What do you need to let go of that’s weighing you down?

Space and vision are what we all need to make our problems solvable.

And whatever we have to do to increase those two assets is a worthwhile endeavor.

The beginning of this process is figuring out what the anchor might be. What heavy object might be mooring our vessel down to the ocean floor. Let me share an example from a particularly challenging time in my early thirties.

I made the very terrifying, difficult, but also necessary decision to retire as a freelancer and join the corporate world. After ten years of running my own publishing enterprise, I was utterly depleted from spending all my time making just enough money to buy more time.

You don’t need a mba to know that isn’t a sustainable business model.

Over a period of six months, I pivoted from being an independent consultant to full time employee. That including everything from going on sabbatical, researching job roles, networking in the community, talking to recruiters, writing my first ever resume, applying for positions, going on interviews, doing homework assignments for potential employers, and so on. The usual stuff.

The process was equal parts exciting, intimidating, enlightening and challenging. But it paid off. I managed to land a job as a strategist at an innovation studio.

Now, it wasn’t the highest paying job. They didn’t offer health insurance. And the company culture was more intense than I would have liked.

The upside was, working there gave me two things that were previously unavailable to me in my first career. Space and vision.

It’s like I could finally take a breath. For the first time in a decade. Ans now I could finally learn some new ways of thinking and behaving.

Do you have any idea how good that feels?

Now I could actually be present and enjoy my life and optimize for fulfillment, rather than achievement. To adapt the recovery mantra from before, retiring didn’t solve all my problems, but it made all my problems solvable.

What do you need to let go of that’s weighing you down? What possibilities might that release make available to you?

There are as many strategies for doing so as there are people to carry them out.

For right now, the priority is acknowledging that these anchors exist, that they might be holding us down, and that there might be meaning waiting on the other side of letting go.

What new ways of thinking and behaving will you learn, once you’re no longer weighed down?