Recently I worked with a client who, before we met, had managed to build a very successful business in just a few years time. But here she was, burned out, resentful and at a plateau. The strategies just weren’t working anymore. She had a capacity issue.

Want to know what the main area of our focus is right now to get her to her next level? 

Rest. (Or as I like to call it, Embodiment Capacity).

I’ve given her a really tough homework assignment: no work at all on weekends. Only four hours of work per day, four days a week. This homework is hard for an achiever like her who is used to working 24/7. 

Her normal “go to solution” for a plateau is hiring a new business strategist, re-doing her entire business model or needlessly cutting a program out even if it’s a good revenue stream. 

That’s why she’s burned out and plateaued. 

Many leaders I work with don’t know why their team members keep quitting or why their relationships keep falling apart. Do you know what it’s like to be around you every time you feel the need to solve your unrest by unnecessarily overhauling everything? Exhausting, for one.

I’m sorry to report, one day off or a two week vacation before you go back to your usual grind isn’t what I’m talking about when I say “rest”. 

I’m talking about expanding your capacity to build a life and business/career that not only initially recalibrates your nervous system to get it back to baseline, but also keeps your nervous system at peak levels, always.

Now you’re tempted to ask me what magic plan that is so you can strategize your way into more rest. There’s no such thing. 

Everyone has a unique Capacity Code, which means what’s restful for my nervous system isn’t what’s restful for yours. You need something custom-curated.

In the Capacity Shift program, this is one of the many assignments we work on. Because trying to apply a self-care template is like buying “One Size Fits All” anything: that never goes well..

WARNING. Here’s where I see you possibly running into a problem: it’s not enough to have the right plan. You need CAPACITY to enact it. 

As an achiever, you’re going to RESIST rest and create “restful activities” that don’t actually give your nervous system a chance to settle. 

For example, my client decided to schedule a bunch of spa appointments for her “first week of rest homework”, but ended up feeling equally as exhausted because she had to sit in traffic to get to each one of those “self care” appointments. Sneaky form of self-sabotage, huh?

Ever took a day off for rest, only to feel stressed the entire time about all the things you’re not getting done? That’s a capacity issue. When you build capacity, rest stops feeling stressful and instead feels instinctive. Then the nervous-system recalibration and maintenance can begin.

And now we come to the reason for all of this: what this has to do with success or achieving your goals? EVERYTHING.

Burnout or a lack of consistent downtime/space actually impairs your brain. It guarantees you’ll unconsciously make poor decisions for your career or business. 

That’s why you keep “overhauling and restructuring everything” once a year, yet you still haven’t gotten unstuck. It “looks” like you’re being a smart and strategic business owner when you “restructure”. Instead, it’s the impaired decisions of a fried nervous system.

I have a personal rule that I impart to clients as well: don’t trust a word that comes out of your mouth or brain if you haven’t mastered your unique capacity to rest. 

If you keep trying to make career/business/life-altering decisions WHILE still maintaining your 90 mile an hour pace on the highway… well that’s just a recipe for a busted engine or a crash.

That kind of depleted decision-making is what got you stuck, plateaued and burned out in the first place.

Are you ready to discover your unique Capacity Code so you can expand your capacity to step into your next level? Fill out the Capacity Discovery Form here. I’ll personally review it myself and schedule a call if I feel I can be of support to you. 

The post bad idea appeared first on Lisa Fabrega.

A few years ago, I accomplished a years-long dream: I booked five days at a luxurious suite in Santorini, Greece. I had the whole image in my head for YEARS. I wanted one of those suites I always saw on Instagram with the private hot tubs overlooking the caldera of the volcano.

So, I booked two retreats for clients in Santorini (one for my Capacity Circle mastermind and the other a private 1:1 client retreat) and in between I sandwiched my own “self-care” vacation.

It was GLORIOUS. Every morning they brought me an amazing, fresh healthy breakfast. I got to eat it overlooking these fabulous views.

And I spent five days swimming in my private hot tub, eating great food, reading… and talking to my coach and meeting with my team as part of my own capacity expansion work. 

Yes, THAT was part of my self-care. Working on my capacity by maintaining my focus on my business. Hearing that, most people would say I didn’t do self-care correctly. They’re wrong.

There’s this peculiar thing I notice happens every summer. It’s one of the sneakiest self-sabotaging behaviors I’ve ever seen in ten years of doing this work with thousands of people. 

