088: The Audacity of Your Capacity as You Age

I learned the hard (yet instructive) way.

Carrying baggage - personal or someone else's - into a particularly challenging season of life can overwhelm you to the point of having to throw in the towel.

In 2006, I was exiting from nearly a decade of leadership on the heels of two previous decades of the same and was preparing to make a career transition.

The transition was exciting but the toll that a lengthy season of leadership (and those prior years) had taken on me, not so much.

The career transition occurred and proceeded for a couple of years, but the leadership "itch" remained and I made a U-turn of sorts back into the former fray.

That fray and the higher-altitude environment, while energizing, revealed that I didn't have the available capacity to exist in the thinner air of such an opportunity.

Have you ever reached the end of your capacity?

You might refer to it as, "biting-off-more-than-you-can-chew."

When you do, you risk choking, am I right?

Aging requires an awareness of your capacity as in what you've hopefully expanded through the years while grinding it out in a career, facing and dealing with relational challenges, experiencing loss, and now staring at your own legacy against the backdrop of your mortality.

The greater challenge in question: are you equipped to handle the occasional higher-altitude and thinner air of the transitions you have yet to experience?

Life pushes your limits and tests your capacity making it essential to be aware of your energy reserves

When opportunity or opposition arises you will either underestimate or overestimate your capacity.

Overestimation potentially exposes any physical or emotional fractures you haven't dealt with (as I experienced).

Underestimation keeps you from exploring and experiencing new and perhaps better opportunities.

So how do you move forward?

• Increase and reserve your energy
• Stay open and flexible
• Push your personal limits (within reason, of course)

Gain energy and guard it

You might wake up on occasion (or daily) feeling as though there's not much left-in-the-tank, so to speak.

That's an energy issue - emotionally and physically.

You can complain about a lack of energy or commit to increasing your energy reserves.

I use the word, "reserves," because when aging or life in general tests you, having something in-the-tank could be essential to getting through it.

Why wait until the opportunity or opposition puts you in such a position?

Always be gaining and guarding your energy.

• Make gains by not giving energy away to frivolous things - energy suckers like media overindulgence, trying to manage other people's opinions, or overthinking your decisions.
• Guard your gains through daily awareness of who or what is draining your energy, doing what replenishes you, investing in solutions instead of criticisms.

Give yourself room to grow and flex

The research being conducted on brain plasticity as you age is encouraging.

"Science has discovered the aging brain exhibits plasticity, meaning it can alter its structure and function throughout life in response to experiences and learning. While some cognitive abilities decline with age, others can be preserved or even enhanced through mechanisms of neuroplasticity."1

In essence, your mind has the capacity to grow and flex.

Going a step further, what you do with your mind's capabilities enables you to potentially avoid the common challenges associated with a fixed (inflexible) mindset.

• Have an open mind about what frustrates you (and why), angers you (and why), or causes you to question the status-quo.
• Expose your mind to new perspectives, alternative solutions, and contrarian viewpoints.
• Exercise your mind through following your intuitive wisdom, being curious, reading, problem-solving, critical thinking skills, and productive conversation.

Go beyond your limitations

You can do more than you think you can!

If you live according to that statement you might actually surprise yourself.

That's proved true for me when making a major career transition decision in 2006, launching businesses in 2007 and in 2009, publishing this weekly content starting in 2024, contracting with a publishing company and beginning a ghostwriting career in 2024 and currently writing three books, training and completing a half-marathon in the Spring of 2025.

None of that would have happened and be ongoing if I didn't go beyond my perceived limitations.

And I say, "perceived," because that applies to most of your limitations until you take action otherwise.

• Have a bias for action even when you lack the motivation or the method - it can be easier to make course corrections than it is to deal with your regrets.
• Push yourself a little bit at a time - limitations have the potential to become leverage you can use.
• Focus on progress not excuses - you can find plenty of reasons not to take action but your first step could create all the momentum you need to keep moving.

Life will test you but you can develop and maintain the capacity to withstand the challenges

• Gain energy and guard it
• Give yourself room to grow and flex
• Go beyond your limitations

Press on...

Eddie

Sources:

1-https://medium.com/crows-feet/five-negative-old-age-stereotypes-debunked-760091675e13