SHOW NOTES

We use the word 'potential' a lot when it comes to students and their performance.
But how do we bridge that gap between your teen's current ability and their potential?

Here's how I see it:
Ability is what your teen is achieving right now.
Capacity is what they could be achieving right now, with their existing subject knowledge AND the tweaks, insights and skills to MAXIMISE that knowledge.
Capacity is what they could be producing, if we just filled in the missing piece of the puzzle or shed light on their blind spots. 
Not with a ton of extra work, knowledge and intelligence, but what they have now, just OPTIMISED at full capacity. 


FEATURED ON THE SHOW:

• Get the Free Parent Guide: 3 Huge Mistakes (Even Smart!) Students Make in Exams and Assignments - and how to fix them immediately so your teen confidently achieves their best ever grades.
   
• "Getting better results, and taking less time": Tara and Kevin's case study video
   
• Follow Rock Solid Study on Facebook
   
• Follow Rock Solid Study on Instagram
   
• Have your teen trained by me in the 10WGT: 10 Week Grade Transformation Program

TRANSCRIPT:
 

You’re listening to The Parents of Hardworking Teens Podcast, episode 81 - ability versus capacity and bridging that gap between your teen now, how they’re doing now (results, confidence, life balance-wise) and their “potential”. A word we’re potentially all too familiar with and might just be a little bit tired of hearing and using! So let’s see if we can make it all a little bit more tangible. 
Ready?

Hey VIPs! Happy New year!
I hope you’ve had a really wonderful Christmas break, a happy holiday and some really enjoyable, relaxing and fun times. 

I’ve got to tell you, I have struggled to get back to work this time. I’m usually pretty good with having a break, rejuvenating and then diving back in full of beans. But I had to really gradually ramp back up this time. Might be my age - maybe I just needed it. Or the break might’ve been just a little bit too relaxing!

Mine and my husbands’ families are all in England, so we took ourselves off for a little getaway for four days over actual Christmas. We hired a little cabin that had a wonderful view just over the border into rural NSW, took our dog, ate good food, a stack of books - I was over ambitious there - I only just finished the one I was on - BUT I did take a sketch pad and some charcoal and sketching pencils - which was my Christmas gift to myself - and did do one sketch. It’s just something that I’m currently liking the idea of having a go at again. I used to be half decent at drawing at school in Art. I’m not creative, I don’t make anything up, I just copy from photos or pictures, but I enjoy it and I’m aiming to do a little bit here and there and so that was a good time to give it a go and I actually went better than I expected. So that was awesome, loved it. 

I’m totally back on deck now, have been for the last week or so and ready and raring to go with 2024. And I know that for anyone in the northern hemisphere, you’re fully back into term, but for everyone here in Australia and in New Zealand, you might not QUITE want to be thinking about back to school just yet, so I’m doing that for you and you can just come along for the ride to ease back in. And listening to this podcast is a great way to do that, and hopefully this episode will give you a bit of a boost and a zing to get this year started, because I’m going to share a little bit about my experiences with students’ ability versus their capacity and how the gap between where they’re at now and their potential, is often a LOT smaller than we might think. 

I talk a lot about potential. I probably overuse the word. But I hear it so much from parents and from teachers saying “They have so much potential”, “They’re not yet working at their potential” or ‘I just want them to achieve their potential”  that I can’t help but use it myself. And of course I see it myself in students too.

I think of potential as the results/outcomes that can be achieved IF…

That IF, is our CAPACITY. If we were operating at capacity. And I’m not talking about increasing your teen’s workload. I’m talking about utilising our full capability without more effort required.

Quick google dictionary search - capacity is 
“the amount that something can produce.” 

Or 

“the ability or power to do or understand something.”

Or

“A person’s competence”.

In my experience, our capacity for things, including your teen’s capacity to achieve the results they’re capable of, with more confidence and less stress, is often greater than we realise. Because we can see our current ABILITY. We know our current results (for your teen that might be academic results or grades - or it might be their current study life - like it takes them twice as long as it needs to, to write an essay, or they get highly stressed for exams, or they end up with at least 3 false starts or re-starts when starting an inquiry or investigation) we can see our current results - our current ability. 
But it’s less easy to recognise our current CAPACITY.

If we uncovered that, and found the tweaks or had the awareness or insights to UTILISE that full capacity, we’d then be able to meet and live up to our potential. 

That’s why I say I’m all about the HOW. 

HOW can we get your teen achieving their potential? 

What capacity do they have right now, that they perhaps don’t even realise and how do we make sure they’re operating at full capacity? Because often they have more knowledge and better understanding than their results are showing just because they’re not doing things or showing things in the right - in inverted commas’ way; 
in the way the task, essay or exam question demands. 

Their capacity is what they are actually capable of right now, it’s just not being shown.
It’s like a water hose you’re using to spray your car, being at half the capacity it has because it’s got a kink down the line somewhere. The ability of that hosepipe to spray water is 50% right now. It has the capacity to spray at 100%, it has the potential to clean the car faster and better, if we got rid of the kink that’s limiting it. 

