What I was, being a coach I was, in a good way, being demanding of myself, trying to come up with ideas and being super conscious and and then I recognize this is hard. I don't know if I got something on almost without. Thinking through it, I just recognize I need to go into a different gear here.

Marty: I'm going to last the whole hour in this way. And so I did. I sat, literally sat back in my chair and I said let's take a, let's take another approach to this. Let's step back for a second and ask a deeper question. And I didn't even know what question I was going to ask at that point.

Marty: I knew I needed to do that. Yeah. Yeah. And so we both breathed for a second and it came to me, Oh yeah, there is a deeper, this is the project she's working on is not aligned with her life's purpose. That's, so we opened up this and it was easeful and was important. And it gave me a chance to rest in the motion of the conversation.

Marty: So that's what I mean by a grab and go.

Bill: I love that story, but I still don't understand the grab and go label to it. How's the grab and go.

Marty: As opposed to stopping all action going out to the woods to go for a walk. It was. Oh, I see. I just grabbed that piece right in the goal of the car.

Bill: I see. So you were able to just shift on the run there into a context, a different perception or different mode.

Bill: Go stillness. Love that. There's your next book right there, Marty.

Bill: In one of the articles that I wrote recently. I believe the name of the article is managing capacity something like that. I'll put a link in show notes if anybody's interested in reading these articles. I introduced the idea and after, by the way, after I'd written the article and after thinking about this for several months, I learned later that somebody used the same metaphor.

Bill: To talk about capacity. And this isn't the first time this has happened. I've had ideas in the past and I thought they were my own and they were unique only to find out that somebody else had already used it. No big deal. It doesn't matter. But so I introduced the idea to those that hadn't already heard of it before, apparently to think of capacity as a five gallon bucket that we're all born with.

Bill: That's empty at birth. That five gallon bucket represents. Our capacity to be with whatever life hands us along the way and that over time, when things get stuck in the bucket, if we handle whatever comes our way in a full and complete way, so that we've integrated the experience and let go what we can't use, then the bucket remains empty.

Bill: But when things get stuck in the bucket. Because they're too painful to feel because it's not okay to feel or think or do whatever might have been required because the resources weren't there that were needed. There'd be a variety of reasons why something that happens in life, like a trauma, a loss.

Bill: But any kind of an emotional wound gets stuck in that bucket. Yeah over time what got stuck in the bucket Begins to add up. Yeah As a baby, there's 100 capacity maybe by the time of five that you're five years old I'm, just going to throw out some random numbers. You've only got 90 capacity every morning you wake up You've only got 90 of your original capacity remaining to operate with whatever comes at you in life By the time you're 20, maybe you're down to 40%, or excuse me, down to, let's say, 60 percent remaining capacity.

Bill: And depending on what happens in that adult life, If more wounding, more trauma, more unresolved and incomplete life stacks up in that bucket, you may, and you may end up with very limited capacity to start every day, then it doesn't take long at all before you're in a state of overwhelm. In other words, your five gallon bucket is full.

Bill: And you've got nothing left to be with whatever comes your way, right? As I share that concept with you, what lands for you, what's going on in your mind? Oh,

Marty: that's, that sounds right on. I can relate. And I know lots of people, witness this phenomenon in. It reminds me of those posters that you see, they show.

Marty: The evolution of man of the homo erectus from the monkey, standing up and then it goes on from there as we age, in our in one person's lifetime, we start crunching over and becoming more right crawling on the ground the end. we, you know, We're overloaded, we don't

Marty: let stuff go. We don't get stuff complete. And so this relates precisely to what happened to me last week. I'm in all this stuff that I love, but there, there comes a surprise. You're going to have to do it this way, not the way you want it. And I was so angry about this. It's an aspect of the writer's program that I'm in, that they changed it up on me and it wasn't going to be the way I thought it should go.

Marty: And so I had to, my bucket got totally filled up with anger. I had no capacity to do all these things that I love for a couple of days. And, people coaching. Colleagues said, sounds like you need to complete some things and express the anger get that out of the bucket and it was hard.

Marty: So this, I don't know, people suggested things like, go beat up your pillow, get the anger out so that you got more capacity again and that really just didn't do it for me and it gave me less capacity because I was frustrated that seemed fake or something. It didn't work for me. So then I.

