A few weeks ago, I was hired to teach a capacity workshop at a business mastermind for some successful business owners. They wanted to know the capacity most responsible for business success. 

I picked Embodiment Capacity™, your ability to assuredly navigate new challenges that come at every level of your growth. 

The direct messages I got from participants after the class was over were filled with tears and minds blown. This gave me further confirmation of what I’ve known for 12 years. Embodiment Capacity is always underlying every other capacity issue my clients have. Always.

Embodiment Capacity deficits are usually the most ignored. And yet, they’re the most dangerous deficits to ignore within us. 

We think it’s what we’ll take care of “after” we make the six, seven, or eight figures we’re gunning for. Or we see it as “side work” to the “main work” of building our businesses. Today, I want you to walk away, understanding that this isn’t side work. 

This is equally as important, if not MORE important, than your strategic work. Because this capacity will ensure you can continue to stay committed and devoted to your business and implement the strategies you invest in consistently so you can see results. 

Embodiment Capacity holds up your strategies and ensures they don’t get derailed because you got derailed. It also makes sure you don’t have personal blind spots that will cause you to get “canceled” because you were leading from an unhealed place.

Let’s take a short quiz to see if you’ve got Embodiment Capacity deficits. See how many you can say “yes” to. Be honest with yourself!

• You feel tired or drained by your work (events, launches, calls with clients, negotiations etc) or life tasks
• You get resentful of all the work that’s on your calendar or what you’ve built
• You often wonder whether or not you can “handle” the success you want
• You feel like you can never get the time away to work on key projects and instead keep getting sucked into things you really shouldn’t be sucked into anymore
• Little interactions with people in your life, client drama, or Instagram hater comments throw you off emotionally for days or weeks.
• You never have time for real self-care anymore, your self-care doesn’t seem to work, or you’re anxious during self-care because you keep thinking about all the things that aren’t getting done in your business.
• You’re holding back on what you say and post because you’re afraid of being “canceled”
• You often feel like you don’t belong or question “why would THEY want to work with me” in a room full of people you admire or who you consider to be “ahead” of you.”
• Your voice changes, body language shrinks, you overly apologize for yourself when you get into power positions
• You’ve had some negative experiences in life and business that make it hard for you to control negative stories in your head.

Even if you only said yes to one, that one could be SO BIG for you, it’s as if you said yes to all of them. And these are just a few examples of Embodiment Capacity deficits.

So, what do you do about this now that you know you’ve got these capacity deficits? 

There are four main culprits that drain your Embodiment Capacity and threaten your business success as a result. Because this is an email and not a three hour workshop, I can’t go into all four for the sake of being concise. 

But we can dive into one of them. I call it “Superficial Self Care.”

If you ever feel like self-care is never enough, or you’re still tired after you do it. If self care feels like it’s not working, or you don’t make time for it. Or you always leave it second.

That means one of 3 things for you:

1. You’re focusing on the wrong thing in your self-care practice.

We all see the perfectly curated IG posts of people in bathtubs sipping champagne with bath bombs. Or we see others posting about bingeing on Netflix with charcuterie boards. 

While all of these things are lovely, and I certainly do enjoy them, those things aren’t really-deep-down replenishing you. And they certainly don’t give you the kind of deep care, nourishment and rest you REALLY need in order to have more capacity to tackle your to-do’s the next day, a big launch, or writing your next book.

Wine isn’t going to help, or chocolate, or stuff that doesn’t make you feel good. A mani-pedi isn’t it either. 

REAL self-care, what I call “the good sh&t” looks like:

• you need to be having that hard conversation with your sister about what you do and don’t do in your house whenever she comes over and disrupts your family’s routine.
• setting that boundary with the client who always asks you to do things out of scope or expects a response time that’s unrealistic.
• refusing to do free emotional labor for everyone in your life, including your family, team, clients and friends.
• letting yourself have a REAL vacation where you aren’t checking in on your team “every once in a while” because you’re nervous they’ll drop the ball.
• hiring people who actually have the capacity to support you so you can be focused on YOUR zone of genius and not micromanaging every detail.
• charging prices or submitting proposals that don’t undercut the immense value you bring to the table.

One of the reasons your self-care practice isn’t giving you the kind of results you expect is because you’re taking care of yourself based on what you saw in Real Simple magazine vs. actually checking in with YOUR soul on what really actually fills your tank.

An example of this is you:

• treat yourself to chocolate, instead of working with a therapist
• buy another course on tidying up when instead you need to be building your capacity and doing some deeper personal development course.
• hope a rose quartz will heal your heart instead of setting serious boundaries with people who stomp all over it.

2. You have a trust issue and value tangible more than intangible.

When you rely on people outside of you telling you what your self-care practice “should” feel like, you’ve got a trust issue. GOOP or Poosh shouldn’t be the gurus of your self-care. 

When you give your personal agency away like that, this is internalized colonialism and industrialism. Those systems say people outside of us need to tell us what is right for us and our own individual needs. Some magazine, course, or Instagram influencer with beautiful photos somehow must know something we don’t.

If you find yourself trying a bunch of different self-care practices, instead of trusting in what feels right for YOU, you’re not trusting in the decision you made to invest in your self care as “the right thing to do”. 

Instead, you listen to some big entrepreneur’s podcast and follow what they do, thinking “if it works for them, it’ll work for me.” Hey, if that mushroom powder butter coffee works for them, maybe I”ll have what they have if I try it…never mind it makes me sluggish halfway through my morning.”

Or you don’t trust self-care will actually help because there’s some part of you that secretly believes progress needs to have “proof” and “results.” You subconsciously believe if you don’t have a tangible, you’ve done nothing at all. 

