Time to let go
This week, I am meeting with my group of private clients for a two day mastermind. And it reminded me of a story about how I learned that it was time to let go.
It was my first three day event, and we were in a hotel in New Jersey. Now, I had never worked with this particular event team before. I’d never really done a live event, and I hadn’t been on a stage for that amount of time before.
So this whole experience was new for me. It was the first day of the event and the team had set up the stage so that, in order for me to get on to the stage, I had to start at the side of the room, walk across in front of the stage, and then walk up the stairs to the stage.
Now, at that point, I wasn’t super graceful — I walked across the room and up and on to the stage in the only way that I knew how.
It was about the middle of day two that my coach, who I had paid extra to be in the room with me, looked at me and said, “Monica, don’t just saunter across the room. You have to walk quickly across the room and then walk quickly up the stairs. That’s what looks the best.”
It was an interesting moment for me because I was totally mortified that I had been walking so slowly across the room.
Now, for a participant in the audience, it probably wasn’t that big of a deal. I’m not sure that people even noticed it. But for me, as a beginner doing events, I was horrified. And for whatever reason, I took that incident and could not let it go.
Weeks after the event, I was still really angry. I was embarrassed that I had walked so slowly across the room. It was the worst thing I could have done. And I was angry at my coach for not telling me sooner to walk differently.
Two months after the event, I was still carrying the shame and the anger. And I finally sat down with my coach and I said to her, “Why didn’t you tell me to walk faster on day one of the event? Like, why did you let me embarrass myself for an entire day and a half before you said something?”
And she looked at me and she said, “Monica, I didn’t notice until the second day. It wasn’t like I was holding the information back on purpose — it was just that there was so much happening on day one that it didn’t occur to me until day two.”
She said, “I wasn’t trying to make you look bad.” And then she paused and she said, “Why are you still holding on to shame and anger about this experience? Why haven’t you let it go? There’s so many other things that need your attention right now. Why haven’t you let this go?”
And it really made me stop and think, wow, I had been focusing on the wrong things. I had been focusing on this shame and embarrassment about how I walked across the room.
I had been focusing on anger because I felt like my coach should have told me sooner, when really I should have been focusing on helping my new clients and their programs, on the joy that I felt from completing the event, on doing the next launch.
Heck, I could have been focusing on resting and taking care of myself, but yet I was carrying all of this pent up shame and embarrassment and anger.
That taught me a really powerful lesson about noticing what I was carrying at any given moment, noticing what stories I was holding onto and really letting them go.
So as we move into this new year, I want to invite you to explore for yourself what stories, what shame, what embarrassment, what anger are you carrying from last year, and what needs to be let go of right now so that you can focus your energy on better things.
Isn’t it time to let go?