The summer kicks in and they think it means taking a break from expanding their capacity and dropping ALL of their support systems and kind of checking out of their businesses. And they confuse that with self care. It’s not.⁣

Here’s how I notice people sabotaging in the name of fake self care:

• Going from eating in alignment with their body’s needs to eating junk food for three months straight. (aka “I deserve to eat all the food that makes me feel like crap because vacation!”)

• Allowing the kids’ summer schedule to totally take over your life while you abandon your own needs entirely. (aka “I’ll just use my kids schedule to avoid doing the deeper work I know I need to do to get to my next level come autumn.”)

• Moving your body and exercising in ways that make your mind feel sharp and ready to tackle any issue in your business. (aka “eff it, it’s the summer so I deserve to not have to exercise at all!”)

• Just when you’re starting to get momentum in your business or career, you slow down, scale back and put the coaching program you were a part of on pause or stop it entirely (aka “I’m tired! Don’t I deserve a break from all this work to “integrate” but deep down you know you’re not going to integrate anything and instead fall off track for three months.) 

Removing your support systems during the summer is NOT self care. It’s self-sabotage. 

It’s also the easiest way to be poorly set up for the fall. It means when fall hits, you’ll have to come back in shock to a sh$t ton of work and “hustle”. You’ll spend months getting your mental and physical health back to where it was before the summer after three months of totally ignoring it with the fake self care excuse. 

You’ll have to come back to a program or product launch that is going to stress you and your team OUT because you didn’t do much work to ease into it after the summer.you have to work twice as hard to catch up in the fall.⁣

You’ll have a personal crisis and spend months trying to remember who you are and what you want because you spent your whole summer ignoring yourself and only focusing on your family and kids. That’s a recipe for burnout, actually. And YOU deserve some of your attention, too. 

Self care isn’t about saying FUCK IT to all the things that keep your engine and spirit running. It’s about having the proper support systems in place. 

So summer, when you might have more time off, is the perfect time to actually LEAN IN to your capacity work. It’s the time to strengthen your support systems. 

Especially if you have kids at home and/or the usual summer vacation / staycation hectic-ness. That’s when you MOST need capacity. Having capacity means you’ll be way less run-ragged and less far behind when the fall comes around.⁣

Some of my most successful launches and money-making months have been during the summer. Why? Because everyone is falling for the “self- sabotage under the guise of self care” routine. That means ad costs are cheaper, less people are selling things. There’s more space to see and hear you.

The summer is also an excellent time to keep “seeding” your community of people with hints of what’s to come. And while you might not be full-on launching something, you could be preparing them over three months to be ready for the next amazing thing you’re offering that will change their lives.

You could continue building on your momentum you worked SO HARD to build at the beginning of the year, while enjoying time off… instead of saying eff it and stopping all your hard-earned momentum in its tracks. 

You could be working on your Capacity all summer long so that when the end of summer comes around, you’ve ALREADY built the capacity to go to your next level of growth, wealth and impact. Then you’re READY to hold, handle and receive it, instead of having to start that work in the fall when you’ll already be behind.

Especially this year, when we’re most likely going to get a second wave of COVID-19 which will be much worse than the first wave. Do you want to be prepared and already ahead of the curve cause you’ve BEEN working on your capacity? Or do you want to be scrambling and freaking out again?

Capacity work is not about “adding more work to your plate” or piling things onto your “to do” list. Capacity work is different than what you’ve done before. It compliments everything you’re doing AND it increases your capacity so that your work starts to feel more like joy and ease, instead of burnout.

That’s why, by the time my five days of vacation in Santorini was up, I felt rested and rejuvenated. EVEN THOUGH I met with my coaches, posted on social media, and kept writing emails to y’all. Because I work on my capacity, those things didn’t drain me, they rejuvenated me.

Don’t confuse self care with “letting all your crucial support systems go.” That’s how self care becomes self-sabotage. Both things are necessary diligence that keep you fueled and ready to have all the capacity you need to keep growing to your next level.⁣

If you’re ready to use this summer to be LEAPS AND BOUNDS ahead of everyone else once the Fall comes around, we’ve got TWO spots open in my Capacity Shift group program right now. It’s an excellent way to work with me on your Capacity and it starts at only $375!
Want to learn more? Just fill this form out right here and I’ll be in touch.

The post when self-care is sabotage appeared first on Lisa Fabrega.

