Hey, hey, hey. Welcome back to the podcast. I am so excited to be back and have this conversation about increasing your capacity. I've thought a lot about this, so I'm excited to dive in with some of my contemplations because capacity is an important conversation, but like, we're going to define it. We're going to dive into where this shows up and how it actually looks and how to know you've actually increased your capacity.
But before we do that, I have two quick announcements. The first one is that I have a free, I'm calling it a community coach-a-thon on March 10th. I'm blocked out two hours on my calendar, and I'm just going to coach and coach and coach, life, business, whatever. I'm inviting you to some group coaching. So how it's going to work is like, you'll raise your hand if you want coaching, and I will just coach as much as I possibly can in those two hours.
It's absolutely free. All you have to do is register so that you can be invited. I'll make sure that that link is in the show notes. It'll be itsambersmith.com/coachathon. So you can register and join us there on March 10th, and it's going to be really fun. The second announcement, which I will be talking more about, is I had a huge awareness, I guess.
First with myself a few weeks ago, I started doing the gene keys and human design, both two technologies that I use with my clients. But one of the things that changed is I actually started looking at it through the lens of my business as its own entity. So my business has its own human design. My business has its own gene keys separate from me. I have shared this with my clients, and it has been phenomenal to see the synergy that has come from it.
And so I decided to create a one-on-one experience for people who are interested in this kind of conversation. It won't be for everyone, but if you like the gene keys, if you like human design, I think this could take everything to the next level because we look at your business as separate from you, but we look at the overlaps. And so I have a process that I'll take you through. Like I said, it's one-on-one with me.
It includes Voxer so that we can have these conversations on setting up your content and your marketing and your business model and your sales process and how you make money through the lens of prosperity. Like how do you run your operating system with your business? And so I'm calling it Business Synergetics, and I'm really excited about it. And I'll make sure that that link is in the show notes as well. Or you can go to itsambersmith.com/synergetics.
S-y-n-e-r-g-e-t-i-c-s to confirm your spot, then book your call with me, actually two calls with me, and then I'll get you set up in Voxer and all of that. And I think it's going to be really nerdy fun if you're into gene keys and human design. For me, it's been like such a breakthrough. And my clients too have had like life shifting awareness because of this. So I'm excited to bring that to you. So those are my two announcements. Community Coach-a-thon March 10.
Business Synergetics with me one on one. Okay, now that that's announcements and housekeeping is done, let's dive into increasing your capacity. So this conversation has been on my mind a long time because we use this phrase in the coaching space a lot, like increase your capacity. And I started realizing like, how would I define that? So like the first place that I went with increasing my capacity is my nervous system, right?
Like, do I have the capacity for business growth, for money, for complexity? I have seven key places that we're going to talk about today. The other place that my mind went was like on my calendar, like do I actually have the time capacity for this? Do they have the emotional and energetic capacity for this? I've often told clients fully booked is an energetics thing, not a time slot on my calendar thing. So it's not about how many clients I have.
It's like what kind of energetic capacity is required of me to serve the clients at my highest level? That's the kind of conversation that I've been having with myself as I've been thinking about increasing my capacity. And so I want to kind of throw it to you, right? Have you ever used that phrase, increase your capacity? Have you thought you needed to increase your capacity? And where does your mind go? Does it go to time? Does it go to your calendar?
Does it go to emotions? Does it go to nervous system regulation? Does it go to literal like capacity in your life? Where does it go? Okay. And I want to invite you to bring your contemplations as I'm talking to this mic, but it feels like a conversation into these seven keys because I don't know. I think that we use this phrase a lot, but we don't really define it. And so I kind of want to define it.
And I'm going to share stories for myself and I'm going to share stories from clients as well. Because in my mind, the top experience in life is something I call quiet wealth. You guys know I wrote a whole book on it called quiet wealth, where my life and my business work in harmony with each other, where I'm creating what I want without sacrificing what I have, where I'm lit up by my creative work.
I love my client roster, but I also love, you know, my life, the walks that I take, the vacations I take with Wesley, time with my kids, time to read and to study and to nerd out on all these things, time to journal, time to work out, right? Where like everything's working in harmony. And so when I think of about increasing my capacity, I usually think of it in terms of like growing my business and expanding my impact, making more money, holding more clients.
