Bill: Welcome to another episode of Not Your Typical Leadership Coaching with Bill Tierney, results coach, that's me, and Dr. Martin Kettlehut, author and life coach. we're going to be talking about capacity. Marty sent out this brilliant email this morning, and I, and I read it, Marty, and I thought, that's what we need to be talking about today.

Bill: Would you kind of set this up for us?

Marty: Well, the, the email was, uh, it's, it's in a series on, um, the connection between productivity and profit. It's not automatic, right? You can be very busy and it not making you any money, for example, right? There are lots of other, uh, permutations, but that's the main 1 we want to avoid. So the 1st article in this series was about how you can't do it alone.

Marty: You want to expand your capacity, you need others, right? You, you can only do as much as you can do, and you can maybe increase that a little bit, but really scale your product, your profitability, you need others, right?

Bill: Yeah

Marty: And, um, so that was the first one. And then now I'm looking at today's was about how, if you're not taking care of your wellbeing, Right.

Marty: If you're grinding away late at night to get all this productivity done, and it's killing you literally, then that's not a good formula. It's not sustainable. There's probably, you know, mistakes in the work because of that and et cetera. So I end with these five questions to consider, which let me bring them up.

Marty: So you want to always be in clarity around these questions. What's the healthiest integration of work, play, and rest, right? I was talking to a client recently who's like, well, you know, I, I take off Saturdays, you know, what's the, I get time off. What are you talking about? It's not about some absolute number, like taking a day is what you need to do.

Marty: It's what is the healthiest integration of work and play and rest. Right. Like what really look at what serves, you know, like if I don't, if I don't play the piano or play soccer or do other playful things, then my mind becomes really, you know, sort of dry. It's, it's all business. It's all numbers. It's all getting stuff done.

Marty: So we're not just talking about rejuvenating. We're also talking about. Integrating. Um, the second question is what are, what are the signs that you're at capacity? I mean, it's good to know, you know, what, what is going to signal you to know, like, you know what, I just probably back away from any more business talk for an hour, I should probably go meditate or have a cup of coffee or do something.

Marty: What are the signs you need to know what those are so that you can catch them in yourself? How to best restore capacity when it's depleted. You know, you don't just go, Oh, I'm depleted and keep going. You got to, you got to know what's the best way for you to restore your capacity, right? To, to give you back your full self, um, how to increase your capacity. Now you might not be interested in that, but a 25 year old is, you know, I am.

Marty: Um, And lastly, how are you contributing to the health of the community and environment, which give you your life? know, if you're not, if like, if you're pumping pollution out of your proverbial factory, right. And choking off the, you know, the life around you, then it's going to choke you off too. So we have to keep that circuit healthy.

Marty: So those were the five questions. So what do you think?

Bill: Well, I I thought it was funny that when I sent you those five questions in an email this morning after reading your email you emailed back and said Bill, I love these questions. Of course you do. You wrote them. I love them too. And I, and I, I'd like to kind of walk through each one of them and spend a little bit of time on each.

Bill: This, uh, this podcast episode, we typically try to keep these at around between 30 to 40 minutes. So if we're at about the five minute mark now. And there are five questions here. So if we were to take, let's just say somewhere in the ballpark of five, six minutes each with each question, I'm not going to be rigid about that.

Bill: I'm just going to suggest and we suggest that we've kind of watched time, uh, on this and, and spend five, six, seven minutes with each one. And, and that should, uh, fill up our time really well. And who knows what, where we'll go with this. We may get so caught up on one of them. We don't want to move up, move on when, when we hit the five, six, seven minute mark, and then we might have to step, come back and do a part two.

Bill: Uh, so that's what I propose. What do you think?

Marty: That's great. Yep.

Bill: Okay. Uh, shall we just go in the order that you have them written?

Marty: Yeah.

Bill: All right. Well, let's start, let's start this way. Uh, another agreement I'll make with you if it sounds good to you is let me take the first question and ask you, you take the second question and ask me, we'll just keep going back and forth that way.

Bill: How's that sound?

Marty: Sounds great.