Ever heard of the phrase “playing possum”? It comes from the Virginia Opossum, who “plays dead” every time a potential predator is near. It looks like the picture above (that possum is fully alive).

A few years ago I was talking to a client on the phone about her self-sabotaging patterns that came up every time she started to get some serious momentum in her business.

“Lisa, it’s like every time I start to get momentum, I can feel this part of me that gets really whiny. Then I start to feel physically tired and overwhelmed, like I just can’t handle it all. And then everything starts to fall off track, I stop showing up for my team like I should, I don’t post as often on social media. And then I get this weird brain fog and don’t even know what to write about or what to say to my community.”

So I asked her, “if we were to give this part of you a name, what would it be?”

“The whiny-weak-woman” she said. 

As we continued to work together on expanding her capacity, every once in a while I’d hear her say “OH, LOOK I can feel the whiny weak woman coming up in me again now that you’re asking me to make this change in my work that feels new and hard.”

We’d have a good laugh about it and keep moving forward. That’s the beauty of building your capacity- you get to the point where you can see those parts of you but you don’t let them take over anymore.

By end of our time together, she’d not only filled her first ever mastermind offer, she’d also negotiated a raise for her other role as a trainer for a prestigious organization. And her whiny weak woman wasn’t ruling her business choices anymore. 

The whiny weak woman lives in every one of us assigned the gender “female” at birth and who identifies as “female” or is treated as “female” in society. 

She loves to “play possum”.  And she’s one of the biggest sabotagers of your success and your next level. She’s so deeply embedded into you, you probably don’t even notice when she’s messing with you.

Ever heard yourself say “ugh, I have so much on my plate, I just can’t deal. I just want to go bury my head in the sand.”

Ever put something off you know deep down is not only good for you, but necessary because “you’re just too overwhelmed right now”?

Or ever used the excuse that you have “too much on your plate” to get out of honoring a commitment or doing something you know is overdue?

Ever come on to a coaching call with a new coach you hired and expected THEM to tell YOU what to do on the call? To pull all the weight and do all the work for you? Or expected THEM to solve all your problems for you?

Ever gotten angry when someone you hired doesn’t chase you down and accommodate your “overwhelmingly busy schedule”?

ALL of those (and more) are ways in which the “whiny weak woman” shows up in you.

Because they’re all ways in which you’ve learned to abdicate responsibility for yourself, your life, your results and your goals. 

And where did we learn this? From society. Particularly the society we live in that is based on an old, outdated, toxic patriarchal dynamic that says that women are threatening or unattractive when they are powerful and sovereign.

Remember, women who were powerful and sovereign used to be burned alive as “witches.” Or were forcibly sent off to nunneries. Or put to death in hundreds of other ways.

So, in order to survive this system, many women learned to “play possum”. This is also known as “learned helplessness.” Psychologists describe learned helplessness as “the general belief that one is incapable of accomplishing tasks and has little or no control of the environment.”

If you identify as a woman in society, you’ve learned helplessness by the ways in which the current systems always left you feeling powerless. So some parts of you learned to play possum, or play the role of the weaker one who “doesn’t know” or “needs to be rescued”.  Because in your DNA is the DNA of all the women before you who had to do this to stay alive.

You forgot you know the answers and learned that when you give away your power and put the answers outside of you, you get approval and acceptance from the society you live in. This made you “less threatening” to the patriarchal system you live in.  

And it’s also a good way to abdicate responsibility for your life and put it in someone else’s hands, so that when push comes to shove you don’t need to look at how you played a role in the areas you’re currently struggling in. Ouch. I know. But we’ve gotta open our eyes to how we do this. 

A few times now a woman has hired me and either been surprised or ANGRY when I’ve shown up for our first session and said “So what did you bring to the session today to work on?” 

They were so in their pattern of “learned helplessness” that they were expecting me to tell them what to do for every little thing in their businesses and lives. Good coaches don’t do that. They don’t tell you what to do. They empower you to know the answers within YOURSELF. They empower you to empower yourself.

I once had a client sign up to work with me, then get angry because I didn’t chase after her to schedule her sessions or didn’t text her every day to “push her” to do her work. She expected to farm out her own self motivation to me!

Yet, part of the reason she hired me was that she had reached a business plateau and couldn’t get past it. She told me it was because she was so busy that she didn’t have time to focus on growth-related activities. She always felt stretched and helpless, like she was being swept along by some big wave of busy-ness. She used this busy-ness to justify her “spaciness” un forgetting to eat well, show up on time for appointments and honor her commitments.