But when we say that, when we want to grow our business, we want to make more money, when we want to have more clients on our roster and we need to increase our capacity for that, we often just say it that way, right? Like you need to increase your capacity. But I've identified a few things in places that I think actually shows up. So the first word that I wrote down is you need to increase your capacity for complexity.
So there's a famous quote actually from Oliver Wendell Holmes, and it says, I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity. And so complexity is a natural part of evolution. As we grow our businesses, there's going to be more complexity, right?
Like when I started doing group programs, it adds more complexity to my calendar, to the logistics, to onboarding, to how I can serve people, to how I need to condense the information that I'm sharing. In MiracleMind, right, there's a level of complexity because now I'm managing different people and all the things that they're working on and the retreat, all of us have our own version of this.
But the simplicity on the other side of complexity to me means you've increased your capacity. So in the beginning, when you're moving from like one-on-one work to group work, or you're expanding your business where you're making more sales, it adds more complexity to your business. How you know you've increased your capacity is that you are able to take the complexity and make it simple again.
I feel like I've just gone through that arc in my own business. So I've had a lot of complexity in my business through the years. I've had different programs like Lighthouse Mentorship, The Vortex. I've had The Matrix. Back in the day, I had ProCoach. I've had Quantum Play, and there's a lot of complexity.
So my business grew, but I knew that I had expanded my capacity when I've made things simple again by starting House of Abundance. House of Abundance is a simple but potent group program, and it's the simplicity on the other side of complexity, right? That is the fruit of me kind of going through a lot of trial and error, complexity, and me making it simple. I have then increased my capacity for more clients.
Sometimes when I work with clients, they say they want to scale, but they haven't increased their capacity for complexity, and so they actually keep scaling at bay because they haven't increased their capacity to hold complexity, which means messing up, getting things wrong, doing it messy along the way, being overextended sometimes, trying something and then changing your mind. That's all part of expanding your capacity in complexity.
That's number one. The next key place to increase your capacity is in rejection. I remember I was on a group consult call with one of my mentors, Rich Litvin, a few years ago, and he said something on that call that really stuck with me. He's like, I get told no more than any of you. I was like, oh, yeah. I see that with my clients. I get told no more than my clients.
I have expanded my capacity to receive rejection. In the beginning of my business, many of you will resonate, I would actually just not get rejected because I wouldn't ask. I wouldn't sell. I wouldn't launch. I wouldn't ask the question. I wouldn't ask for the money. I didn't get rejected, but I also wasn't creating what I wanted to create in my business.
As you grow your business and expand your income and work with a bigger client roster, as you make more sales, you have to increase your capacity for rejection, which means you can move on quickly. You don't take it so personally. You put it in the context of like, this is how business goes sometimes, that you get no's and you get yes's. You have people that love you and there's people that don't resonate and both are fine.
To me, when I have this conversation with clients, increasing their capacity for rejection, that means you are shining your light like a lighthouse out in the world and some people will not like it. It's kind of like what we talked about last week on your gravitational pull. I shared that quote from David Whyte where either people are going to be pulled in by your gravity or run in the opposite direction.
People running in the opposite direction can feel like a sting or it can feel kind of abrasive or it can feel unexpected or it can make you feel really bad about yourself if you haven't increased your capacity for rejection. So when I'm in a launch or when I'm selling something, I have increased my capacity because I know I'm going to be okay even if everyone says no. That's how I know I'm ready to launch something actually or like sell something.
I'm good if no one buys this. That has come through a lot of inner work, a lot of spiritual work of being with what is without resisting it. So even though this is a conversation that might seem more masculine, a lot of this is like more feminine surrender. So to increase your capacity, you kind of have to surrender your experience of rejection. I wouldn't even say the word rejection like when clients tell me no or when they don't renew or when people don't buy.
I don't necessarily experience it as rejection because I've done a lot of this work where I see it different. That's how I know I've increased my capacity. Early days of my business, a rejection would sting so bad I would kind of tuck my tail between my legs and not show up for a week. Let's say I had like this new idea and I put it out on social media and no one bought. I would kind of have to like recoil and I would hide.
I didn't have a lot of capacity for rejection and now I have like an ocean of capacity for rejection because I believe my business is about every life that I touch and then me in that order. I believe that my people have their own timeline and it is not my responsibility to manage that. Even if they say no today, that doesn't mean they're going to say no forever. Even if a lot of people say no, that doesn't mean that everyone will say no.