Bill: All right, so here's the first question, Marty. And some brilliant guy wrote this. What is the healthiest integration of work, play, and rest for you?

Marty: . Mm hmm. Yeah. See, um, I don't know if I'm typical, but, um, this is not your typical leadership podcast. Um, I need to pause between activities. I need time to reset, you know, to let go of everything that happened in the last meeting so that I can come and be my fresh, full self in the next meeting.

Marty: So part of that, from the answer to that question for me involves having time to pause between activities. And not just between work activities either, you know, between. Tasks at home too. You know, I have a list a mile long of stuff I need to do around the house, but you know, I don't just get up on Saturday and go through them all.

Marty: I say, okay, let's do this one first. And then, you know, have a glass of iced tea and see if we're up for the next thing now or another day, you know, like that, but the, I want to emphasize the play thing for me. I think it's a neurological thing, and I'm not an expert on this, so I can't really, you know, present it in that way.

Marty: But I feel, you know, the, the restructuring of the dendrites in my brain when I, you know, get to play a game of chess or, you know, You know, throw the softball around or something in between. Like you use your brain in a, in a different way and it allows you to come back to thinking business wise with, with fresh energy and, and also, you know, new pathways, new pathways in the brain that allow you to think new thoughts, like, Oh, you know what, we've been thinking about it that way all these I just went and, you know, played a Bach prelude.

Marty: And it makes me think we could, we could do this the other way around in our business like that, you know,

Bill: You're saying that play, then this leads into the next few questions, actually. You're telling me that play is a way for you to increase capacity.

Marty: it is.

Bill: It gives you greater access to what some might call flow, certainly creativity, which is an aspect of flow.

Marty: And just as an example of this in action already that you will, or love, you know, Byron Katie, the fourth question, or the, I guess it's the fifth one, do a turnaround, like play with the sentence. Like how else could the whole sentence go, you know, to play with it. That's, I mean, it's like scrambles the brain so that you can think new thoughts. Any new possibilities?

Bill: We, I haven't heard from you about rest yet. I've heard about work and play. Before we go to rest though, I want to, um,

Marty: Well, pauses, pausing is what I meant, was my attempt to address rest.

Bill: I see. I see. So a pause is the way to rest. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so what I'm curious about in this moment is I'm thinking about, well, you just said about question number four, actually the, the, the question that comes out or the instruction that comes after question number four in the Byron Katie method, which is turn the thought around.

Marty: Yeah.

Bill: that's, that's a form of improv. You want to just improvise and see what lands. Uh, you know, any good improviser will tell you that when they take the stage, they are less concerned about getting approval from the audience than they are about just playing the game.

Marty: Yeah. Yeah. we had a, I worked for a company back in the nineties that, um, we were stuck in our sales. We, we were having just a hard time getting sales. And so, uh, my boss was brilliant. He took us all down to a comedy club. In New York City with this, this was happening in New York City. He took us down to a comedy club where they did improv classes.

Marty: And so the whole, the whole sales team did this whole, it was like a four hour improv class.

Bill: That's wonderful.

Marty: And amazingly sales picked up afterwards. It's like, that's what we needed was some play.

Bill: Mm hmm. Yeah, and, and some, yeah, some creativity, some loosening up, you know, find some joy in what you're doing. And, and so this is what I wanted to point to is that for me, my best days are the days that work is play,

Marty: Mm hmm.

Bill: fills me up. The days that I struggle are the days that I'm not playing. In my coaching sessions with my clients, I'm not improvising.

Bill: There's parts of me that maybe get worried or scared or concerned that the client's not getting the value that they're paying for. So I go to some formulaic, an exercise that had created a piece of content and I, and I just lean on that structure. Uh, most of the time I catch myself pretty quick in that and realize, Oh gosh, I've got parts that are scared and worried and self, self, uh, defeating in this moment.

Bill: And so I'll shift out of that and, and I use that same pause that you're talking about in the moment. I don't get up and walk away from my desk at that point. But what I will do is I'll pause and sometimes I'll even say to my client, Hey, I'm noticing that I've got parts that are kind of getting in the way right now.