Naturally, she was playing the “too busy” game with me. “Too busy” to schedule her sessions with me, “too busy” to sit down and get clear about what she wanted to discuss on our calls. Too busy to show up as a functioning adult and take her own reins. So she expected me to play into her “too busy” story and chase after her “too busy” self, to keep perpetuating that very story that was blocking all of her success.

You should have seen the look of shock on her face when I said “listen, we’re all grown ass women here. I trust that you can prioritize the coaching you’re paying for, respond to our scheduling emails in a timely manner and text me whenever YOU have a problem you need support with. I’m not going to chase you. You hired me to help you become a grown ass business woman. So that’s how I’m going to treat you.”

She sent me a thank you note after getting over her initial shock. And six months later she not only was having HUGE, never-before-seen revenue breakthroughs in her business, but she had attracted a mature, non-co-dependent relationship, too. 

Too many of us “play possum” with ourselves. We say things like “ugh, I’m so TIIIIRRRED, why can’t someone just do this for meeee?” 

Or we make people chase us to get on their calendars. We take weeks to respond to an email and make it so that others have to follow up with us five times. We throw our hands up in disgust when we’re hitting a new edge of growth for the first time and don’t like that it’s not easy. 

(Have I ever told you about the ex client who wrote a scathing post about how terrible I am because I told her that no, her business wouldn’t “feel like a dream vacation every day”.)

We hire people for our team hoping they’ll solve problems for us and “save us” without us having to be involved in it at all. We make the coaches we hire our “saviors” and then rage against them when they won’t do the work that only WE can do. As they say, your coach can lead you to the water…but they can’t make you drink.

Then we wonder why we aren’t where we want to be in our work and lives.

It’s because your work in this world requires you to LEAN IN. It requires YOU to take the reins. It’s YOUR horse to steer. No one else’s. 

No one is going to do the work for you that you’ve been avoiding. No one is coming to save you. Only YOU can save you. Even the knight on their steed gets tired of rescuing you after the millionth time.

Sometimes when you’ve made a mess by abdicating responsibility for years, the ONLY way to fix it is for you to roll up your sleeves and dig in. You might have to sit down for hours with a new team member and walk them through your processes step by step, even though you “hate” developing standard operating processes and “it’s not your zone of genius.” 

You might have to completely re-brand and start a whole new marketing plan from scratch because your previous audience is no longer responding. You might have to do some hard work that you don’t feel like doing.

But you’re not helpless. You aren’t incapable. And I promise, NO ONE is going to care more about your business than you. Ever. If they do, they’re probably buying you out. But even then, if you want someone to buy you out, you better have that business in tip top shape aka not a train wreck behind the scenes because you’ve been waiting for a savior.

A long time ago, a former casting director told me this story about Oprah…

She said the reason Oprah rose in the ranks so quickly at ABC when she was young was because she would set up meetings with the head of the network. She’d walk into that meeting with the entire plan for what she wanted to do drawn out and ready to present. She’d tell the network head EXACTLY how she wanted to produce her show, how her idea would play out and the steps that needed to happen to get it there.

The network head often said yes to her demands because SHE HAD THE REINS OF HER VISION, wasn’t expecting him to do any of that work for her. SHE did all the pre-work herself. She LEANED ALL THE WAY IN. She took the responsibility for her vision. And she made it happen. All the network head had to do was greenlight it.

If you want your next level of success, you’ve got to stop playing possum and lean in. It’s time to put on your big girl panties and take responsibility for your life, your goals and your results. 

Not sure how to do that? That’s where capacity work comes in. Capacity work allows you to switch your perspective from “ugggghhhh I cannnn’t” to “you know what? Let’s do this. It may not be pretty or fun, it might be hard there for a bit, but I’m the only one who’s gonna get this ball rolling and get it done.”

Capacity work allows you to learn to see yourself (and feel yourself) as capable. And when you change how you see yourself, and you change what you believe you’re capable of… you’re capable of doing anything.

Want to change the way you see yourself and build your capacity so that you stop playing possum in your business?  Fill out the Capacity Discovery form and we can chat about ways to work with me. Our programs start at only $375 a month and go all the way to VIP private coaching. There’s something for everyone.

The post Playing possum appeared first on Lisa Fabrega.