I had this happen at the gym. It would be about 3 years ago now. I got a personal trainer for a few months to work on some strength training. I’d had a few annoying little injuries here and there over the years, and wanted to improve my technique. I hadn’t upped my weights or really upped anything over the few years up to then and wanted to get some progress, but also didn’t want to push anything in case I injured something again. 

Anyway, first session and I got a whole new set of PBs - with the biggest jumps I’d ever had - and I can say, was to ever have again. 

For example, my max squat went up from something like 60 or 65 to,  I think it was 75 or might’ve even been 80 kilos. But let’s say a 15 kilo increase. 

That wasn’t because I suddenly got stronger.  

It was because the trainer could see the small things I was doing wrong - and a few things I wasn’t doing at all that I needed to be.

Things I just didn’t know, but weren’t hard to do or to change with a few practises, that meant my technique was SAFER - less likelihood of injuries - AND I was able to perform better.

This is how students get better results and spend less time on their study. 

You can see Tara’s video on the 10 Week Grade Transformation Program summary page where her dad Kevin says literally those words. I’ll pop a link in the show notes if you want to check it out. 

Now, does that mean that every student can start getting straight A’s or do every task in half the time? 

No. 

When I talk about capacity, I’m talking about the potential we have at that moment, that your teen has in this moment. 

The grades and results they’re capable of with their current subject knowledge, IF they had the technique and skill to apply it and use it in the way that maximises their marks, optimises their performance AND their confidence. Because I’m not gonna lie, I felt good about my new PB, and I also had more confidence in what I was doing and how I was doing it. Because it’s exciting for students when they realise they’re capable of a fair bit more than they realised - and to know that they have that within them. It’s not a:

 ‘if I slog my guts out and totally flog myself I might achieve such and such a result’ type thing.

It’s:  “turns out I already had this in me, I just needed the know-how, the skill, the awareness, the things I didn’t know I didn’t know.”

When we think about capacity, rather than potential, I think it makes things a bit more tangible.

I don’t know about you, but when I think about potential, it feels like… a far away thing. 
Like, I believe it’s a possibility. BUT only if I change things up in a big way, or only way off in the future, or it’s a possiblility - there’s the potential for that to happen.

Whereas capacity is what we have inside of us now. 
It’s a reality that’s ready and waiting.

So, I’ll give you a couple of real life examples.

Sophie emailed me after learning about command words to tell me that she’d gone from almost failing her English exam on one day, to then getting just some basic command words insights on one of my free webinars that evening, and then getting 77% in her Chemistry exam the day after. 

Now of course it could be that she just wasn’t great at English and was brilliant at Chemistry, but Sophie said it wasn’t that. She was disappointed with her English result and pleasantly surprised by her Chemistry and realised from that webinar that it was because she wasn’t dissecting and answering questions in the right way before. 

She removed that kink from the hose to operate at full capacity and then achieved a result that matched her potential. 

Beth went from getting Bs and Cs in her assignments and exams right through Years 7 to 9, to then getting 7 A’s in her next report card after completing the 10 Week Grade Transformation Program. She didn’t suddenly became a genius in those subjects, it was because she got the missing pieces of her study puzzle into place that had her then operating at her full capacity, without studying harder or longer.

That’s how these big improvements happen so quickly for so many students. It’s about having them operate at their capacity SO that they can achieve their potential. It’s about realising they’re driving with the handbrake on or using the hose with a kink or five kinks in it. Quick to rectify and not rocket science or difficult to do.

When they specifically learn the information, skills and concepts that enable them to perform or achieve at a higher level, each of those tweaks, insights and know-hows might be small on their own, just like the small tweaks to form for a squat PB, but they create big results when you suddenly increase your PB or exam result by a significant jump.

Now, if you’d like to learn some specific insights, concepts and skills that YOUR teen might be missing and find out if they have any blindspots or missing technique tweaks that could massively boost their results and confidence, these are what I’m sharing to kick off our first Facebook Live for the year. It’s on Wednesday 17th Jan at 7pm AEST - so that’s 8pm if you’re on eastern daylight time and check your time zone everyone else. 

If you’re not on Facebook, I’ll also be streaming via Zoom and you’ll be getting a link for that if you’re on my email list.

It’s going to be a bigger class style session, a super-session we’ll call it, where I cover more concepts, and go into more detail than our usual Facebook lives, so don’t miss it. And if you’re listening after January 17th, don’t worry, the recording will be on the Rock Solid Study Facebook page so you can still check it out.

And if you know anyone else who might benefit from this sort of support or info right now, then send them a screenshot of this podcast or tag them in one of our Facebook or Instagram posts.

You could fulfil your capacity as a great friend by helping someone else with that.

Have a fabulous rest of your week, I’ll meet you back here next week, if I don’t see you before that on the live class, and here’s to making this an AWESOME 2024!