Bill: So I'm just going to pause for just a moment. And the moment usually is just a few seconds. In fact, just acknowledging it out loud to the client often will. Have the part say, Oh, my bad. Sorry. Let me step back and let me go back to being coach again.

Marty: That's brilliant.

Bill: Anything else? Mm

Marty: last thing about pausing or, or resting. It's not a pause. It's not restful to jump on your computer and start scrolling or to go smoke a bowl of pot. Those things just get the mind going. They get it even more distracted and lost. So when we say, when I say rest or pause, I mean.

Marty: not think. Pausing is watching your breath or going for a walk in the woods or getting out of the mind. If you know, however works best for you. Pausing is not watching TV. That's not pausing. That's just, that's just keeping the buzz going in the mind. That's all that. I'm not saying it's bad, but it's not restful.

Bill: Mm hmm. Right. Yeah, it would, all of those things that you just described could fall into a category called play, could, it could come into play, but, uh, or fall into that category of play, but more, more than likely it falls into another category called distraction

Marty: Yes.

Bill: or survival. Yeah, or addiction even.

Marty: Yep.

Bill: Yeah, which is all of that.

Bill: It's distraction and shutting down. Okay. Um, we've been on this for about eight minutes. So,

Marty: gosh. Let me ask you the next question,

Bill: okay.

Marty: which is how do you know, how do you recognize that you are at capacity and need to do something about it? How do you recognize it?

Bill: Yeah. For me, when I noticed that I am efforting, it's not possible to both effort and be in the flow. When I'm efforting, I'm not in the flow. And one of the things that will take me out of the flow is to, is that I'm maxed out. I'm, I'm using up the capacity that I have. just my, it's my sign that I need to pause.

Bill: I need to take a, take a break. And, and for me often on my busy coaching days, for example, some, sometimes my, my sessions will run 15 minutes apart. One session ends, 15 minutes later, I have another one.

Marty: Mm hmm.

Bill: I know other coaches that don't take the break in between. They'll just go from one session to the other to the other without a break.

Bill: I don't know how they do it. But for me, I need to get up out of my chair, get my eyes off the screen. I do all my coaching on the screen. There's eye, there's fatigue, visual fatigue from looking at the screen all day long. Um, I do a lot of note taking and typing during my sessions. So there's fatigue with my hands and my wrist and, and just the, The, the intensity really of taking the notes, being present and, and after, um, after each session, I, I really need to get up and walk away, just walk out of this space,

Marty: how do you know that? How do you, what, how do you, what are the signs?

Bill: because if I don't do that in the next session, sometimes I get sleepy, sometimes I have a really hard time staying present with the client. And it's not about the client. It's about me and my capacity.

Marty: What if I said, look, they make monster drink for that.

Bill: Oh, well, I don't know if I, if I ever could do that. I, I took a drive from Spokane, Washington to Joplin, Missouri. This has been 15 years ago. And I thought my mom was dying and I wanted to get there before she died. So I decided I was just going to drive straight through. And I did the math and it was going to take 29 hours to get there. So I thought, I can do this. I've stayed awake for 29 hours at a time. Not often. It's been a long time. But I think, so I'll pick up, I'll pick up some five minute, what do you call that? Anyhow, I picked up a four pack of those and I have never felt so sick in my life as, as the way those drinks made my, my body feel.

Bill: There was this really high state of artificial agitation and energy, just like a, like I felt so out of control with how driven I was. No, no pun intended, but I mean, um, and, and they worked. I took 20 minute nap in that 29 hours. And got through, but, and it took me close to eight hours to get to the point where I could rest.

Bill: So for me, that's, that doesn't work. If somebody, if it worked for somebody else, but I just can't imagine that that's restful, that that actually restores capacity. I think what happens then is, if we use the metaphor of a candle, that I've been burning this candle, and I need to snuff it for a little while, walk away, and then light it again.

Bill: And when I take a Red Bull or an energy drink. Basically, what I'm doing is I'm carving out the other end of the camel, and I'm, and I have both, both ends of it lit at the same time, and pretty soon it's gonna burn completely out.