I'm here to serve the people that resonate and that's my whole business plan. And if they don't resonate, that's okay. I release them and I surrender. I have increased my capacity for rejection. Okay, so we talked about complexity. We've talked about rejection. The other place that I see a key place to increase your capacity is in boundaries and this is true in personal life and in business. So I've shared this story before, but I have a family member that loves to contact me.
Not so much anymore, but used to. And she said once, like, I know you're so busy. And one day I had to kind of correct her out of love, but also out of transparency. I'm not busy. I actually don't experience my life as busy, but I'm very mindful of when I take calls, when I answer texts, because I want to be present either for my clients or for my family or for myself. Those are my priorities.
And that was a form of a boundary in protecting my time so that I could increase my capacity for what I wanted to do in business, which meant to be creative, you need time to do nothing. So while I might have nothing on my calendar, that doesn't mean that I'm just going to answer any phone call that comes my way, which was really uncomfortable.
But it increased my capacity to grow my business. The other way that this shows up is I work with a lot of moms or people who are married and it's like you have to ask for time alone, whether that's on a Saturday morning when you need to get stuff done for your work, whether you need to go for a walk, whether you need to go for a trip, whether you need to leave the state that you live in to go to a different state to get clarity. Right.
Like sometimes we have to ask for the boundary to increase our capacity for creativity, for time alone. Right. A lot of women that I work with who are moms, they don't have a lot of alone time. And so their capacity is limited until they can ask for with a boundary conversation time alone. And some of you really need to hear this. I feel that very strongly. And I would say there's a rhythm to it. You should have alone time every day, every week, every month, every year.
So for me, like every day I have some form of alone time, whether that's a walk, whether I'm in my office, whether I sleep in, I have some form of alone time. Every week I take a good chunk of time, whether that's like a two hour block where I'm getting my hair done or getting, you know, pedicure or I'm visiting a friend or I go for a drive by myself. I go to the mountains by myself sometimes or I go for a really long walk.
I just get to do whatever I want or I like am in my office nerding out on the jean keys or something. Right. And all of that is great. And then I would say like every month I have like either a half a day or a day to myself and every quarter or yearly or so I go to a retreat or a workshop or a conference or an overnighter where I just get to be me and like put ideas together. Think about my business. Right.
Think about what I want my creative life to be like, whether it's a book I'm writing or a program I want to make or just like a general reset. I find ways to build this in. And I think it has done wonders for my creative life. It has done wonders for my capacity to mother my children as well, because when you are past your capacity, you burn out.
You get resentful, you get bitter, you get frustrated. And so a lot of times, unfortunately, when we don't have the awareness, the only way to know we are past our capacity is it impacts our personal relationships in negative ways. So for me, I had resentment. That was how it showed up for me. My husband would take a day to go hang out with his brother in the woods going hiking or hunting or whatever. And I had this resentment.
This is before coaching because what really was happening is I wanted some version of that, but I couldn't articulate it and I didn't say it. And so he would go take time for himself and I would be with the kids and I was resentful. And once I started learning coaching, I was like, oh, I need to articulate what I want and what I need. And so we started calling it like an Amber Day.
I would take an Amber Day or like I started taking solo walks or I would go to these business events or like hang out with friends or like a girls night or something where I could restore. And if you haven't learned to do that, you will go past your capacity and burnout or get resentful or blow up or self-sabotage or quit your business.
Because if you are listening to a podcast like this, my guess is, is that there's a lot of multidimensional levels of success that you want. You don't just want one dimension of success. Like you don't just want to make money in your business. You also want to be a good wife or a good mother. You want to be a good partner. You want to be a good friend. You want to be a good daughter. You want to be a good community member, a good neighbor, a good friend.
And so our capacity can expand if we have boundaries to protect your time and your energy. This also shows up with clients. Right. In the beginning, before I had a lot of clients, I would basically spend a lot of times in my DMs coaching and answering questions. And so what I've learned is like an energetic boundary is I'm available to coach people who I'm actually coaching, right? Who have opted in to one of my containers that I have created to meet my clients where I want to meet them. Same with my Voxer. Same with my client calls.
