18. Capacity is the Cure: How to Grow Without Burning Out
What’s new:
Burnout isn’t a flaw—it’s feedback. This episode explores how to expand your capacity instead of pushing harder, so you can grow sustainably and lead with more resilience, clarity, and joy.
Why it matters:
Most leaders try to outwork burnout. But long-term impact—and a big, juicy life—requires a new skill: holding more without abandoning yourself.
In this episode:
Redefining capacity: Emotional, intellectual, and physical capacity isn’t about doing more—it’s about holding more with intention
The stress curve + nervous system basics: Learn how peak performance requires recovery, not chronic pressure.
Capitalism, rest, and worthiness: Why our systems confuse busyness with value—and how to rewrite the script.
A real client story: What it looks like to grow beyond burnout while staying grounded in mission.
Enneagram & leadership stress patterns: Each type has predictable stress defaults—and growth edges. Learn yours.
8 tools to build real capacity: From interrupting faux productivity to celebrating micro-wins, these practices help rewire your response to pressure.
Capacity as equity work: Leadership justice means creating cultures where everyone
The bottom line:
Capacity is the real next-level leadership skill. It’s how you align energy with vision—without burning out or checking out.
🎧 Listen now and explore tools, coaching options, and next steps at michellekayanderson.com
Have a favorite podcast player? Here are direct episode links to: Apple | Spotify
🧭 Ready to lead with more joy and less burnout? Book a consult today.
Transcript
💡 Opening: You Aren't Broken, You're at Capacity
Welcome back to Upleveling Work. I'm Michelle Kay Anderson, executive coach, systems thinker, and your guide to making work more human. This season we’re exploring what it means to live a big, juicy life while leading in complex, mission-driven environments.
In the last episode, we reframed burnout as a portal—a call to reclaim rest, agency, and purpose. Today, we’re talking about what happens after you rest. Because if burnout is a signal that your current way of working isn’t sustainable, the real question becomes: how do you grow your capacity so you can thrive at the next level?
Spoiler: it’s not by pushing harder. It’s by learning how to hold more—emotionally, mentally, and somatically—without abandoning yourself in the process.
🔑 What Is Capacity?
Let’s start with a definition. Capacity-building can happen across three key domains:
Emotional capacity: Your ability to be with what is, to stay present through discomfort, and to access resilience as you move toward the life you want.
Intellectual capacity: The discernment to prioritize, skill up, and make grounded decisions without getting hijacked by overwhelm or perfectionism.
Physical capacity: The strength, energy, and groundedness that come from tending to your body and regulating your nervous system.
Capacity is not about doing more. It’s about being able to hold more with intention, clarity, and care.
This includes understanding the stress curve: a certain level of tension is necessary for peak performance - it gets you excited, motivated, engaged. But chronic stress? That’s a fast track to breakdown. If your nervous system is constantly freaking out, you can't accurately assess what a situation actually requires. So step one is tending to your body—building rest and recovery into how you lead.
Are you building capacity to meet your vision—or just to better survive a dysfunctional system?
🧠 Busting the Productivity Myth
Let’s be real: capitalism sells us the myth that our worth is in our output. That busy equals important. That rest is only deserved once you've produced enough. But there is never enough…
Books like Tricha Hersey’s Rest is Resistance and Gordon MacKenzie’s Orbiting the Giant Hairball call this out for what it is: a system that fears unregulated creativity, curiosity, and rest. But rest, presence, and pleasure are not indulgent. They’re essential to innovation, equity, and sustainability.
We must create space for a different pace. One that honors the full arc of becoming. Because your big, juicy life isn’t only found in titles, milestones, or deliverables. It’s in the way you live now.
Sometimes we hyper-focus on one area—the dream job, the ideal body, the perfect partner—believing it will unlock the feeling we crave. But you might already have access to that feeling in your current life. That’s the secret to living into your juicy life now.
👥 A Real Client Story
Let me tell you about a client of mine—an Enneagram 9 who had just been promoted and was on the verge of burnout.
She was overwhelmed, irritable, and rigid. Frustrated when others didn’t meet expectations. She’d worked so hard to be recognized—but now she was wondering how she could possibly take on more. The increased responsibility, new personalities in the mix, …. were a lot.
Together, we unpacked her stress pattern. We discovered it wasn’t the actual workload causing her stress—it was the expectation that everything had to go perfectly. She was trying to lead with control, not connection. And all she could feel was the gap between where she was and where she wanted to go. She couldn’t see the progress the team had already made or the opportunities for deeper trust were already available to her.
