The less capacities you have the closer you are to the bottom.
Asking what those capacities are, those seven is a little dumb, but just think about it.
What does everyone who went to school has to have as capacity? Reading, using language, i.e. writing ans speaking, adding numbers, recognizing faces, smells, sounds, telling the time, basic stuff.
You may be able to cook.
You may be able to clean.
You may be able drive…
But they are not capacities: they use capacities, but they are behaviors…
Parents that take their children to play soccer or sports strengthen the base capacities, but don’t add any new capacities.
Intelligent parents enroll their children to extracurricular activities that activate capacities beyond the base capacities.
Playing music, playing chess, playing bridge (card game), photography (not just snapping pictures), art, acting, languages, quire, debate team, spelling bees, electronics, archeology, science museum classes, movie classes… are diligently building a human who is more capable and has a chance to be more, do more, have more in life.
Your state of low number of capacities is a testimony of your parents not encouraging you to expand.
Some of my students awakened, activated capacities by virtue of their travels. By virtue of taking jobs that needed new capacities. Started businesses that needed new capacities.
But most people like an unchallenged life: it is good enough. They learned their view of what is enough from their environment: that is why it is so rare that someone can break out and be more than what’s predictable by the environment.
Travel, as a child, to a foreign country is an excellent starting point for growth. You are exposed to different cultures, different ways of communicating, and you need to change fast or you will be miserable… But even if you are miserable, something quite irreversible happened to you: you see that you could expand… and you can choose to expand.
When I was 17-ish, I went to England to be a maid. My father was in the government, we had staff at home, a driver, a cleaner, washer woman… and suddenly I was doing the wash, the ironing, the shopping, some of the cooking for a family.
I grew capacities that summer… not fast enough though: I was slapped a few times by the master of the house…
After that summer I was unrecognizable. Hardship was nothing to me. I became mentally and physically tough that summer. I had to… either that or breaking.
I don’t know if I actually chose it or not, but from that point on the hardships, the difficulties, the challenges kept on coming.
I met most, some flattened me… but I always bounced back and “asked” for more.
By the time I came to the US at age 38, I had lived in 3 countries, spoke six languages, had two degrees, but carried a large burden of unfinished business from “home”.
It took me another 30 years to get rid of those… so long because good guidance is hard to come by.
Now, I went to hard route. I don’t regret it. Interestingly, the fact that I have tried almost all forms of challenge and hardship (and still do!) makes me a better coach than any I know or can even imagine.
The key to coaching is being able to connect, through compassion, to what the person is going through. Otherwise it is talking at them.
The only thing I have a hard time to connect to is no capacities.
That is why I mostly refuse to coach or work with people who have too little going for them.
I do make exceptions… when I see that some aspect of the person I can relate to. Like the chador. Like trying to fit it… Trying to shrink to fit in…
Well… you can start growing on your own and work your way up to where I can work with you.
How? If you haven’t gotten it from this article, then I can’t help you. Sorry.
PS: I have been experimenting. People who have only 5-8 capacities can start to climb if they accept the capacity: humility, the capacity to say you don’t know anything, please teach me. If not: no growth, no capacities are accepted.
It seems that even growing capacities follows a process…
Read the original article: What if you only have seven capacities? Or eight… or even nine?