Marty: Yeah. Um, because, uh, I think this is, is, it's an important question because I observe a lot of people insensitive to the signs that are there. Yeah. You know, they poo poo them or they think they shouldn't, you know, take a break. Or, you know, there's something there that prevents them from recognizing like, Oh my gosh, I need a break.

Marty: And you know, it's push, push through. You know, artificially or somehow or just, or just, you know, let your, let your performance go down for the sake of being in that, at that desk from nine to five, there's, I just, I see people working way beyond their capacity. There's, we've in, we've become desensitized to our own needs.

Marty: Mhm.

Bill: is a book that really helped me with this, long before I discovered, um, IFS, and it's called, uh, Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time. That may actually be the, uh, oh, so the book is called The Power of Full Engagement by Tony Swartz. And he also wrote an article called Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time.

Bill: But the whole idea is, uh, I think that what he was asserting was that you shouldn't ever do anything consistently and constantly without a break for more than 40, 45 minutes. And then get up, go do something, make a, make it a routine. If you're working in an office building, take the elevator down to the next floor and come back up again.

Bill: That's Through the stairs or something like that and then go back to work and just a just a five minute pause I run to the restroom get a drink of water a five minute pause like that will give you the rest that you need to Be restored you asked about how do I know that I'm out of capacity by the way?

Bill: There's far more than just that. I can't be present or that I get sleepy I also get irritable

Marty: Mhm.

Bill: I also lose my creativity often. I love to write And later in the day, when I've already had several different coaching sessions and now I've got, let's say, an hour break between sessions, I think, oh good, now I get to do some writing.

Bill: And so I'll go to write and I realize, oh, huh, I got nothing to say here. I have no, I'm no, I'm not inspired. Seth Godin talks about this. And what is the name of that book? The, The War of Art.

Marty: Yeah.

Bill: He talks about it too, that, that he says you can't just wait to be inspired before you write.

Bill: You just, you put it on your clock and you sit down and you, whatever it is, nine o'clock, you're at your desk and you're writing. But what, and I don't know if in that book he accounts for this or not, but when we are out of capacity to continue to push, and I've tried this, When I continue to push and make myself write when I don't have the capacity, and if I don't take a break, my writing's not very good at all.

Bill: And I come back and I have to rewrite the whole thing. Anyhow, so those are some other ways that it shows up. You ready for the next question?

Marty: Sure.

Bill: I had it in front of me and then I went looking for that article. Let's see if I can find the, there they are. So the next question is how to best restore capacity when it's depleted.

Bill: How can you best restore capacity when you notice it's depleted?

Marty: Well, we've talked a lot or some I should say about the the thinking behind restoring it is get out of your head because that's where all of the stress is. Then it goes into the body, you know, when you hold on to it for a longer time, but, um, so I'm inclined to, you know, to, to say some of the things that work for me, um, given that principle, you know, that what you want to do is take a break from your thoughts, right? Something, something that either quiets the mind, which, you know, that it could take focus, it takes focus to get your mind off of your thoughts, you know, to, to, to get it, to just stay on the breath for 10 minutes, it takes focus, but that's why it works, right. Um, but you know, I, I, one of the reasons why I live where I do is so that I can go hiking in the mountains.

Marty: Easily, you know, I can get there quickly and I'm in the forest and there's nothing there. There are no screens. There's nobody talking. There are no print, you know, to read. It's just trees and moss and rocks and blue sky. And so my mind gets to rest. You know, I mean, for the first couple of minutes, I'm still going.

Marty: It doesn't take long for me to just be present to the beauty of nature. So that's, for me, that's a good way to restore capacity is to get out of my mind by meditating or being in nature. What would you say to that question?

Bill: I think a good night's rest really Really is valuable for restoring capacity. Recognizing my limits, when I'm out of capacity, being able to assert myself and say no to requests and demands, whether they're coming from other people or from me. uh, and then taking that break and taking that pause and resting.

Bill: And then interestingly, uh, I have had days where at the end of the day, I'm just done. I'm exhausted and I haven't had dinner yet. And I want to just sit on the couch and I want to do the death scroll. I just want to be going through shorts and videos and checking this and checking that and looking at this and looking at that.

