Allow, Release, Let Go
Read time: 5 minutes
23.12.2022
Merry Christmas!
December has always been for me a month of joy. Most probably many of us have deep-rooted memories of the Christmas tree, of too many family members eating too many Christmas cakes, of Santa and, of course, of the gifts.
In the beginning, it was fun. Somebody else was taking care of making all the preparations for Christmas.
One can not even acknowledge the moment when he or she started to become responsible for orchestrating Christmas preparations. Neither do I, but at one point I became aware of feeling like I am in charge of it.
And I started to feel December was a rush month. Especially for being in charge of creating and approving the company budget and supervising many organizational projects. And some strange ideas started to creep into my mind. Not that anyone put them there in the first place …
I had the strange feeling that I need to finish or complete THE WORK exactly at the end of the year. That I need to not leave anything incomplete to flow into the year to come. I needed to enter next year as if stepping into a pristine land, without “a stain”. I needed my team to be happy and proud of the work they did in the current year. I needed the company shareholders to be happy with the company's results. I needed my house to be sparkling clean for these holidays. I needed to have everything around choreographed as in a story tale.
Tightening, closing, appraising, congratulating, cleaning, cooking - it felt like continuously giving, giving, giving, with little time - if any - of minding that I exist. And at a certain point, it started to feel heavy and pointless. Too many expectations of mine, too many expectations of other people, too many wishes, too many claims, too many perceptions. One too many. And I was nowhere in this picture, I was at the end of a long queue of people waiting for my attention first.
At that moment I realised I need to drop everything. Cause everything felt like stones too heavy to be carried.
And …
Allow
It struck me one day that Christmas and New Year are just rites of passage occurring every year. They are like a point in time. A one-way time portal. Once passed, the year’s number increments and you cannot rewind it.
And I realised that the same thing happens anyhow at the end of each month, at the end of each day, at the end of each hour or minute.
It is people who created the convention of passage from one year to another and added the meaning of renewal, through perpetuating a tradition. Nothing is newer, nothing is renewed, just more mature. And after a certain moment in one’s life, just older.
Work, tasks, activities, plans, and lives will pass through that point in time and will continue relentlessly without even minding about the year-end moment.
This simple shift in perspective helped me allow seeing life as a continuum as opposed to a series of consequent segments with start and finish.
My happiness, my success, and my value stopped depending on the year-end moment or result. With very few exceptions, nothing needed to be initiated in the new year. Activity or work was already there, just waiting for me to resume once back from the year-end break.
And this simple idea allowed me:
- To be happy with whatever I managed to progress over the closing year and see success in my current progress as opposed to seeing failure in not yet achieving.
- To appreciate my professional progress. I was a continuous work in progress, and that progress would accrue any time I will add value to myself.
- To feel OK with the progress I made in the projects I ran even if the tasks were not completed at the end of the year as I unrealistically dreamt before
- To function at under 100% of my capacity without feeling guilty, as a healthy way to take care of myself. My passion for my work and my love for my family were still there. Unshaken. But I started to also have the energy to enjoy both, better.
- To show I am a work in progress and look constantly to making progress.
- To appreciate that being a work-in-progress does not mean being imperfect. And this helped me a lot in appreciating also the people around me.
- To express my needs and create boundaries for my human needs. I stopped seeing them as just limits of my essence or imperfections.
- To listen to what I feel without fearing it. My feelings became signals that I need to do something, and sometimes that something meant changing or refreshing my perspective to be able to see with new eyes the same thing. And this allowed new realities to emerge for me and made REALITY manageable without feeling it difficult.
- To forgive me and others in a deeper and more complete manner, without expecting anything in exchange. I understood forgiving is a unilateral declaration and decision. And that it is mine and is not connected in any way to anything else.
And this led me to …
Release
- Mainly disproportionate expectations
- Wishes and desires that were not mine
- Wishes and desires that belonged to a younger and more immature me
- Desires to see too much or too far away into the future
- Claims that other people owe me anything
- Assumptions about perfection or definitions others offered to me as criteria
- Fear about who will I be if I will not be anymore who I was
- All the tension created by the above noise.
A huge click happened in my mind and tons of mental and emotional weight disappeared in matters of … a thought.
And with this release, I could see clearly and …
Let Go
If you read the letter up to this point, you clearly know what I mean and, by now, you also have understood what you need.
I am sure you have even asked yourself how can you let go of something without harming yourself or your career in the process.
The truth is once you follow this path, you already know that nothing can actually harm you anymore. You might be shaken a bit, but not harmed. You are safe. You have the inner resources to be OK after the shake.
You already won. What? A new perspective. Your universe is much larger than it was before, and now you have plenty of room for your next expansion.
Why is this important? Because the way you close the door of an event or a phase in your life creates the conditions of success or of relieving pain at amplified levels once you open the door of the next stage or phase. Unfinished businesses creep forward into that new phase you want to start afresh and on the right foot, only to make you learn the lesson.
You will start afresh, for sure. But only after you would have ALLOWED, RELEASED and LET GO.
The lesson is about how to allow, release and let go.
What do you need to allow, release and let go to be able to be performant?
What kind of leader do you want to be next year?
What will you shift?
If you want to gain this clarity and lighten the load of your journey, let's talk. Coaching is the most appropriate tool for you to safely accelerate this shift in the safest way to you.
May your Christmas be a time of rest, relaxation, and renewal, surrounded by all the things that bring you peace and happiness.
Alina Florea
Your High-Performance Coach
💥🎉 That’s pretty much all for today 💥🎉
SUMMARY
We create tension and stress by holding too tight to unrealistic expectations, erroneous assumptions, impossible scenarios or long-dead circumstances. This happens a lot to managers too, and the end of the year becomes often an occasion for inflicting all kinds of wounds on ourselves for imperfections we perceive we have, missed targets (in spite of the effort and dedication we put in), incomplete actions (that could not be completed for obvious reasons outside our control but still we thought about ourselves we would make it), etc.
Entering a new year with the heavy weight of such expectations is the main way in which we maintain the vicious loop of busyness.
Year ends are just conventional ends, in fact, nothing fundamentally ends, and nothing fundamentally starts: events, tasks, or projects will still be there waiting for someone to pick them up, whether will be us or others.
The way you metaphorically close the door of one year will help you sustain the challenges and success in the next year. Dropping the unnecessary weight that you carried this year becomes a matter of mental and emotional hygiene accelerating your performance in the year to come.
How to do it: by actively allowing, releasing and letting go.
This article gives you my experience on it.
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Alina Florea
Your High-Performance and Mindset Coach
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