America’s Leadership Expert : Increase Capacity
Clay Staires: This is Clay Staires America’s Leadership Expert with Tulsa Business Leadership with podcast number 30, The Circles of Fulfillment. What I want to talk about today on this podcast is how do I live a life of fulfillment, how do I live, in each area of my life, how do I find this place called nirvana, this place called fulfillment. As the leader of Tulsa Business Leadership, I have found myself often talking with entrepreneurs and business leaders and managers in this place of feeling overwhelmed, that they’ve got these different pockets of their life. They have these different buckets of their family and their business and their finances and all these different buckets and they are constantly trying to keep each of these buckets filled or you get the classic picture of somebody trying to juggle several different balls all at the same time.
Clay America’s Leadership Expert, when I focus on this ball, that ball seems to fall down. If I focus on this ball, that ball seems to fall down. What I want to talk about today in this Tulsa Leadership Podcast is how do I find fulfillment in each area of my life on a consistent basis. First of all, let’s get a picture in our head. The idea here is rather than having separate buckets, one for myself, one for my family, one for my wife, and so on, what we need to do is bring all of these buckets or all of these different areas into one. The picture I want to try to get here is a picture of concentric circles. Little smaller circle with a bigger circle around that and a bigger circle around that and so on. In the innermost circle is what we’re going to entitle this is You.
It is who you are. It is your identity. It is your mental, physical, spiritual, emotional wellbeing, your health, your mental health that you have, your capacity is another way to say this. In the Tulsa Business Leadership, what I find so often in talking with entrepreneurs and business leaders is this inner circle is most often overlooked and we spend so much of our time and so much of our energy taking care of and staying focused on the other circles, the outer circles, and we neglect this inner circle. As a result, everything seems to be a little bit out of order. Everything seems to be a little bit unstable. What I want to focus on here is at the very beginning is this inner circle, the circle called You or Your Capacity.
The idea as we grow and develop and as we experience more and more complexity in our life is we have to find that this inner circle begins to grow and expand. We have to increase our capacity to be able to process greater complexity in our life. To reach this fulfillment you have to be in this continual mode of growth, of expanding that inner circle. If you don’t, if the capacity never does expand, then the growing responsibilities that naturally come into our lives, they’ll simply overwhelm us and they’ll begin to shut us down. You may have been in this spot before. I was just speaking to a person the other day, one of the clients of Tulsa Business Leadership, and they were in a place of saying Clay, I just need things to slow down. I just need things to stop for a little bit. I need a break. I need just things to shut down for a moment.
This would be a person America’s Leadership Expert who their inner circle of their capacity is overwhelmed and in that place, what we always want to do, our solution to that problem is almost always going to be to bring all of those outer circles of responsibility in closer to begin to make everything small. Unfortunately, and I’m sure you’ve come to this conclusion, that rarely happens. Rarely, do we have the power to be able to take the responsibilities of family, the responsibilities of finances and work and social and all of these other responsibilities in our life. Rarely, do we have the power to be able to shut all of those down, so life goes on. What we need to do is rather than bringing all of those circles in, we need to learn how to expand our inner circle, increase our capacity so that we can process the greater complexity that comes with each of these added responsibilities.
This next circle that we have. The next circle beyond the you, this next level, if you will. I call this The Family Circle. This is the circle obviously where you find your spouse, you find your children, you find your, even maybe, immediate family and maybe even a little bit more of an extended family. It’s just the responsibilities that you have in your family, the role that you play in your family. It’s this inner core. America’s Leadership Expert Your inner core has to be healthy enough. This inner you, this inner capacity has to be healthy enough to support the needs of your family or to meet those responsibilities of your family. If the inner circle that you and your capacity, if it is all jacked up, if it is broken, if it is small, if it is nonexistent, then it will impact your ability to function appropriately in your role in the family, whether that be as husband or wife or daughter or son or sister or brother, whatever it might be.
If the inner circle of you, if that inner identity is limited, then it is going to be limit your capacity to process the responsibility that comes with functioning in a healthy family.
The next circle, the third level out, the next circle that comes is where I put job and finances. Again, yes, these are in a particular order. As Clay Staires, America’s Leadership Expert Tulsa Business Leadership, I have found over and over in conversations again there has to be a priority, there has to be a focus of what am I going to spend my time, what am I going to spend my energy and my resources on to make sure that I can live this life that we called fulfilled. This life that we call a full life or a life that we call a balanced life. As we talk about this third level here, we are now getting into job and finances. Then again, obviously with job and finances comes more responsibility. Not just the responsibility of having to make sure my family is okay, but now I’ve got this responsibility at work and I have to make sure that my job gets done.
Or if I’m a manager or a supervisor, I have to make sure that other people’s jobs get done. Responsibilities will always be the best furnace to reveal the weaknesses and impurities in your character, in your inner you. As begin to load, as you come through your teens and into your 20s and 30s and so on, as you begin to add responsibilities of family and then add responsibilities of job and finances, the weight or the furnace of those responsibilities will reveal any impurities or any weaknesses that are in that inner core, that inner capacity of you. Family and job, finances will always be among the most difficult responsibilities to manage with balance because they will always challenge my capacity. To focus on job and fiances and neglect the you in the inner core or to neglect the family will always lead to some real trouble and some real out of balanced living.
I’m sure you know of people like this. America’s Leadership Expert You might even be like this. I was definitely was once like this. I would focus on my self and I just wanted to do what I wanted to do. Unfortunately, my boss didn’t agree with me and I got fired, and so we have to be sure that we are living in this balanced in this fulfilled way. There are a lot of times where you may find where you have to expand to be able to process that complexity that comes with greater and greater responsibility. Again, if this inner circle is not complete, if this inner circle is not functional, then it will limit my capacity. It will limit my ability to process the responsibilities that come with these larger areas in my life that begin to be added on.
There’s a lot of times where people, even people in their 50s, will be in this place where they’re just saying well, America’s Leadership Expert I just want to do what I want to do. I don’t want to have to worry about all that. I just want to do what I want to do. Okay. That’s fine. You can do that if you want, however your inner circle, your inner capacity will never grow. If we don’t accept and embrace the responsibilities that come with family, the responsibilities that come with job and finances, then we will find ourselves continually at this limited small capacity of personal self, of personal development. Your capacity will remain limited and the pressures that are brought on by the responsibility of family and work and money and the desire to actually enjoy your life with other people, it will always feel overwhelming.
Your destiny is in fulfilling each of the circles. Once again, your destiny is to fill of the circles of fulfillment. The final circle on the very outside, this is a circle that I would call your social or your friend circle. Obviously, these are very important things that we have in our lives, so we want to make sure that we have that as well. However, if we focus too much on friends and our social circle and the neglect the job and finance circle, then immediately we’re going to find that we’re going have some serious problems. Same thing if we focus on friends and social and neglect the family, we’re going to have some problems. The idea here once again is to begin the focus, begin the journey into the center and make sure that my center, my emotional capacity, my mental capacity, spiritual capacity, and physical capacity are being taken care and that they are healthy so that I can fulfill the responsibilities of family, so that I can fulfill the responsibilities of work and my finances, so that I can fulfill the responsibilities as well of social circle and my friends.
This is Clay Staires America’s Leadership Expert with Tulsa Business Leadership with podcast number 30, The Circles of Fulfillment.