As she widened her lens, she started initiating hard conversations, trusting her inner knowing, asking for what she needed but not holding it too rigidly. and defining success beyond productivity. Her big juicy life wasn’t just a job title—it included the kind of home she wanted to create, the relationships and routines that grounded her.
She’s still leading on a big mission, but now with more grace and agility. Her calendar reflects her values. Her leadership better reflects her wholeness. And she found a lot more agency to influence things than she initially thought she could.
🔄 Enneagram Stress Patterns
Each Enneagram type has a predictable stress pattern—and an equally predictable growth edge.
Type 1s can soften into acceptance and grace
2s can prioritize their own needs
3s can slow down and connect to intrinsic worth
4s can ground themselves in the present moment
5s can come back into their bodies
6s can practice trust and courage
7s can stay with discomfort without running
8s can release control and lean into vulnerability
9s can show up and take meaningful action
When you hit your upper limit, your Enneagram type’s default story kicks in. Growing your capacity means noticing that story—and playing with a new one.
😣 Why Capacity Work Feels Hard
Let me normalize something: growing your capacity often feels worse before it feels better.
Because you are literally re-patterning your nervous system. You are stretching the boundaries of what you’ve believed you could hold. It’s vulnerable. It’s tender. And it often kicks up a lot of old coping strategies—perfectionism, avoidance, control, people-pleasing.
Capacity work is often grief work. You're grieving the old version of yourself who coped by staying small, staying silent, or staying busy.
And it’s okay if you need support as you do this.
🛠️ Tools to Build Capacity
Here are a few tools I offer clients who are building capacity:
Name the Domain: Where are you most depleted—emotional, intellectual, or physical? Start there, build your awareness so you can prioritize the things that will meaningfully help.
Practice Dual Awareness: When stressed - your brain will go into rigidity of binary thinking - this or that. We want to build your capacity to hold two things at once: "This is hard" and "I’m capable." "I’m overwhelmed" and "I have choices." Name the both/and.
Celebrate the Not-Yet: Most people wait until they arrive to celebrate. But capacity is built by noticing the micro-wins: saying no, asking for help, naming a feeling, taking a nap instead of pushing through.
It all adds up - and is important to combating your brain’s negativity bias. Try celebrating small, quiet progress and see what that opens up for you in terms of energy.dopamine hits along the way
mental flexibiilty - notice what is going right. brain over-indexes threat or problems. even if circumstances don’t change, you can find some relief by building these muscles
Update Your Self-Talk Your inner dialogue needs to evolve with you. Try phrases like:
"This feels new, not wrong."
"I’m safe to succeed."
"I can do hard things without abandoning myself."
Interrupt Faux Productivity: If your to-do list is fueled by fear, self-judgment, or adrenaline—pause. Ask: What’s essential? Cal Newport talks about deep work. This is deeper living. Busyness isn’t the goal we are optimizing for in a juicy life - so you are going to have to train your brain to interrupt this pattern.
Interrupt the Burnout Cycle Ask: What am I believing right now that is making this feel impossible? And then try: What else could be true?
Connect to What’s Already Available: What feeling are you chasing with all your effort? What od you think you are going to get at the end of the rainbow. Can you access it now, in a small way? Joy. Peace. Belonging. Satisfaction. now, in the present.
Reconnect to Your Vision Remember: you’re not building capacity to do more busywork. You’re building capacity to create a life that feels aligned, energized, and meaningful. The more you can juice that vision - feel into what is here now and visualize where you want to be - the m ore energy you’ll find to show up for the bigger work.
⚖️ Capacity = Equity
Here’s the truth: not everyone has equal access to rest, healing, or support.
Who gets celebrated for boundary-setting? Who gets labeled "difficult" or "uncommitted" for the same move?
Capacity work is equity work. It’s about dismantling systems that reward over-functioning and punish humanity. When you reclaim your energy and re-center your values, you become a different kind of leader—one who makes space for others to do the same.
This isn’t just about personal empowerment. It’s about collective liberation.
📩 The Invitation
If you want help mapping your stress pattern, growing your discernment, and building the real capacity to lead with more joy and less burnout—let’s work together.
I work with leaders and teams navigating complexity, mission-driven growth, and personal evolution. We slow things down so you can reconnect with what matters most—and then take aligned action from there.
Whether you’re looking for 1:1 support or want to bring this work to your team, visit the show notes at uplevelingwork.com to book a consult or learn more.
❤️ Closing: Your Juicy Life Is Now
Your big, juicy life isn’t waiting for you to earn it. Or to become someone else.
It’s waiting for you to become more you. Rooted. Resourced. Ready.
It’s available in every micro-moment of alignment, presence, and courage.
Thanks for listening. See you next time on Upleveling Work.
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