you may have to let go to get unstuck.
by bill reeb
if you have identified a desire, created a plan and are working your plan to your satisfaction, you are in what i refer to as the “try (work)-evaluate” loop that continues until you accomplish whatever you want to achieve. as long as you recognize the early warning signals and respond to them in a timely way, you will remain unstuck, continuing to work better and achieve more.
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however, most of us are not that fortunate. we start getting stuck and rather than respond to the early warning signals, we either ignore them, hoping they will go away, or try to power through them.
unfortunately, my experience is that neither of these approaches works well very often. therefore, we get kicked out of the try (work)-evaluate loop because of our dissatisfaction (our feelings of being unsuccessful or unhappy about our progress or priorities).
let it go
“let it go” is a trigger phrase my mentor and martial arts instructor, john, uses to let his students know he sees them resisting change, holding on too tightly to the past, beating themselves up for a prior mistake, allowing their egos to cloud their judgment and so on. the meaning behind “let it go” is as simple as the phrase itself: don’t let your thoughts, expectations, tension, personal baggage, vanity, ego – you name it – get in your way of getting better.
john will often pose the question to me, and everyone else at the school for that matter, “what do you need to let go of right now to allow yourself to get better right now?” as well, in our conversations about various struggles i might be facing, the same question is posed, “what do you need to let go of so that you can get unstuck and moving again?”
i can tell you from personal experience – what you need to let go of could be anything. but ultimately it will come down to letting go of something you think you already know. we typically don’t act until we believe we understand or know something. it may be as simple as defensiveness because you don’t want to be proven wrong (because i know the importance of being “right”) or don’t want to acknowledge that you have made a mistake because i know that mistakes are synonymous with being a failure). it could be that you are frustrated by your progress, which is being held back because you are more focused on winning than learning (because i know that winning is really more important than learning). while there are plenty of examples, the point is … anytime you are starting to get stuck or are stuck, chances are that you need to let go of something that will likely be rooted in what you think you know.
letting go is difficult to do because it requires an honest self-report as to what is in your way. given that what you are reading now is the fourth rewrite of this material, with several additional reorganizations as well, imagine the conversation i had with john when he suggested that this version was necessary. i was very frustrated, and very irritated … with him. why would i be mad at him? he was only trying to make the book better. i just didn’t want to hear it. i knew my previous version was just fine. i knew that the next version wouldn’t be much different – it would just prolong the time required to get the book published.
that night, i remember clearly the conversation (in my head) that allowed me to transition so i could get started on the fourth rewrite. i had to let go of the idea that the current version of this book was a clear presentation of the ideas. i asked myself “what is more important … to get this project done according to the plan and timeline i had laid out, or make the book better?” it wasn’t a hard decision to make once i opened myself to learning more and trusting that john’s assessment that we were not where we needed to be was enough to justify the delay. to be clear, i was wrong in what i thought i knew, because based on what i know now, the extra time helped resolve some holes that i didn’t want to admit were in the previous versions.
but notice the trap. what i thought i knew created resistance to writing version four of the book, but what i know now regarding version four could create resistance regarding what i am able to learn in the future. so, we have to constantly let go of what we think we know in order to better position ourselves for what we are about to learn.
what also makes this concept difficult to implement at times is that what we need to let go of could be some aspect or the priority of one of our personal core values. sometimes when we get stuck, the only way to get unstuck is to rethink about the various values we have that we have never bothered to challenge because we consider them unchangeable components of who we are. we often blindly accept those values and their priority as being valid in perpetuity.
in martial arts, i see this conflict between core values and learning arising frequently. while students, including me, are practicing various techniques on our own, this isn’t much of an issue. but as soon as a particular exercise creates a physical engagement between two or three people, well, that is a different story. all of a sudden, the fear of losing, or the fear of getting hurt, or the ego to look good, or most likely, the desire to win, takes over and the learning process comes to a halt. we lose sight of what the exercise was trying to teach us in the first place: creating a controlled situation in which the intensity is amped up to see how well everyone manages their minds, controls their emotions and stays in the now.
in order to get better, faster and stronger in martial arts, you commonly are asked to let go of, or better put, reprioritize those beliefs that no longer serve you. in this case, while a competitive spirit is great, a competitive attitude that is always at the highest priority is not only out of balance, but can be very damaging. you have to know when and how to reduce its priority or you will find yourself stuck often.
this is a predominant reason so many people end up quitting before completing their objectives; they were unwilling to let go of the priority of a core value in order to allow them to think differently. or put another way, they are unwilling to let go of what they think they know about the priority of a specific idea, value or belief.
to further clarify reprioritization in the context of letting go, here is another example. consider that someone has a very high priority for being honest and trustworthy in their dealings with others. but also consider that this same person has a high priority, although a lower one, for meeting a specific financial goal. now let’s picture a scenario in which this person has an opportunity to make a big sale and all that is required to close the deal is to forget to bring up some important information to the buyer.
in this case, in order to make the sale, this person would have to compromise the higher priority, honesty, for a lower priority, achieving the financial goal. because this person’s values would be in conflict in this scenario, even if he or she decided to make the sale and got away with it, this act would likely create emotional chaos as he or she tried to resolve it internally. though as humans we are good at finding ways to ease this kind of pain through rationalizations like “buyer beware,” or “it’s not personal, it’s business,” if the conflict exists, your mind will still require you to reconcile the disconnect. or in some cases, when what you are thinking is in direct conflict with what you want to do, that conflict won’t allow you to take action at all. now, if honesty is not important to you, (and that is your choice; i am simply creating an emotional scenario to make a point) then this example is meaningless, because not being forthcoming would not have violated a core belief. so in order to keep from getting stuck, the general rule is
if you have to compromise your values or beliefs in order to reach some objective – or compromise a higher priority value or belief to achieve a lower one – then either (1) change your objective (change your desire, plan, tactics), or (2) change or redefine the priority of your values or beliefs in relation to each other.
don’t be surprised as you challenge the priority of some of your ideas, core beliefs or values against others that you find it is time to update them because of changes in your thinking. for instance, a common one for overachievers might be that you believe you need to be hard on yourself if you want to improve your performance. while ideas such as this one might have played a positive role in your past, that doesn’t mean that it is working for you now, or that you should continue to hold on to it or that you should maintain it with its same priority.
being able to let go of what you think you know is the cornerstone of this process, regardless of what you are doing, what you are thinking or where you are in the cycle. what bias, belief, process, vanity, insecurity, fear, expectation, outcome, permission, acceptance and the like do you need to let go of or embrace to allow you to change what you think?
“what do i need to let go of right now?” is truly the billion-dollar question you will find yourself asking and answering every day, and every moment, you find yourself stuck or starting to get stuck. by letting go of something, you can get back on the road to feeling happy or successful about whatever it is you are trying to achieve.