#536: Capacity and Capability

The Life Coach School Podcast

Brooke Castillo

Education, Entrepreneurship, Business, Self-improvement

4.8 • 9.2K Ratings

🗓️ 4 September 2025

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Have you ever noticed that just when things start going well, you somehow find a way to mess it up?

Maybe you finally start making good money... but then spend it all immediately.

Or you attract a healthy relationship... but find yourself creating drama.

Or you're making progress in your business... but suddenly feel overwhelmed and pull back.

Here's the truth: It's not your capabilities holding you back. It's your capacity.

In this week's episode, I dive deep into the crucial difference between capability and capacity and why understanding this distinction could be the key to unlocking your next level of success.

What You Will Discover:

Why people with all the right skills still sabotage their success when they haven't expanded their capacity to hold it.
How to identify and question the thoughts that are limiting your capacity for money, relationships, and success.
The three-step process to increase your capacity: awareness, decision-making, and deliberate practice.
Why avoiding stress and overwhelm actually shrinks your life and limits your opportunities.
How to develop capability through massive action and failure while building capacity at the same time.
The difference between taking on more stress that kills you versus stress that grows you.
What happens when your capability outpaces your capacity and how to bring them into alignment.

Featured on This Episode:

The Work by Byron Katie

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You are listening to the Life Coach School podcast with Brooke Castillo, episode number 536.
0:09.0	What's up, beautiful friends? I got inspired. I was out on a hike, got inspired, was thinking about capacity, was thinking about capability, was thinking about all of you. And I started asking myself
0:23.7	the important question, which is, what is the difference between capacity and capability?
0:32.1	And the biggest question that I think I have and that I mule around with is why don't more people utilize the
0:43.1	capacity they have? And even more importantly, why don't more people focus on increasing
0:51.5	their capacity, increasing their capability. So several years ago, I was talking a
1:00.0	lot about the concept of the capacity to have. And I was talking about it in relation to money.
1:08.2	Because what I started to notice was that many people were blocking their capacity
1:17.4	to have more money. And I would watch it happen with my students. They would earn a bunch of money,
1:25.2	but they would immediately spend it. It was like
1:29.3	they couldn't be present with the amount of money that they had earned. They couldn't increase
1:36.3	their capacity to have. The terminology capacity is often used when talking about corporate, like
1:43.6	talking about manufacturing,
1:44.8	the capacity to be able to produce a certain amount of product. But there's also like the capacity,
1:50.7	an easier way to think about it, I think is the capacity of like a glass to hold water. And what is
1:58.1	the capacity of that glass? How much water can that glass hold? And that will
2:06.4	determine how much it can quote unquote handle. And that's similar to how we can think about it for us.
2:14.4	So I started thinking about what prevents capacity? What prevents us from holding more,
2:22.4	from having more, from being more? What is the thing that blocks that from increasing, blocks that
2:30.5	from being bigger? I mean, think about the power of just that question to ask for yourself.
2:37.3	What is your current capacity for the biggest things you want in your life? And what could it be?
2:46.6	What do you want it to be? Now, I want to make sure that this isn't being confused with capability.
	...

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