If I don’t have a picture of a bubble bath and chocolate on my Instagram feed, or I don’t make an immediate $10,000 after my self-care practice, then I haven’t done “real” self-care or self-care doesn’t work.

This obsession with valuing the tangible over the intangible in business is probably one of the most dangerous threats to people’s success I see. If you don’t trust in the intangible results you get, you’re not going to get the tangible results you want, ever.

Look at love–it’s intangible. You can’t really hold “proof” of love in your hand. Sure you can look at the things someone does for you and see those as evidence of love. But it doesn’t actually prove they love you. 

Anyone can buy a ring, doesn’t mean they love you. Many famous athletes cheat on their wives. Look at Jay Z– he was with Beyonce and he still cheated on her. And all of them were buying their significant others all sorts of amazing things. 

Plenty of people do things for their spouse, then just pack up and leave one day because they never loved them and were just doing it out of duty. 

You’ve been taught the only thing “worth” setting aside time, money and energy for is a work product, to produce a widget, an object, a revenue number or a report. 

So you approach your self -are this way, too. This is the equivalent of saying, “show me on an x-ray how this self-care helped me!” See how silly that sounds?

So when we meditate, talk to a therapist, get offered the opportunity to work on our 

capacity, or get told to take a day to do nothing… we dismiss it, discount it, or don’t even 

CONNECT it to the material success we may be experiencing. 

We don’t see it’s the crucial undercurrent that ensures the “car” runs. The car being your business and its continual growth and success. You’re a Ferrari. Your self-care is the premium gas that’s fueling your engine. No gas, no movement.

But oh no, unless it’s tangible, “it doesn’t matter”, or it’s a throwaway while you work another 10 hours or invest another $20,000 to “get your funnel profitable.” 

You’re not gonna get the funnel profitable if you don’t start engaging in real self-care. Period. Or you will and it’ll fall apart because you’re falling apart.

Or you’ll get canceled because your lack of self-care means you’ve not developed your capacity as a leader, and you’ll say or do harmful things without even realizing it.  We’ve seen many recent examples of that on the internet.

Mental clarity, mental peace–that’s not “tangible” but you can feel it and it makes sure you do get tangible results. 

3. You’re too focused on “ROI and Receipts”

If you will only value intangible results because they also give you a tangible result you’re also squelching and diminishing your tangible result AND you’re abandoning the intangible you need to have in place in order to get the tangible results you want. 

For example: “I will only work on inner peace if I can prove it will add $100,000 to my bottomline.” Or “I will only invest in this personal development mentor unless they can prove it will double my business.” 

So you don’t work on increasing your inner peace. And you won’t get the extra $100,000 without working on it.

Whenever people sign up to work on capacity, and all they want to know is “how it will help them make money,” those people always do the worst in our programs because they don’t allow the process. 

They’re so tense and tight, wondering when the “$100,000 as a result of Capacity Work™” is coming, they don’t even allow their capacity to grow. And we all know abundance can’t come into a tight, tense, demanding, and untrusting container. 

THAT kind of behavior is what I mean by “being too focused on ROI and collecting receipts as proof before you’ll dedicate time to something that’ll involve self-care. 

If you always feel this way or do this (and be HONEST with yourself, you do), something is not aligned for you. 

Not everything of incredibly high value in your life and your business is going to be dollars in your pocket and bank account. In fact, the most valuable things AREN’T and if you dismiss those things, you will be empty.

Jeff Bezos is a billionaire soon to be trillionaire, and his wife left him and was awarded half of his money. Bill Gates is getting a divorce, too. You’ll become an emotionally bankrupt human. 

How many matchmaking services have the archetype of the millionaire that never developed himself to attract his ideal mate and has zero dating skills because all his energy went into making millions? Now he’s 50 and has the emotional capacity of a 20 year old. I’ve met men like this when I fly Business Class and sit next to them.

Do you want that to be you?

When the pandemic broke out, I can’t tell you how many well known business thought leaders “all about the ROI” who’d previously dismissed my work as “unimportant” now secretly sought my help because they didn’t have the emotional capacity to pivot quickly and save their businesses. 

All my clients who’d been working on their capacity in the year prior handled it beautifully and easefully. They all had fantastic years, revenue-wise.

Real leaders make people feel a certain way. They make an energetic impact on their communities and the world- they don’t just make a billion dollars for their company. 

The tangibles you’re obsessed with don’t contribute to that kind of impact. Your intangible results, like inner emotional equilibrium (what I call Equanimity in Capacity work) DO make you that kind of leader.

Or you could end up in a place where you don’t have one real friend. When someone in your family dies, and you experience a loss, when your feelings are hurt, or you feel alone… talk to me about how your dollars keep you warm, or that launch gives you a hug.

How is that like having a friend who can take you to an oceanside picnic to celebrate a big achievement? Tell me how all those strategies and tangibles you valued more can do that for you?

I know this must be sobering to read. But it’s such a huge blocker of success and capacity in so many business owners and entrepreneurs that we have to talk about it. The nonsense has to stop. Can you be honest with yourself about whether or not you’re doing any of the above?

How much do you invest in intangible things? And I don’t mean chocolate, bubble baths, and crystals. I mean the real sh&t. How often do you not want to invest in personal development mentors yet will easily put down $50,000 for a funnel strategy? 

Is that strategy going to keep you emotionally well when a client tries to sue you? Or a team member quits in the middle of a launch?

Now excuse me while I go curl up on the couch with my two rescue dogs, who contribute NO money or tangible value to the household income or my business, yet nourish me in a way that allows me to serve my clients and show up for my business on a whole other level. 

I hope you’re starting to get why I’m always saying, “it’s not your strategy, it’s your capacity.”