Letting go: The key to being effective in life

How to let go

At any moment, your situation is the way it is whether you like it or not. When you are at peace with the way your situation is, you are very effective. You see clearly and can take effective action. When you fight the way your situation is, you create a state of fear and upset. You destroy your ability to find solutions and usually make your situation worse.

To handle a difficult situation, you need effective action, not the inner state of resisting. You restore your effectiveness though a process called “Letting go.” Letting go is the inner action that removes the fear and upset. The moment you let go, you restore your ability to see clearly. You can then take action based on facts instead of emotion. You can also find solutions that you could never have seen before.

How letting go works

A good way to see how letting go works is to look at the nature of fear.

Fear is a state of mind and is created by resisting a future event. For example, if you have a fear of losing someone, you are resisting the future event called, “losing the person.” The more you resist losing the person, the bigger your fear. The bigger your fear, the more you feel threatened. The more you feel threatened, the more you hang on and push the person away. By resisting the future event, you tend to make the fear come true.

To have any fear lose its power, do the opposite of what creates it. Instead of resisting the future event, be willing for the fear to come true – not in your actions, but in your heart. In your actions, do everything you can to make sure it doesn’t happen, but in your heart, be willing. “If it happens it happens. I’ll deal with it.”

The moment you become willing for your fear to come true, the fear loses power. You restore your ability to see clearly and become very effective. Solutions appear and this area of life starts clearing up. This is the purpose and opportunity of letting go.

To make the process of letting go a little easier, there are two very important steps.

Trust that you will always be okay

The first step in letting go is to trust. Trust that you will be okay no matter what happens. Even if your greatest fears come true, know that you will be fine. When you know that you will be okay no matter what happens, letting go becomes relatively easy.

Ultimately, trust is a choice. It’s something you create. It’s a declaration. “I will be okay no matter what happens. I trust, just because I say so.” Trust is also telling the truth. You have had tough times before and you have made it through every one of them. Difficult times are always temporary.

If you are in a tough time now, this too will pass. Life is only threatening when we resist. So stop resisting and trust. Trust that you will be okay no matter what happens. If you are engaged in your spirituality, a powerful way to let go of resisting is to give your situation to God. Life works much better when you do this.

Be willing to feel your hurt

The second and most important step in the process of letting go is to be willing to feel your hurt. This is important because it’s the automatic avoidance of the hurt that forces us to resist. We think we are resisting certain circumstances, but we’re not. We are resisting all the feelings and emotion that are being triggered by the circumstances.

When you are willing to feel the hurt that is being triggered, your circumstances will have no power. If you are unwilling to feel the hurt, your circumstances will have total power.

The key to feeling your hurt willingly is to stop fighting it. Let it be there. Then dive into it. Feel it deliberately and purposefully. Reach in, grab it, and pull it out. Feel the hurt of the circumstances and more importantly, the childhood hurt of feeling worthless, not good enough, not worth loving, failure, or whatever your deeper hurt is. Let the hurt come and let it go.

The more you get this emotion out of you, the more you restore your inner peace and the more effective you will be. If letting go is difficult, focus on the deeper hurt. The best way to heal this deeper hurt is to have Bill Ferguson walk you through the healing process. You can also take The Mastery Course.