I have places that feel good to both of us, but it starts with me. There's a phrase that I've used with clients through the years that came from one of my mentors. It's for me, for you, for us. Boundaries means I start with what's good for me. And that might be really uncomfortable for a lot of you women listening to this episode because we were taught and kind of handed down the story that it's like put everyone else first and you are on the back burner and like that's the way it's supposed to be.
And I would say taking care of yourself first actually gives you more capacity to take care of other people in your life. I have more energy, more love, more creativity, more genuine love and presence for my family when I take care of me. Abraham Hicks said this, like one of the best gifts you can give your children is your own happiness. And that was not modeled right for many people because it was like the opposite.
It was like do all the self-sacrificing so that everyone in your life can be happy, even if that means you're miserable. And like this is totally flipping the script, which is like uncomfortable, but this is true. Like we see this play out, right? When you have a full cup, you can pour into others. If you are empty, you have nothing to give. And so we know this and yet it is difficult to set boundaries. It is difficult to ask for what we need. It is difficult to articulate, I want alone time.
And for many of you like that's exactly what needs to happen. It's a way to increase your capacity. Okay, so we've talked about complexity. We've talked about rejection. We've talked about boundaries. The next one is scarcity. You need to increase your capacity. You need to increase your capacity around scarcity. And I'm going to give you a few different examples.
In business, this looks like clients refunding or clients not being able to pay you. If you don't know how to increase your capacity around scarcity, you're going to freak out or it'll break your business or you'll do things that are manipulative and not in integrity to you. Or let's say a failed launch. How you respond to a failed launch is so interesting about your relationship with money and provision.
And so all of these things that happen, whether it's a client refunding or a launch not going the way that you hoped it would or clients not renewing and now your business income is dipping. If you can't hold yourself in abundance around scarcity, you have limited capacity. And so it's an invitation to do the work. I can't even tell you how many times I've had to do this work.
Every time I've done it, I have increased my capacity because I had to stare scarcity in the eyes and choose abundance. I had to look at, you know, maybe it was like a client that I thought was going to renew and then didn't. And I was like, oh, I was kind of counting on that money for like some of the investments I've made or the way that I show up for my family or the way that we're saving or the things that we're buying. And I had to stare it in the face.
What I increased my capacity around is like no client is responsible for my financial success. And until you learn that lesson, you're going to keep bumping into situations that feel really bad or that feel very activating. But if you want to grow your business, you need to be able to handle clients refunding, clients not signing, failed launches, scarcity type stuff and see it and hold and maintain the energy and frequency of abundance.
And until you learn that lesson, you won't be able to grow your business. I say that with a lot of love because I've been there. If one client asking for a refund or one client not resigning throws your business off, we have work to do. If a failed launch makes you want to crawl into a hole and not show up for months, we have work to do. And like I said, I say this with so much love and I say this from experience.
My business couldn't grow beyond my capacity to hold other people's scarcity in my life. So that includes my partner, my spouse, my kids, my parents, my friends, their scarcity. Also, I had to be able to hold it and not let it impact my abundance mindset. And until you learn this lesson, right, like the saying goes, the lesson will keep showing up for you until you show up for the lesson. And this is a hard one because we are very impacted by other people's choices.
But until you learn how to create unshakable abundance inside yourself, scarcity will keep showing up for you because it's expanding your capacity. And I see this one a lot, especially if you are a business coach or you coach on money. Because if you want to help other people with money, you have to be unshakable in their scarcity or else how can you help them? So you have to face your own scarcity.
You have to face scarcity in clients, in their financial situations that impact you, like them not signing or a launch not going well or someone asking for a refund or people bailing on their payment plans. All of these things happen in business. And what it will reveal to you is where your relationship with abundance and scarcity is. And so we are constantly being invited to embody what we teach at a higher level. And this is one place.
If you want to increase your capacity, increase your capacity to experience or to see scarcity or even to be impacted by scarcity. And until you do this, you will not be able to grow your business or else you'll keep bumping into the same situation over and over again. Early, early on in my business, I had a client that defaulted on a payment and I blessed her and released her with love. But what it did was it kind of like made my mind spin because I was like, oh, dang, like I kind of was planning on that money. And I was like, oh, that's the lesson.