Marty: I had to really find a way to get that anger processed and out of my bucket so that I had the capacity to get back in love with all this stuff again,

Bill: and you found a way to do that.

Marty: It seems yeah, it seems like I have it. I got it out by watching emotional movies that made me cry.

Marty: So it wasn't exactly expressing anger, but there was so much release and cleansing that it, it healed me in a way that I needed to get back to

Bill: work. You found something that worked that would go on that list of, yes, that does it warmer. This is one thing that I can do to restore capacity for you in that situation with that kind of feeling that, that anger that was taking up your capacity.

Bill: You watch movies that made you cry, restored your capacity. It made room. Yeah. Yeah. Which is interesting in a separate way, that anger obviously is there because of the sadness. And when the sadness was given voice or given an opportunity to be expressed, you were back at capacity, back into the flow again, it sounds yes?

Bill: Yeah. Yeah. That's great. A couple of things I want to mention. I'm making a few notes. You might see Well, I just want to mention that part of our earlier conversation referred to author Tony Schwartz, who I was first introduced to Tony Schwartz work when I read an a Harvard article, manage your energy, not your time.

Bill: Which I highly recommend if you can find that, and I'll look for the link to that and see if I can provide that in show notes. He then went on to write co author a book with, oh, I'm not remembering the other author's name, but the name of the book was The Power of Full Engagement. And so I had recommended that book to you.

Bill: It's a book that I've read. And that I've recommended to my clients but the basic concept of both the article and the book is that most of us are wired for a limited amount of time. And I suspect that amount of time is related to how much capacity we have when we wake up in the morning to work with throughout the day.

Bill: For example, I'm a 20 percenter. I'm somebody that only has 20 percent of capacity remaining at the very beginning of the day. It would be understandable if one or two things went wrong or were more challenging than I expected them to be that I might be completely out of capacity by noon.

Bill: I might be completely overwhelmed by what life is offering me. So what certainly wasn't, I certainly wasn't thinking in these terms when I read both the article and the book probably 10, 12 years ago. But now that I'm thinking about the concepts in the book I, I'm really getting it even at a deeper level, which makes me want to go back and read both the book and the article again.

Bill: That is that if I'm out of capacity and I'm focused on a single task. For a period of time. Then I need to stop myself even before I feel overwhelmed or even before I get to a point where I'm actually trying to make myself stay focused on what I'm trying to do and do something that restores my capacity.

Bill: And what Tony suggests is just to get up. If you're on a screen. If you're at the desk, if you're sitting down, get up and walk around for 10 minutes. Go down to the coffee stand downstairs, get yourself a coffee or just walk to it and then walk back again. Just go say hi to Carol over in accounting department, whatever, just do something.

Bill: Get your mind away from what it is that you're doing. And then you'll notice that when you go sit down again, you're refreshed. Maybe I'm that 20 percent guy and I got all the way to 100 percent of my capacity being used up by noon or by whenever this is that I take the break. If I, even if I get an extra 5 percent of capacity back by getting up and taking that break.

Bill: Then now I can get back into my zone of genius or into the flow, whatever it would take. So that's, I wanted to mention those two are the article in the book that Tony Swartz wrote. What did you write down?

Marty: I was curious about the nature of the things that restore capacity.

Marty: What is it about them? What is there to look for, to get away? I had used the term grab and go stillness, right? What is it about stillness? Like, why is that important? Or, How

Marty: do you distinguish what we need in order to restore

Bill: capacity?

Bill: I don't think that any of us are going to be able to produce a list, like Tony Swartz is saying, get up and go see Carol in the accounting department or go down to the coffee stand or do something, move away from your desk. He found universally that pretty well works for everybody. Just get up and move your attention away from whatever you've been putting it on and go do something else for a minute. If I find myself sleepy through the day, for whatever reason, whether it's because I didn't get enough sleep last night or because I've been overtaxed in the day so far today, if I close my eyes for 10 minutes, whether I actually fall asleep or not, and I take a power nap, That often will restore it for me.

