Know Your Capacity

We're at the lake at the moment for a summer break, and I've put on my most orange party shirt especially for EOS. There's some orange in it to celebrate EOS and celebrate summer.

Now, in this summer vacation I was reminded of the lessons I learned at EOS. The one is about capacity and I saw this on a recent boat ride.

We invited some friends over and we were expecting themselves and their kids. As things panned out their parents came to visit for the day and they brought an aunt with, and in the end once we had everyone on the boat, the boat was severely loaded. It wasn't overloaded, but it was heavy, really heavy. Like we summed it up later on that it was like driving a ferry, it wasn't like driving a little pontoon boat. Because normally this little pontoon boat, when you started putting up speed, it rises above the water and you float on top of the water and you can go at a great clip. Now with a heavy load I tried to do the same when we crossed the lake and it was not fun.

The poor little boat worked very, very hard. All it could do was push, push, push at sort of a 45 degree angle and it couldn't crest the water, it couldn't get on. The little motor worked so hard and it was so loud that we couldn't speak on the boat. Halfway across the lake I realized this is not going to happen. With this capacity that we have we cannot have fun, if we try to do what we do when there's more spare power.

So what I did was I slowed down and brought the boat down, and we just simply cruised across the lake at a sedate pace. We could chat, we could do whatever we needed to do. It took us longer, but once we got to the other side, where we normally swim, the boat just became a swimming platform for all the kids and some of the adults, like myself, who like swimming off the boat. We jumped off the boat and we had lots of games with the boys and it was a fun time, with the boat just serving as a sort of a swimming platform. We spent some time there, chatted, drifted, had fun, and then sedately made our way back to the bank again.

This reminded me about capacity. If we're over-committed and we don't have the capacity, it is very difficult to bring out lots of results. Like the little boat couldn't go fast; then you have to adapt your speed, you have to think about what's happening in my life, why am I so over-burdened, why am I carrying this massive load and have to adjust to it? And then better still, once you know, I'm overloaded, there's too much going on, maybe that's the time to 'delegate and elevate.'

There's a tool in EOS we use for that, where we make sure that certain things we're not doing well, we can delegate to others, and we can help to elevate them in their careers. These tools and building our capacity is really important, because if you are, you've got the capacity and you're giving a great output. You're in a place of joy, you're in a place of productivity, you're in a place where you're making a difference in the world.

But if you don't have the resources, if you're under-resourced and you haven't got the capacity to handle what you need to do, your output gets terrible, or it gets less; and this is not a good place to be, it's not a good place to inspire yourself and others, and it's a place that you need to make changes.

Talk to me if you want to know more about the Delegate to Elevate tool, and how you can work with that to always build the capacity, so that you can soar on top of the water and not sit and struggle through life and business.

Thank you for your time, we'll speak again next week.