I cannot plan for money from people in the future. That's not a safe bet in my business. I have to count on the money that's actually in my bank account and I can be abundant about the future and I can trust that I'll create the money in the future. But I can't rest on payment plans from people. I have to constantly be creating clients. I have to be constantly shining my light so that I have a pipeline full of people who are interested in working with me.
It can never be down to a singular person. That's not fair to them. The pressure that I put on them is not fair to them. I want to be a business owner of high integrity, which means this has to change. I learned the lesson and I never found myself in that situation again because I never want a singular client to be responsible for my financial prosperity. Some of you really needed to hear that. I think this is probably the hardest one.
If I look at this list, right, scarcity is very difficult to feel because especially like when you have a business, you want to feel secure in cash flow, but you have to learn the skills and the inner resources to be abundant and to create abundance through your resourcefulness, regardless of what other people do or don't do. That's how you increase your capacity. Okay, so we've talked about complexity. We've talked about rejection.
We've talked about boundaries, talked about scarcity. Now let's talk about people's perception of you. This has been a huge one for me personally, and many of my clients struggle with this. We are really tuned in to what people think about us. And if we're not careful, it can really impact our capacity. I'm going to read you something that I wrote about perception. I think I've read this before, but it's still so good. I wrote it for me, but it resonates. So this is the poem that I wrote.
I said trying to control other people and how they perceive you, your work, your art is like trying to control the river one drop at a time. Open the floodgates. Be the conduit. Let your life force lead. Be so in love with your process, your art, your life. You release everyone from the secret burden of their approval. That is how you increase your capacity.
For me, this is probably in the work of my lifetime because I learned at a very young age how to anticipate and people please, right? I could like read people's faces and know what they thought about me. And so I would chameleon myself, shapeshift myself to be what they wanted me to be. And that doesn't work when you're growing a business. Because how can I manage everyone's perception of me? My coach told me this the other day.
She was like, you exist as a different version to everyone who knows you, which is true. Everyone has their own thoughts about me, their own relationship. Everyone listening to this podcast, the way that you see me is different than other people listening to the same podcast, which is just interesting and fascinating to think about.
And so if you're trying to manage perception, you are literally limiting your capacity to grow your business because you're going to try to control the river one drop at a time. It doesn't work. And so if you want to open the floodgates of clients, of cash, of an audience or a community, you have to be okay that you can't manage everyone's perception of you.
You have to love what you do so much and be in integrity with yourself that you release the need to manage, to manipulate their perception of you. And for you people pleasers, this is very difficult and confronting because it's a pattern that you learned pretty young, is my guess. And it also kept you safe and it helped you make friends. It helped you be a good student, helped you be a good employee, helped you be a good in a relationship, right?
Because you could anticipate needs and you could read the room. But there comes a point where that is not helpful to what you're trying to create. If you're trying to manage everyone's perception of you on Instagram, can you think about how exhausting that is and you can't even do it. So the result is you kind of hide, you kind of don't post, you water down what you really want to say and it doesn't resonate.
And so if you want to increase your capacity, you have to increase your capacity to let people be wrong about you, to not have to manage everyone's perception about you. And it's very difficult, but it can be done. Who are you when no one's looking? Who are you really? And can you let people see that and then let them have whatever thoughts they're going to have about you and understand like there will be different versions of you that exist in the minds of everyone who knows you and that's okay. Okay, that's people's perception.
The sixth way to increase your capacity is in leadership. So when I think of this key place to expand your capacity, I think of people asking you questions that you might not know the answer to. Are you okay with that? The people have opinions that are different than you, right? They're going to look to you for your opinion. Can you increase your capacity for that?
One of the biggest things for me is like, I knew that I had increased my capacity when I'm okay not knowing publicly. So like if I'm on a group call in House of Abundance and someone asks me a question that I don't know, I'm okay saying, I don't know. I'm okay saying this is outside of my wheelhouse because then it allows me to serve more people because I'm not afraid of not knowing.
If we're afraid of not knowing, we will limit our leadership or limit the people in our sphere because we don't want to be seen as not knowing or like having the wrong opinion. And so that's like the specific flavor of leadership that I think of in this way. And for a lot of you, it's challenging because you want to know. To be really honest, we were rewarded for knowing the right answer in school.