Bill: And it just, You know, it can, it can eat up the next hour until I'm ready to pick something to eat or until Kathy's pick something to eat those days when, and today's a good example of it, where when I get off work today, whether I'm exhausted or not, it's my intention to go outside and work on the line. And it doesn't matter how I feel, how depleted I feel in my capacity, guaranteed getting outside and doing some of that kind of work, getting my hands dirty, getting some, moving my body completely restores my capacity. I could do that. Come in, have dinner. And then if I wanted to spend an hour or two on writing my book, I can do that and have the capacity restored.

Bill: Interesting. Huh?

Marty: Well, yes. And it reminds me, you know, sometimes. Just these, so the ways that I've suggested so far aren't enough. What I need really to restore capacity is. A transformative conversation to, to really restore my capacity. Sometimes I need to call up a colleague like you and say, I'm pissed off. Help me myself. Right. Or, or whatever the, you know, uh, whatever the case might be.

Marty: And you know, that, that is enormously restorative, you

Bill: You know, you're pointing to something important. I haven't talked about this in this way for a while. I think I interrupted you. Did you? Did you?

Marty: that's all right.

Bill: Um, I talk about this 5 gallon bucket that we, that, that represents how much capacity we have, uh, very quickly. The idea is that we're, we're issued an empty 5 gallon bucket at birth. And what it's for is to hold everything that life hands us throughout a day. The, the ideal is that by the end of the day, the bucket's empty again. Because we've learned how to let go of things that come passing by every day.

Marty: Mm

Bill: Someone says something that hurts my feelings. I do whatever I need to do to be complete with that.

Bill: To, to not have an incompletion. To not have an unresolved issue that stays in the bucket. I have a disappointment. It gets stuck in my bucket. I need to let go of that disappointment and so I can move on and to whatever's present next.

Marty: hmm. Mm

Bill: Um, there's another bucket analogy that ties in as well though.

Bill: If we reverse that and say the bucket is full, full of capacity and you have a scooper that you use to scoop out some capacity to use for whatever you're challenged by.

Marty: hmm. Mm hmm.

Bill: Imagine now somebody has punched a bunch of holes in that bucket. All of that capacity is going to be gone very, very quickly.

Marty: Yeah.

Bill: So throughout the day, many, many things can happen to punch a hole in the bucket. And, and, uh, such as a misunderstanding,

Marty: Mm hmm.

Bill: a miscommunication and incompletion, uh, a rupture in a relationship

Marty: Or just

Bill: those will,

Marty: yes, not buzzing you and leaving the package on the front. I'm just making up.

Bill: well, irritations like that

Marty: Yeah, yeah,

Bill: Expectations that aren't met either by ourselves or by others. These are all little either BBs in the bucket that have small leaks or they're huge ruptures to the bucket where you have no capacity whatsoever. So in order to restore that capacity, we have to restore the relationships.

Bill: We have to complete what's incomplete and resolve what's unresolved.

Marty: yeah.

Bill: And, and so you just pointed to that just now when you reminded me sometimes we need to pick up the phone or just have a have transformational conversation where we, we get to be seen, heard, known and understood, and then also supported in some way that helps us to restore capacity.

Marty: And sometimes if there's nobody to have that conversation with, you can do it in your journal.

Bill: Mm hmm.

Marty: You can actually, you know, um, have a conversation, like be the guy who's upset and be your own loving parent toward that guy. Right. Or, um, you know, um, some people use the non dominant hand, uh, to access. You know, a different way of thinking about things.

Marty: So with your dominant hand, you, you write about what you're worried about. And with your non-dominant hand in your journal, you respond like as if you were the divine himself, right? And, and so journaling is another way, and sometimes it just takes a cathartic scream in the woods, or, you know, a good 20 minute cry, you know, um,

Bill: We're deep side. A deep side.

Marty: A deep side. Yeah. So, you know, we, I think one of the things that we keep pointing to in this conversation, I just want to capture because we've kind of implied it at several points is you have to keep track of yourself. You have to be like next to you all day long, noticing it as he had capacity. How's he doing?

Marty: You know, what does he need right now? You've got to be your own best monitor.

