Hanging On To What I Don't Want

I rarely give advice when I am coaching.  I prefer to let the session be a self-discovery process.  On those occasions when I do give advice, however, what usually happens sometime between instantly and five minutes later is that I realize the advice I gave my coaching client is advice I should have given myself.

Today the advice was to be wary of hanging on to things that my client doesn't really want just because they are hers now.  Almost as the words were coming out of my mouth, I thought, "Kay, you should be listening to this advice yourself."

Over the years, there have been others that have tried to hang on when they shouldn't.  One pattern that I have experienced is the person who has a job they've never really liked or wanted but they've had it so long that they are terrified of leaving it or losing it.  One executive that I coached needed to tell his CEO something, which he knew would anger him.   I asked him what the worst thing that could happen would be.  He sat quietly for a few seconds and said, "I'd be fired."  He smiled, shook his head gently, and continued, "from a job I never really wanted.  Freedom: that is what would happen."  Hanging on to his own personal prison.

A heart surgeon was oppressed by the stress of the job.  When I asked him why he continued, "Because my father wanted me to be a heart surgeon, and my brothers are heart surgeons.  It's the 'family business': my father wanted me in the family business."  Hanging on to what he never wanted.

In the work I do, it is really quite common to have a new manager with functional expertise to micromanage their staff because they don't want to let go of what they are "expert" at doing in order to grow into a new role.  Unable to step up to what they've wanted because they are hanging on to what they had been yearning to leave.

There are lots of other examples, but in both my own life and in those of the many clients who have wrestled with letting go of something with which they are finished.  In many ways the leap of stepping into what we want and letting go of what we don't is one of faith--faith that the other side will be better than where we are and not some the-grass-is-greener illusion.

After I gave my client advice today, I pondered: what am I hanging on to that I don't want.  A laugh-out-loud moment followed: let me count them. It seemed for a bit that every thought passing through me brought another and another. 

A couple weeks ago I wrote about feeling like I was pregnant--about to give birth to something new, maybe even a whole new life. (11/2/13)  A woman about to give birth becomes something new: she becomes a mother.  That role doesn't come with an instruction manual.  She must risk moving into a totally new world with no assurance that she will do well...or even can do it at all.   The baby can't wait for her to calculate her odds for success; it will be born. 

In the instant that she becomes a mother, she lets go of who she was before the birth.  Unless, of course, that she decides that she can't do it.  Well, of course, that is crazy.  She can't decide when she is going into labor that she isn't going to have the baby.  I think that is where I am.  Yet my hands are locked in a white-knuckled grip on what I don't want.  Tonight I will ask for help--help letting go of what I don't want, so that I can give birth to this new life.