We were rewarded for knowing the right thing to do in a job, in an entrepreneurship, and I would say even like in wisdom traditions, a lot of my clients come to me for like wisdom. They want me to help them find their own wisdom about a marriage situation, a money situation, a business situation, a relationship situation.
And so for me to share the wisdom that I have in my experience and to extract the wisdom from their experience, I have to be comfortable not knowing. And I think great leaders admit when they don't know. That also makes it so that when they do know, it lands better. And so to increase your capacity, increase your capability of being in the unknown. I don't know. I'll think about that. I'll contemplate that. I'll come back to you with something about that.
Or, hey, that's outside my wheelhouse. But if you come up with a solution, let me know. Or like the other thing that has been really beautiful to see in my business is like I'm happy to point people to others who can help if it's not in my wheelhouse or it's not something I feel comfortable or confident talking about. And that has increased my capacity to let more people into my business because I don't feel all the pressure of needing to know every single answer to every single question. It's also made me a better coach being with the unknown.
Okay, the last of the key places to increase your capacity is money and stewardship. So this is different than scarcity. Even though we talked about scarcity, it's actually the opposite. Right. Like some of you are afraid to have money. Some of you are afraid of more stewardship. And so you limit your capacity.
And so I want to speak to this one at the end, because as your business grows and as you increase your capacity, you also increase how you use money, whether that's investing, spending, hiring team members, paying for technology or software, going to events. How to steward the money that your makes is another level of growth that you get invited into.
And for me, this is why I'm an eternal student. This is why I get coaching and mentorship myself, because I don't think this game ever ends. The more money I make, the more responsibility I actually have to steward it. So to increase my capacity, like I need to be okay with that. Basically, I need to not be triggered by a lot of money.
And actually, one of the homework assignments I guess I've given the most clients is when they make a big amount of money, I just have them sit with it. So whether that's like a bonus from their husband's job or a big painful client or a big launch or maybe unexpected money from the government, which I know, shocker, that actually does happen, or unexpected money from an inheritance, like I've seen all of these things play out.
One of the things that I invite my clients to do is literally just to sit with it, to not spend it, to not move it, to not fidget with it, to not get rid of it, because a lot of our tendencies is actually, which is funny because you think you want a lot of money, but then what happens when you actually get it? A lot of you get rid of it as fast as possible. And I've been there.
So I see it in my clients really quickly because how to increase my capacity is literally just being with bigger amounts of money, not needing to do anything with it, not needing to move it, not needing to randomly buy something, to just be with the money and from a place of discernment, choose how to steward it. And that's another thing for you to contemplate.
So to recap, seven key places to increase your capacity, the complexity in business and life, feelings of rejection, boundaries around your time and energy, being with scarcity, mostly from clients and their situations and how it affects your business, people's perception of you in your leadership, of the questions people ask, the opinions that people want from you, when they look to you to make a decision, can you increase your capacity around that?
And then money and stewardship. Those are seven places. I'm sure there's more, but those are what I came up with in my contemplation about increasing your capacity. That's what it actually means. And if you noticed, a lot of it is uncomfortable work. It means challenging old patterns, old paradigms, old ways of being and choosing something different. It means sitting in discomfort and not running away.
It means choosing abundance and love and attachment, even in the face of really challenging situations. To me, it also means not making other people responsible for my business. Clients are not responsible for my business. My family is not responsible for my business. I am responsible. I am the creator of it.
And so it is in my stewardship, which means a big conversation is articulating what you need and want, being able to sit with yourself in discomfort, which is one of the reasons I love the gene keys, because it really invites you just to be with a shadow pattern and not really necessarily fix it or do anything with it. Just being with it, sitting with an uncomfortable emotion, sitting with an uncomfortable circumstance and not trying to fix it or save yourself or distract, is how you increase your capacity.
I have seen these things unlock magic and miracles in my business, in my client's business. And all of us are at different, I would say, thresholds with all of this. And so my invitation to you is, which one stood out to you that you could do a better job of creating space around it, being with it? Complexity, rejection, boundaries, scarcity, people's perception, leadership, money and stewardship.
Which one spoke to you that you could go deeper with, get coaching on, look at old patterns and transcend, which is evolution. So hope this resonated. I'm grateful for you being a part of my podcast community. I appreciate you all. If this resonated with you, share it with a friend. That would help me and them. So thank you for being awesome. I will see you in the next episode. Bye.