Bill: Self awareness. And if you don't, if you haven't developed that yet, then you're going to be at the mercy of circumstances outside because it looks like that's what's happening to your capacity. I'm feeling that I'm, you know, I'm, I'm overwhelmed by life and, and it seems like life is what's causing that overwhelm.

Bill: If I, if I'm only aware of the external triggers that make me feel in ways that I don't want to feel. If I have no self awareness, I cannot notice, then I don't have the ability to notice when my capacity has been depleted, and I'm at the mercy of hoping that life stops poking me. And that's, that's a powerless place to be.

Marty: That's a powerless place to be hoping that life is going to do anything you want it to is hopeless.

Bill: and I lived that way for, gosh, 45 years, closer to 50 years, maybe. I'm only 51 now, so I'm new at this. 69 years old now, so I've had a little bit of experience with it.

Marty: So we look at the next question, or I don't want to

Bill: Yeah, no, let's go to the next question. But I just want to say one more thing about what I just said, and that is that I'm so grateful that I'm not there anymore.

Marty: Yeah. I

Bill: for is the previous versions of myself over these previous 1920 years that have been willing to do the work to learn how to be aware of self, to learn how to resolve the unresolved, what's not resolved, complete, what's incomplete, to be willing to do those things, be as uncomfortable as they were.

Bill: And to find the people that could show me how to do it, to find the right mentors and be supported along the way. Very great.

Marty: want to thank you for that. Um, on behalf of everybody that interacts with you, thank you for doing that work.

Bill: I did it for me, but you're welcome.

Marty: So our next question is about how to increase your capacity.

Bill: Yeah. That's a nice distinction. Uh, these two questions sound a little the same, and so let's distinguish them. The previous question was how to best restore capacity when it's depleted,

Marty: hmm.

Bill: we're thinking how to increase capacity.

Marty: Right.

Bill: When I first looked at those questions, I thought, well, aren't those the same?

Bill: Isn't that the same question? No, it's not the same question.

Marty: No,

Bill: Let's take, let's go back to the first five gallon bucket,

Marty: Mm hmm.

Bill: Metaphor. Empty. The, the goal every day is to empty out that five gallon bucket. And if I'm not emptying out, then I wake up with yesterday's still in there. And if I do that two days in a row, now I wake up with two days worth in there.

Bill: If I do that for 40 years, then it's full

Marty: Mm hmm.

Bill: overflowing and, and making a huge mess. So if it's full and overflowing and making a huge mess, mess, when I, my eyes pop open in the morning, if I'd get, got lucky enough to get some sleep last night, then I'm screwed. I got no chance. I'm doing anything but surviving today, and maybe not even that,

Marty: Mm hmm.

Bill: operating on minimal resources.

Bill: That's the problem with that, with using up all my capacity, is that I'm operating on less and less and less and less resources. Resources are less and less available as I use up more and more of my capacity. I'm talking about the resources that are built right in. I'm not talking about skill set that I've developed.

Bill: I'm not talking about my ability to perform in the world. I'm talking about built in resources like, um, wisdom, compassion, patience, creativity, curiosity, connection. If I can't access those resources of playfulness, perspective, um, and patience, if, if I can't access those resources, I gotta hide out. I mean, I'm just in no position to fight life.

Bill: And that's what life is gonna feel like to me, is fight. What if I can go, let's just, let's take a number, let's say that I wake up in the morning because I've been so damaged and so, um, unskilled at being able to empty out my bucket that I'm, I'm using 90 percent of it all the time. That's the best it gets for me.

Bill: I've only got a 10 percent capacity in the morning. By nine o'clock in the morning, maybe it's all gone already. What if I could get from, and if that's the way I'm operating my life, and I can get that 10 percent capacity in the morning to 20%, what a difference that would make.

Marty: Yeah. Huge.

Bill: Huge difference that would make.

Marty: Mm hmm.

Bill: So how do we do that? That's the question. How do I go from that 10 percent or to 20? Or maybe it's how do I go from that 50% How do I do that?

Marty: Mm hmm.

