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What is Your Capability Gap?
Have you ever felt that you’re not quite living up to your own potential, to what you know you could possibly achieve?
Is that quiet voice inside you reminding you that you’re capable of more than you’re currently showing?
Your Gap Defined
Your capability is everything you have within you: your skills, your talents, your strengths, your creativity, your resilience, your experiences, your network, even your energy. It’s the sum of what you could bring to life if you were fully engaged.
Your performance, on the other hand, is the reality of how you’re showing up each day, the actions you take, the habits you practice, the results you’re creating.
That distance between the level you are performing at and the level you can potentially perform at, is your capability gap.
The question isn’t whether you have a capability gap, you do. The real question is: what could your life look like if you closed even half of it?
Why Your Gaps Exist
Most of you don’t live at your full capacity, not because you lack ability to do so. Instead, it is because of the barriers that you creep in:
- Fear: Fear of failure, of judgment, of what might change if you really live up to your true potential.
- Comfort zones: You never leave your comfort zone. Your life feels “good enough,” so you stay in familiar territory.
- Distractions: You allow your life to be full of distractions. Endless distractions pulls you away from meaningful effort.
- Lack of clarity: You never have taken the time to define what living up to your potential actually looks like and means to you.
Your gaps are not proof that something is wrong with you, it’s proof that you have untapped potential waiting to be activated.
Spotting Your Own Gaps
The first step is recognition. Ask yourself these questions to spot your own personal and professional gaps.
- Where in my life am I playing small?
- What do I need to be honest about in my personal relationships.
- Do my daily habits reflect my true strengths, or are they keeping me stuck?
- What is keeping me from getting promoted or achieving my professional goals.
- What skills, passions, or ideas have I set aside?
- If a close friend, colleague or your boss, compared your potential to your performance, what would they notice?
Being honest with yourself. You will feel uncomfortable, but it’s also liberating. Awareness creates the opportunity for change.
Closing the Gap
Bridging the distance between capability and performance is an easy thing to do. It begins with setting an intention and taking actions. Here are four practical steps:
- Awareness – Identify where the personal and professional gaps exist in your life. Awareness means being willing to look honestly at both your strengths and the ways you’re holding yourself back.
- Clarity – Visualize what performing at your full protentional would look like for you. Clarity provides a starting point that helps guide your daily choices tp close your own gaps.
- Alignment – Adjust your choices, routines, and priorities to support and come into alignment with that vision at performing at your full potential. Alignment is about living in sync with your full potential.
- Courage – Take steps that feel uncomfortable but move you closer to your potential. Courage is not the absence of fear; it’s choosing to act in spite of it. Each courageous step reduces the gap between who you are today and who you’re capable of becoming.
Try this simple exercise: (1) Choose one area where you know you’re capable of more; (2)Write down a small but specific action you can take this week to step toward that higher level; and (3) Record your successes. Momentum starts with one decision.
Living Closer to Your Potential
Your capability gap represents the space between the life you’re living and the life you’re potentially capable of living. Closing your capability gap means stepping into your own life with authenticity, bravery, and purpose.
Closing your capability gap allows you to create a significant positive impact in your own life.
Out There on the Edge of Everything®…
Stephen Lesavich, PhD
Copyright © 2025 by Stephen Lesavich, PhD. All rights reserved.
Certified solution-focused life coach and experienced business coach.
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