Bill: I talked to my wife about that and she says, There's no way. There's no way that I could close my eyes for 10 minutes and come out of that refreshed. I would come out of that sleepy and wanting to stay asleep. So it's going to be different for everybody. I don't think we could produce a, as coach what I tell my clients is, look for what restores your capacity and what drains it.

Bill: And make yourself a list and get really clear about those things so that you can be at choice when you're out of capacity. That's one of the problems with running out of capacity and being overwhelmed as you're out of choice. Yeah,

Marty: that's right. I'm wondering if I'm looking at. This and I'm not a neurosurgeon or a neurologist or anything to do with neurology, but I'm wondering, just as I reflect on what restores my capacity, if it doesn't have to do with involving as much of your neurology as possible seeing, taste, touching, smelling difference, right? Using your whole body to get up rather than just keeping focused on this problem in front of you on the screen. Get up and use your whole body. Like, It feels. And this is just an intuition, I'm not a scientist on this topic, but it's feeling to me like the more you can, get your whole neurology, if you play the organ, and you're using your feet and your hands and your brain, like that would be, you'd have to get totally away from whatever you were doing.

Marty: That might be a good suggestion to. To look at to experiment with if you just put the pen down, but you stay sitting, that's not as much of a neurological event as if you get up and walk down to say hello to Carol and come back, right? Yeah. Which is not as much of a neurological event as if you go practice the organ at church and then come back.

Marty: So I think that I don't, I'm suspecting there's something to do with like unplugging and replugging of all of your nerves. That seems to be

Bill: important to me. So there's this, there's probably going to be a somatic aspect of this. There's also when I think about the qualities.

Bill: And of self capital S self as referred to in the IFS model internal family systems model is who we authentically are and it's only through our authentic self that we have access to innate resources. That otherwise we don't have access to and those are listed. I've got them here on my computer tower as the five P's and the eight C's.

Bill: That's just a real quick and easy way to remember what those qualities are. Let me just tell you what they are. The five P's are presence, patience, perspective, persistence and playfulness and the eight C's are compassion, connection, courage, clarity, calm, creativity, curiosity and confidence. I want to assert that there may be something in engaging self that would restore capacity.

Bill: That would do that reset that would be necessary after whatever period of time that might be focused and concentrated attention.

Marty: I think that's right on and because self of the capital S is the source of all energy. If you're tapping into that. You're going to it's like plugging your electric car into your house or into one of those stands where the, it's super charging it.

Marty: If you, if you take a break from your work and you get a cup of coffee that's some kind of a break. But if you can plug into self of the capital S, you're going to, you're plugging into the source.

Bill: That's right. That's right. That's right. Little sidebar. I would think of using your metaphor.

Bill: I would think of self as the court itself that plugs into the overall source. That's our portal to all of these resources. That's when I say it's innate. It's not in. I don't know that it's individually innate. I think it's innate in that it's access to it comes from within us. And then we have our own particular versions of presence, patience, perspective, persistence, playfulness, compassion, so on and so forth.

Bill: Yeah. So some ideas might be, let's take any one of those words, let's take connection. That's maybe the reason it makes sense to go down and see Carol in connection or in accounting is because there's a connection that can be made. Might be in front of a screen or on the telephone all day long, or doing whatever it is you're doing that's disconnected from others, if you can find a way to, to get connection and somatic movement, neurological movement in your body, all of that might be a good way to restore it.

Bill: And I just would recommend that that you, as you use the word experiment earlier, that anybody listening to this, that sees this as a valid point to make and pursue that you find it, make your own list. Experiment. What do you notice? That increases capacity and what do you notice that decreases capacity or drains capacity?

Bill: And I might even recommend an exercise that if you want to take this on if you're watching this or listening to this podcast and you want to take this on, I want to challenge you for, let's just say the next week grab a way to to keep track of this. Maybe it's on your phone. Something that's going to be with you all the time.

Bill: Maybe it's a piece of paper in your pocket that anytime that you notice that something is happening, that's draining your capacity, that you make a note of that. And anytime that you notice that something happened and you found yourself restored to capacity, to be focused, restored to capacity, to, to show interest, to be creative or whatever that might be.

