I'm in a love-hate relationship with this...

So, I’m just going to come out with it:

I’ve recently been told by my own coach that I just need to trust the process.

How rude.

What do you mean trust the process when I have spent the vast majority of my life teaching myself to control everyone and everything around me (consciously and subconsciously I might add)?

My being is/ was (keep reading, I’ll get there) wired to set things up and then make sure they happen exactly the way they have been set up (by me).

Regardless of whether that’s then actually the way said things do happen, you better be sure I have an idea of how I would like for them to go, and I am very much convinced that that’s probably the best way for things to play out (otherwise I would not have come up with it, duh…).

Now this can be applied to anything in life but to make it practical I will say: At least some version of me is convinced that from next week on my home will always be immaculate, everything is stored in mason jars, meals are prepped, my skin is flawless and the rest of my life will play out exactly as I want it to.

Has that ever heppened?

No.

I mean sure parts have, for a while...

My home is clean - until it’s not.

I have stored most of my dry foods in mason jars - because I recently had pantry moths.

My skin looks pretty ok - but not when I’m on my period.

My coach then also proceeded to tell me this:

Mel, you like for things to be black and white but sometimes there is just no answer for it…yet. You need to be able to sit with that.

She got me thinking (like any good coach should) and I wondered what my striving for answers meant?

Why was there part of me that constantly wanted control?

The answer to that came to me immediately:

Safety.

Control has always been a means to keep myself safe when I could not trust the people, institutions, or situation around me to do that.

A nervous system that never learned what safety felt like, learned to create it for itself.

So, tell me,  have you ever found yourself saying things like:

• Don’t worry about it, I’ll take care of it.

• It’s fine, I know you have a lot on your plate, I can do it.

• No need, it’s all done.

I have.

Because that was so much easier than to rely on anyone else.

Also, if I mess up, at least I only have myself to blame…and that leads to:

I can’t get disappointed.

I can’t get….hurt.

So then...control becomes protection.

Yeah...

Protection is good, right?

Protection means I am keeping myself safe, right?

Well…

I used to think so.

If you found yourself nodding once or twice while you were reading this, let me ask you:

What is harder to do, making a call and taking (perceived) control of a situation or sitting in uncertainty and letting things play out?

If you hear the words "trust the process" and immediately roll your eyes and go "yeah whatever the f*** that means", you probably have a nervous system that does not even know how to trust the process and so of course it's excrutiating to sit back and watch when you could be putting it all on a spreadsheet and get to work.

And maybe by now you’ll go…

"Fine, so how do you start trusting this so called process then??"

Ok so this is a hard pill to swallow, you might want to sit down for it.

Ready?

By doing this one thing:

Accepting that there is no control.

Say what?

I know, it took my a long time (and I still relapse as I shared at the beginning) to wrap my head around this.

Control sounds nice, it’s comfortable, it makes us believe in this idea of permanence, that this time your home will just stay clean and the pillows will be fluffed for eternity. And instead of accepting that this is just simply not true we keep striving for things to stay exactly like that.

We’re attached to control.

We’re attached to something that doesn’t exist because leaning in to anything else is just super scary.

There, I said it.

It’s scary because of what we could make it mean: If there’s no control then should we just give up? Does anything even matter?

This is why it’s not just scary, it’s also hard because it points you towards one of life's massive a contradictions:

You are the creator of your own life, but you are not in control.

Can you think of a moment when something happened serving as a reminder that, as hard as you might try, it’s simply not up to you?

Watching the news usually does that trick for me…

Look, it takes one to know one, I have fluffed my pillows until the cows come home and still, over and over again I’ve had to realize that I am not in control.

So, now what?

Well, at some point, I gave in to trust.

• Trust that the process (whatever it is, where it goes, or where it will take me) will serve me in the best way possible.

• Trust that I will learn what I need to learn.

• Trust that things happen for a reason (that I may or may not ever understand).

And you know what happened?

The strangest thing….

It didn’t only free up energy or bring me peace of mind, in some weird way, it makes me feel more in control because I know I can handle whatever unplanned, unorganized, uncontrolled thing comes my way.

And honestly, it’s the best feeling.

So go and get it for yourself, I know you can.

Have a great week!

Love,

Mel

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