Bill: question. How I do it is back to the previous answer. Through self awareness, I notice when I'm suffering and rather than running from the suffering or shutting it down, snuffing it out the best I can, the more often I'm willing to notice my suffering and then get curious about it and do what it takes to be able to heal it.

Bill: This is a bigger, longer term, resolve what's not, what's unresolved and complete what's incomplete. Do it, do it in the day, in the moment that it happens, if you can. Do it a week later, if you must. Do it 45 years later, if you must.

Marty: Yeah.

Bill: Find a way to complete the past.

Marty: Right

Bill: what's filling up the bucket.

Marty: Mm hmm. Exactly. Very good. I would add a couple. And in that in that vein of you like longer term, you know, bigger picture thinking, right? Not just, you know, drinking a caffeine drink to restore capacity, but like what's really at the sorts of my not having full my full capacity. I would say, you know, knowing your purpose and aligning your your life with it.

Marty: I noticed a lot of my clients, they expend lots of energy trying to deal with stuff that's off the path, you know, and, and then bring themselves back and then might have a day on purpose. But then so much of life is, is handling stuff that, you know, it's not aligned with who they are. Right.

Marty: And so there's tremendous drag and wasted capacity spent that way. So the more that you know, what you're here for in this life, you know, what you were born to do or, or be, and, and you set yourself up to live that, then the, the, and, and for me, one of the, just to give an example, one of the biggest things I'm not born to worry, I'm not meant to worry, but for a long time, that That sapped my capacity.

Marty: I would spend a lot of time and a lot of, you know, vital force worrying that was not aligned with my purpose in this life and it decreased my capacity. So to increase my capacity, I gave up worrying, you know,

Bill: And how did you do that? I

Marty: well,

Bill: a really great idea. How do you do it?

Marty: Well, it's, um, it's about awareness, like you said, first I had to recognize when I was doing it. Right. And then giving it up, giving it up. That's, this is the third thing that I wanted to say in addition to yours, like, which I would call, you know, what's a good word to abbreviate what you were talking about?

Marty: Like, um,

Marty: getting back, sorry,

Bill: Healing.

Marty: healing. Very good. Besides healing, aligning with purpose, I would also just, you know, say that practice, practice at it, you know, you gotta, it takes, it's not like you just take a pill and then, oh, you know, now I've got capacity. It's, it's a practice thing, you know, you, you practice noticing what takes you out, you practice noticing what depletes you, you practice noticing what restores you, you know, um,

Bill: So you practice pausing,

Marty: You practice pausing, right, exactly.

Bill: resting, practice noticing when capacity is depleted before it's completely depleted.

Marty: And I think this is worth mentioning because We're, we are such an on demand kind of society. Like I want it now. And, you know, increasing your capacity is it, it takes practice. It's like learning to play the tuba, um, or tennis. You don't just step onto the field and take the magic pill and you're perfect at it.

Marty: It takes practice. And I find more and more people, I think if you look at the gen, even from one generation to the next, the, the patience with practice, the willingness to have a day where you worked your ass off and it didn't produce any results, but it was good practice and appreciate that. I think that's, that's something we're losing.

Bill: Really great, great thought and metaphor too. Spend all day practicing. You don't produce results that are measurable. If you're on a football team, you spend days and days and days and days and days and days practicing before the first scrimmage. And then finally with, when there's a game where things can be measured. Yeah, really good practice. Last one is, how are we contributing to the health of the community and environment from which we live? And I think that's your question again.

Marty: Why? You want to go first on this one?

Bill: I'm not, I'm not sure that I have an instant answer for that. I'm still a little bit hung up on a cartoon that's in my mind. I've been around. I better, let me, let me just get this off my mind so I can really listen and be present for

Marty: you're sure.

Bill: When, uh, I, I'm, I'm old enough to remember when microwaves were first invented. So I can imagine somebody watching this or listening to this, this podcast and say, Jesus, how old it, how old is he? Well, I'm old enough to remember when, and I don't know when that was, was it the seventies or eighties? I don't know. But there was a day when we didn't have microwaves. So what we would have to do to reheat something would be to, there was no such thing as reheating coffee unless you wanted to burn it.

