Hey Team,
This is one of those topics that I have returned to over and over again in Go Team posts throughout the years but since I often need another reminder, I thought you might need one, too.
So here goes:
Please make sure that you match your expectations to your capacity.
No matter where you are in the process of developing practices to expand and enhance your life, matching your expectations (your results) to your capacity (how much effort you can put into the project) is one of the kindest things you can do for yourself.
As we all know, there are hundreds of ways to get stronger, get fit, decrease stress, learn new things, or develop new practices and different approaches will work for different people.
And those different approaches include different intensities, different time lines, and different activities, and they will all help people move towards the lives they want to live.
BUT the speed at which each person is moving, changing, and learning will be different.
AND each person is living a different life with different pressures, different schedules, and different abilities.
SO it only makes sense for each person to take ALL of those things into account when they are developing their expectations of themselves, their progress, and their results.
To clarify, let’s consider an extreme example:
Let’s imagine that a big movie star gets a role in an action film that requires a lot of extra muscle. She can generally hire a trainer to design a targeted program, she can spend hours in the gym every day with someone else tracking every aspect of her workout and telling her what adjustments to make, she can have her staff shop, prepare, and serve very specific foods and she probably has other staff to take care of her house, her car, her kids, and any other details of life admin that may spring up.
Her JOB for the next while is to prepare physically and mentally for that role. She will have to work hard and she will have to juggle SOME other priorities but she has the capacity to put in the time and the energy for those lengthy and challenging workouts and she will see results very quickly.
In contrast, your job is probably separate from your plans to build extra muscle. You probably have time for a few sessions at the gym each week. You may have a trainer but you probably don’t spend hours a day with them. You probably have to shop for your own groceries and prepare your own meals and clean your own house and you probably don’t have the same support for your life admin,
Your capacity for the task of building muscle is VERY different than the movie star’s capacity.
It would be unfair for you to expect yourself to get the same results that she gets in the same period of time.
The kind thing to do would be to be realistic about the results your efforts can generate in the time you have available.
A person who can run several times a week will see certain results sooner than the person who can only run once per week. That doesn’t mean that either person is ‘better’, they are both doing the best they can with the resources they have. The person who only has one opportunity to run each week needs a different set of expectations for themselves than the person who can run more often.
Being realistic about your capacity and about what you can expect from the efforts you are able to make at this point in your life is much better for your brain than berating yourself for falling short of disconnected expectations.
So, Team, today I invite you to take a look at what you are expecting from yourself right now.
Do you have the capacity to do the work that would be required to meet those expectations?
If not, how can you adjust your expectations to match your efforts?
After all, it makes more sense to celebrate what you *can* do and what you have achieved than to be hard on yourself for things that are beyond your capacity right now.
And, as always, here is your gold star for your efforts today, no matter what size and shape they are.
Be kind to yourself, pretty please.
Go Team Us!