Marty: That's an excellent exercise because even sometimes little things, bringing a little humor can, I don't even have to get up and take a break. That joke did it for me. I'm ready to go again. And other times, and I can speak from experience here, like the works been so intense that I think that what I need is a big bottle of something alcoholic to take a break from, and that does the opposite.

Marty: It just, it's like binging and purging like it in all at the. The end of the day, it's going to be more exhausting than if you plug into self.

Bill: I love the way that you said that just now you said it with an absence of morality or judgment. You just said you want you reported the facts. These are the facts.

Bill: Sometimes. When I'm so busy, I'm paraphrasing what you said, that I feel like I need a break, sometimes I feel like I need a big bottle of alcohol and that just doesn't work. That's just a flat reporting of what you've noticed about yourself. You didn't say, and that's wrong. I shouldn't do that because blah, blah, blah, alcohol is bad.

Bill: You just said it doesn't work. That's what I'm suggesting is that, try to leave the judgment out of it and just notice factually report to your what works and what doesn't work to restore capacity. What actually happens that's related or correlated with draining capacity. Now, I noticed that we've only got maybe 5 minutes and I want to bring up because we mentioned at the front end of this conversation that we were going to talk about boundaries to and he's too.

Bill: Yeah. So how all of this is related. And I'm just now still exploring this. I certainly haven't drawn any final conclusions about it. And most likely in my article, I'm going to just assert that this is a possibility. But I've always struggled with the idea, I don't know if it's the word itself or what I make the word mean at an unconscious level, but I don't like the idea of boundaries.

Bill: I never have liked the idea of boundaries. Yeah.

Marty: How about you? Okay. I agree. I yeah, the concept. Yeah, it's never quite worked for

Bill: me. I think of boundaries as all right. That's far enough.

Marty: Yeah.

Bill: You can't cross this line.

Marty: Yeah. Yeah. Like I think of Dachau and the, the fences to keep the Jews in the concentration camp.

Marty: That's what it makes me think of. Oh man.

Bill: Yeah, there's some legacy pain right there, man. That's, yeah. What if boundaries. Are not about the other boundaries are about me here's what I mean by that. What if all of this is tied in then this way I recognize my own capacity another way you might have heard that said in other settings would be I recognize my own limits.

Bill: I know my limits I recognize my capacity which can be restored, but I recognize in the moment what my capacity is so that when I request or a demand comes my way from life or a person or however it presents itself, I check in with myself and I ask question number one, do I have the capacity to fulfill on a yes to this request or demand?

Bill: And if the answer is yes, I have the capacity. I don't just automatically say yes to it. The next thing I ask myself is, do I want to do it? Is this something I want to do? What would prevent me from asking that question or even to think to ask that question would be a belief that I don't deserve to have a choice.

Bill: I don't deserve to honor my own preferences that others, for example, are more important than me. And therefore I need to acquiesce to their preferences. Even if it means that mine are denied.

Marty: Yeah. And sometimes I don't mean to interrupt the flow here, but sometimes that even is not as clear. Like I just feel obligated.

Marty: I'm not recognizing that I don't give myself the deserving boundary. It's just that I just feel obligated.

Bill: And what I'm suggesting is that automaticity that you just described, unconscious automaticity of, Ooh, there's this uncomfortable feeling. And what's easiest to do is whatever it takes to not have to feel this anymore.

Bill: I'm just going to say yes. But then I'm going to pay the price later because I'm going to be resentful. Or something regretful at the very least that I said yes, or I'm going to be deceitful. I'm going to, I'm going to pretend like I didn't say it or I'm going to not honor the commitment that I made when I said yes to, to whatever that request was.

Bill: Like I said, I'm just exploring this, but I think it has something to do that really having healthy boundaries. And I'd really like to come up with another word other than boundaries, but. Using the word that's common to everybody, having healthy boundaries probably just means recognizing my own preferences and my own capacity, and then honestly communicating that to somebody that asked.

Bill: Let me give you an example. This just happened. It was such a gift. It was 845 last night. I got a text from a client. The text said, do you have time for a chat? And I felt this thing inside happen Oh I should probably say yes, but I don't want to, this isn't, this is not, I don't want to say yes and then invite this more and more.