Bill: You know, you could put it back in the percolator again, and put it on the stove and heat it up, and it would just taste horrible.

Marty: Well,

Marty: that's what

Marty: that's what I do.

Bill: is that what you still do, and it tastes horrible? Yeah. Uh, anyhow, the cartoon is, and this came out shortly after, uh, microwaves were invented, is there's a guy, I At the microwave, looking at his clock and saying, come on, and that was funny because, you know, what takes 30 seconds in a microwave would take 10 minutes on the stove.

Marty: See, and that's, that's also an example of practice. Like if you're practiced at waiting for it to heat up on the stove, then the microwave is always faster, but we're practiced at getting it immediately. And so we have no capacity for waiting. I like that. Let's so repeat the question again.

Bill: The question is, how are we contributing? I'll just ask you personally, how are you contributing to the health of the community and environment from which you live?

Marty: right. You got to think like you're you're like a Tree growing in the ground and if if that ground if you're polluting that very ground you're killing yourself Same thing, you know if you come home and you kick the dog and yell at your wife you just sullied your support system

Bill: hmm. Mm hmm.

Marty: Like, we have to pay attention to that.

Marty: We, we don't, we're so individualistic in, in our thinking. Like I'm, I, it's me against the world. And we don't stop to notice like, you're, you're connected to nature. You're connected to other people. And if you're ruining those things that give you life, you're ruining yourself. So, you know, fostering your relationships and, um, nurturing your environment are absolutely, they should have been question number one.

Marty: This is not a secondary thought. This is primary.

Bill: Thank you for that. You know, what it made me think of is when you pause. Uh, and I just threw in how grateful I was feeling, uh, about previous versions of myself, uh, as recent as yesterday, that have done the work required in order for me to know how to resolve what was unresolved and complete what was incomplete, to heal in other words.

Bill: And you said, thank you. And my response was, well, I did it for myself, but you're welcome. And that's true. But in, in, in this, in terms of this question, uh, in the context of this question, how am I contributing to the health of the community and the environment from which I live? Because I have and will continue to do the work that I need to do to heal myself from what has, is still stuck in my bucket, who I show up as in the world.

Bill: Invites others to do the same. And one of the things that we talk about in the internal family systems model for those of us that are enthusiast and practicing it all the time And talking about it as if we're in a cult, uh, is that we, we talk about how self attracts self and parts attract parts. And what that means is, when our burden parts are activated, they are going to invite your burden parts to react. But if in no matter what the situation is, if I'm showing up as more self led, in other words, in my essence, with access to all of those innate resources I spoke about earlier, that's going to invite those out of you as well and and give you the opportunity to experience yourself. As that fully resourced wise adult that you actually are

Marty: That's

Marty: brilliant

Bill: rather than,

Marty: Oh, brilliant. Yes.

Bill: rather than the burdened child adaptability, the maladaptive child reactions that we otherwise are going to react with. So that's one level of contributing back to the health of the community that I think is as important or maybe more important than anything else I can think of. It's an improving relationship, one conversation at a time, one experience at a time.

Marty: Yeah, I love it.

Bill: Okay. Anything else left to say? If we were, if we hadn't just generated this in an improvised fashion, the only thing that we had prepared going into this conversation was the five questions. And the rest of it just came from our hearts. And from our experience, you know, um, and if we were, uh, if we had practiced and rehearsed this and had an agenda about it, we might have a sweet little way to summarize everything that we've just talked about.

Bill: But I don't have that. Do you?

Marty: No, I don't. But I, I would just, I guess just in closing, I would say that this, this is, we, we have expanded our capacities. If you look at the difference between the way we live and the way Like somebody in Sweden lives or the way somebody in the aborigines of Australia lives. Like, you can see how these three different peoples have been increasing their capacities in certain ways.

Marty: And it's just ultimately, I want to go back to the awareness piece, you know, that we need to be aware, like, are we expanding in the way we want to expand? Is this serving us? And, um, and if not, what changes do we need to make?

Bill: hmm. It's a great, great way to wrap it up. Marty. Great, great conversation. I've really enjoyed it. Thanks again.

Marty: Thank you.

Bill: Until next episode.