Capacity is a way of understanding inner strength. It reflects how far you can reach or how deeply you can stretch your emotional and psychological self in order to handle the task at hand. It's not the same as a capability, which reflects competence or skill.

Capacity for love and the capability of expressing love are both valuable but we cultivate them differently. Capacity to love is nurtured in relationships and capability is cultivated through practice, rehearsing what we'll say and how we'll say it.

There's a richer way of understanding capacity and it includes our capacity to forgive, to disagree without harming a relationship or sacrificing oneself, and to uphold your own values in situations that make it difficult to do so. These are aspects of human strength and they are more important in our work and personal lives today than ever before.

Unfortunately, the scaffolding that fortifies our capacity is withering away. The number of Americans with no close friends quadrupled in recent decades and globally the share of people who interact with others regularly has been falling for over a decade. Old and young at home and around the globe, people spend less time with each other, which means that systems that help us adapt to change and withstand pressure are eroding when we need them most.

HOW CAPACITY GROWS IN RELATIONSHIPS

Because capacity is an inner resource, it's understandable to try and grow it on our own. But much of our capacity is learned, nurtured, and shaped by our relationships.

Scientific research reveals how capacities emerge and expand through relationships. Infants develop inner resources of felt security when a parental figure provides a secure base during their earliest experiences (Bowlby, 1988). Children learn to regulate their emotions in the relational context of their family (Morris et al., 2007). And both children and adults are more able to overcome adversity and adapt to difficulty when supportive relationships buffer stress and provide constructive reframing that transforms setbacks into opportunities for growth (Feeney & Collins, 2015).

Think about forgiveness and how we learn to forgive others. While it's possible to forgive someone we've never met, we don't learn how to forgive without interacting with others. We learn how to forgive and develop our first understanding of forgiveness by watching others. Personality influences our tendency to forgive and the practice of reflection and mindfulness can strengthen our willingness to forgive, but our capacity to forgive is forged through our relationships.

How we forgive is also shaped by relationships. It emerges through contemplation of what happened and through our perception of the other person. Forgiveness can vary as our bonds with others differ, making it less of a fixed personality trait and more of an expression that emerges through relationships (Maio, 2008; McCullough, 1998).

Securely attached adults are more inclined to forgive others than people who struggle with insecure attachment. Consequently, our very first relationships affect our capacity to extend forgiveness to others throughout our lives (Lawler-Row et al., 2006).

In the language of Self-Determination Theory, the body of science that defines how Anchor Relationships facilitate well-being, constructive relationships replenish vitality, the energy a person needs to respond adaptively to adversity. In SDT terms, this occurs through need satisfaction, when a relationship satisfies a person's needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness (Vansteenkiste, Ryan, & Soenens, 2023). Relationships that frustrate a person's needs deplete their vitality and undermine a person's capacity to rise to challenges.

THE MYTH OF RUGGED INDIVIDUALISM

I remember a time when people who hated to ask for directions would drive in circles rather than asking a stranger for help. GPS came along and assured us that no gas station attendant would ever make us feel small again.

With the emergence of AI, we have yet another tool that invites us to fix things on our own. Things we previously would have asked someone else for help with are now knowable through this tool. As a result, our capabilities, our skills, are growing exponentially but our capacity to handle pressure isn't.

The myth of rugged individualism is that it rewards grinding solo effort with attention, love, and community. But what it really does is undermine the very structures that nurture our inner resources, namely other people. Relying on willpower not only creates deep loneliness, the absence of being fully seen and known, but it also fails to fortify aspects of our strength that are nurtured in relationship: the ability to uphold our values when they aren't popular, to disagree without collapsing, to extend compassion for others, and to remain open to feedback as a source of growth, not criticism.

GROWTH, EFFICACY, AND VALUES: A THREE-PART PATHWAY

Not all relationships help us expand our capacity. To help us expand, someone has to hold a tension for us (such as challenging a choice we made), and they have to hold it in a way that feels safe in order to preserve the relationship. This is why Anchor Relationships measures generative capacity and relationship quality as separate dimensions of a generative relationship.

The three qualities illuminate what steps to take in order to build a relationship that generates capacity for both people. Mutual investment in growth is inherently bidirectional and it challenges each person to want the other to succeed in the direction they choose for themselves. Enhancement of self-efficacy involves taking an active interest in who the other person is at their best, naming their strengths in action, and cultivating independent confidence that travels beyond the relationship. Values coherence keeps you rooted to your most authentic self, ensuring that you can access and act on your values in ways that feel true to you without compromising the relationship.

Through the science of Self-Determination Theory, three distinctive dimensions of interpersonal behavior compose each quality, revealing specific behaviors that mark generative, capacity-building relationships. These behaviors are not only learnable, they are also face-valid, meaning that you don't need to be a scientist to spot them in action or to notice their absence.

The Anchor Relationships assessments and framework are tools for crafting the relational infrastructure your career depends on. Do you devote most of your time and energy to connections that expand your inner strength? Managing your relational energy is one of the greatest gifts you can give your future self.

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