Bill: And I'll admit it. I just ignored it. Like I hadn't seen it. I didn't respond at all to it. Until this morning when I got up and and then I responded to it. And I said, I have this period of time for a short chat if you're still interested. It worked out great because the client said do you have time for a session?

Bill: So we just scheduled a session that was perfect. That's within my capacity. I'm a coach with my clients. I am a coach and I coach between 8 a. m. and 5 p. m. Monday through Thursday. Those are my client hours and those are my boundaries, not theirs. But when they come to me outside of those hours, now that I've got this much clarity, all I have to say is, I'm sorry, that's outside of my client hours.

Bill: Let's see if we get time to schedule a session within those time, those hours. And that's really good. Yeah. Awesome. I had a buddy in. When I lived in San Diego, we did some business together, and he had this amazing capacity, it was so chill when somebody would ask him, put something in his calendar, he'd just say let me check and he'd open this is when we had, we carried our calendars, and he just opened his book and look at it right in front of them like, oh, I'm sorry, that doesn't fit.

Marty: We'll have to find another time. And he was just, whereas I would be like, gosh, I don't know if I can fit it in and I get all worked up about it. And it's really simple. Is it in your self designed boundaries or not?

Bill: In other words, the answer to the question or the request of the demand is about me.

Bill: I find it in me, not in them. They didn't cause me to feel the discomfort. They didn't cause you to feel the discomfort. Can I fit it in?

Marty: So that's what you're, that's what you're, I hear you saying is don't make it about the outside world. This is about taking care of

Bill: yourself. That's right. Yeah. So

Marty: I guess something I want to summarize is that once I have

Bill: clarity, sometimes I don't know what my boundaries are for me, what my limits are, what my capacities until I've reached it. Yeah, exactly. Until I find myself in a situation where I've reached that capacity or surpassed it and find myself in a state of overwhelm.

Bill: And then. If I can look at it and really take the attention away from whatever activated this overwhelm, whether it's a request or a demand from a person or that life is asking me to do something else, like a pop up email or something else that happens right in the middle of my focus, and I realized I'm overwhelmed.

Bill: If I can learn from that and realize that's my capacity, I can actually then formulate a solution. A way to honestly communicate in advance to those that I interact in my life. Like a good example of that is when

Marty: I was in the mortgage business. One of the things that I learned

Bill: in a workshop was that if I spend all day long watching my email

Marty: as it pops up throughout the day,

Bill: nothing ever gets done.

Bill: But as a mortgage loan officer, I was afraid that if I missed one of those emails from a potential client or from a current client or from a real estate agent that was going to refer me a client, I'm going to miss

Marty: out. And the suggestion was check

Bill: your email. First thing in the morning between eight and eight thirty, let's say one more time right after lunch and then one more time at the end of the day and then communicate in advance to everybody that you that is in your sphere.

Bill: This is when I check email. I promise. I will get back to you during these times. Exactly.

Marty: So I started doing that. And as scary as that

Bill: was. It actually generated more room in my day to get more done to be more focused to be more relaxed Honestly,

Marty: it's a great suggestion. So that's another conclusion.

Marty: I'm

Bill: drawing out of this

Marty: Distinction

Bill: as we're exploring it is, can we, but now what can we do with this information? I suggested number one, ask yourself, do I have the capacity? Number two, do I have the preference? Do I prefer to do this? But I would add to that also be aware. Learn from being overwhelmed, be aware of what, what contributes to that overwhelm and what are some earlier signs like, let's find out at 80 percent of

Marty: capacity used up instead of it at 101%, if that's possible, let's find, let's notice

Bill: at 80%.

Bill: Okay, I'm on my way to 100. I need a break right now and a break that works using one of these things on

Marty: my capacity list.

Bill: The storytelling that surrounds.

Bill: Boundaries in a request , which is just indicative of parts of us that are getting activated from the past, right? That really confuses the issue and really adds to the stress. Hopefully, by the time we release this podcast episode, I will, I'll just commit to it. Now. I will have this article written and I'll have a link for this article about capacity and boundaries in the show notes.

Bill: Beautiful. I've enjoyed our conversation, Marty. I look

Marty: forward to that article. All right. Great.

Bill: All right. Take care. Bye.