If your in a season of support raising it is likely that you have thought about your capacity recently. Questions may have come up such as “How am I going to find the time to raise this budget?” or “What do I need to get done this week to reach my budget goal?” or “What’s more important, getting this laundry load folded or spending another 15 minutes calling potential financial partners on the phone?”
Believe it or not – capacity actually has nothing to do with time. We all have the same amount of hours in a day, we simply focus our 24 hours differently.
John Maxwell in his book No Limits: Blow the Cap off Your Capacity says this about capacity:
“If you grow in your awareness, develop your abilities, and make the right choices you can reach your capacity. In other words AWARENESS + ABILITIES + CHOICES = CAPACITY.”
Let’s quickly explore awareness, abilities, and choices in light of capacity.
AWARENESS AND ABILITIES
It’s not naturally what you would think, but capacity truly has everything to do with self awareness. The better word for capacity often times is the plural form, “capacities”. Another way to say it perhaps is “abilities”.
To explain – being realistic about your limitations, strengths, and weaknesses can create awareness that can be helpful in optimizing your capacity. If you are aware which capacities you have strengths in and others that you can explore growth in, you’ll naturally be more likely to grow. Have you ever taken a capacity quiz? John Maxwell provides a very insightful one. Take a few moments and take the quiz: http://go.johnmaxwell.com/no-limits-capacity-quiz.
You may find yourself struggling in an area that someone else may excel in (classic examples include organization, public speaking, task management). Exploring what comes naturally to you and what areas you can improve in have everything to do with maximizing your capacity. The more your grow in self awareness, the more you can challenge yourself to grow in areas of weakness – it’s all about knowing who you are and working to strengthen your abilities!
CHOICES
As Maxwell states, a large part of our capacity is also determined on what choices we make. If we make the right choices to work toward our overarching goals, we can be healthy in our capacity concerning those goals. To do that, we have to figure out what goals we have and what we want our lives to be all about.
The hard part comes in when we have to make decisions on what we are willing to give up in order to reach the goal or do the thing we really care about. The mom with 2 kids may decide that time with her family is more important than her career goals, and take a step down at work. A person raising support may have to decide not to lead the small group or church committee anymore and let someone else step in to do it, so that they can have more time to devote to raising funds. The student who decides it’s important for them to take care of a sick parent may decide to move back in instead of stay on campus and maybe take a few less hours that semester. Bottom line, the choices we make have a great impact on our capacity. And sometimes those choices can be very challenging to make.
In a season of raising support there maybe some good things that you have to hit pause on. That’s okay! The thing to keep in mind is to know where you want to focus and ultimately land. If we aren’t intentional typically the loudest voice will grab our attention instead of the goal or area we really want to focus on. Before we know it – we look up and our capacity is swallowed by a thing we never intended it to be! Oftentimes I see this in workers who are raising support but also have full time demanding jobs. With these workers, the loudest voice is their current job and it’s rigors, and they struggle to find extra time to raise support. If they aren’t careful they will loose the long term goal they have to get to their field of ministry, because they are so busy trying to keep up with the job they will eventually leave behind. Our goals and our “why” in life often have to be fought for, especially in circumstances when they aren’t actualized immediately and take hard and consistent work to achieve. Those long term, non-immediate goals need to be known, recognized, and remembered to intentionally spend ourselves on. Ultimately it’s a CHOICE that requires diligence along the way.
“No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.” -Alan Watts
In summary, if you find yourself challenged with capacity in this season of raising support, think about the following:
A. Are you self-aware? Are you aware of the places you naturally excel and the places you find challenging to implement? Challenge yourself to grow in those areas and give extra time and thought into expanding the capacities you find yourself low in.
B. What choices are you making with your time and this season of life. Are you reaching toward your long term goals, or listening to the loudest voice that may be crowding out your capacity and overall ability to reach that goal? Maybe it’s time to make some changes to adjust life according to your larger goals.
I hope this post inspires you to think about your capacity and how you can grow in this season!
Financial Partnership Development 