Letting Go and Letting Come
For the past several days, I’ve just been feeling really…off.
It’s been so unlike me.
I’ve been feeling disconnected…unsettled…
Whereas usually, I’m pretty content!
I’ve done a ton of work on myself, and I generally walk around feeling that I’m living my best life - that I’m living on purpose.
But this has been different.
So I fell back on my past experience working in IT.
As strange as that may sound, it’s a method of problem-solving I often return to – and it can sometimes work.
When something goes wrong with your computer, you look at the last thing that you changed on it, and that usually provides the clue to solving the issue. So, with myself and even my kids, I often approach problems in the same logical way – strategically looking for recent changes.
The thing is…humans aren’t computers.
I was so attached to that concept of “a + b = c,” that idea that there was an actionable clue I could uncover, that I forgot that humans don’t need to be fixed.
We just need to be present.
Once I realized what I was doing, I decided to stop trying to figure my feelings out logically, and just sit with them.
Just be present with that unsettled feeling, experience it, and allow the process to happen naturally.
And in that moment, I found a place of peace – of letting go and letting come.
That was what I had needed all along.
I’m reading this incredible book right now, called Theory U, by Otto Scharmer. Scharmer is a senior lecturer at MIT, and he’s written this book about changing systems – huge, multi-billion dollar organizational systems at huge Fortune 50 companies. Systems that large don’t change easily, and so Scharmer and his team of researchers have come up with a fascinating approach to this kind of change called Theory.
Theory points the light of awareness back onto the person within the system. By doing that, it’s then able to shine a light on the entire organizational system. Scharmer has done case studies of health care organizations, schools, universities…and in each and every case, it all comes down to this idea of “presensing” – which is “presence + sensing,” or taking us out of our heads, and using practice to get ourselves grounded.
Which is funny, because that’s exactly what I teach in my leadership programs – for both youth and adults.
Getting grounded, and getting into present moment awareness.
Of course, Scharmer doesn’t use that language. He’s not approaching the idea of Theory from a spiritual place, as I do in my coaching. But that’s really what he’s talking about, in his most recent book Leading From the Emerging Future, as well – letting go and letting come.
Being present in this way allows you to lead from the emerging future. We tend to lead from the past, both in organizational systems and in our own lives – using our old ways of doing things, trying the same old things again and again.
Collectively, societally, globally, when we do this, we’re creating results that no one wants. There are problems all over the world! No one says, We want our world to have issues with hunger…or clean water… or climate…or financial crises – and yet, we keep creating these issues, as a system. In order to solve them, we have to begin to lead from the emerging future as a community, and that starts by being present.
In my own life these past few weeks, once I found that place of peace and connectedness, once I got there and let go, so much creativity arose – ideas for talks I’m giving, connections with other people, even this blog post! Just imagine that effect multiplied by the world’s population – with every individual aware of the present moment, every individual leading from the emerging future – what an amazing world that would be.
Challenge: I’d love to hear what you think about the idea of letting go and letting come. Can you think of any examples of this in your own life – times when you needed this approach, or times when you’ve found that place of peace and it made a real difference? I’d love to hear about it.
