Letting go of cool and in control
Wholehearted Living - Guideposts 9 & 10
Before I get started I invite you to get up and dance with me and Taylor Swift - this is how we started our group coaching call on Sunday - me and about 12 of the women dancing our socks off! It will all make sense by the end of this post!
I have started this week with absolutely NO VOICE! It’s always my weak point - if I get run down, stressed, out of balance, or catch a cold it always attacks my voice. I could feel it coming on Saturday morning and then I went and sang my heart out at Robbie Williams in Hyde Park! So now, not even a squeak is coming out!
So my plan is to spend the next couple of days snuggled up at home going between working on the laptop, Bridgerton and the book I’m currently reading called “The Anxious Generation.” (Check out
for Jonathan Haidt’s substack.)Wholehearted Living
As many of you know, I have been spending the last couple of months writing about what it means to live a wholehearted life. Engaging in our lives from a place of worthiness and cultivating compassion, courage and connection.
My previous posts covering the first 8 goal posts are:
After many posts on this topic this is the final one!
The last two guideposts for living wholeheartedly from Brené Brown.
Cultivating Meaningful Work, Letting Go of Self-Doubt and Supposed-To
Cultivating Laughter, Song, and Dance. And Letting Go of Cool and Always in Control
Below I delve deep into these two guideposts with specific tools and resources to help you master them - they are not easy! I also give you a recording of my favourite Kirtan singer Ellen, some beautiful and inspiring quotes, a link to a great TED Talk as well as my dancing playlist. If you enjoy and value my work please consider becoming a paid subscriber.
Letting Go…
Of self-doubt and supposed-to… and of cool and always in control.
Why do we doubt ourselves? I mean, it’s a real pain in the bum that we hold so much self-doubt inside. Do I look good in this? Did I sound stupid? Did I mess up the presentation? Am I going to make something of my life? We doubt ourselves when we feel uncertain about what has happened or what will happen. Self-doubt might come in the form of a few thoughts here and there or it might come in the form of crippling anxiety.
We doubt ourselves because most of us haven’t been taught the skills to combat the inevitable - others putting us down, not meeting our own expectations or other’s expectations of ourselves, making mistakes, being rejected. We internalise the pain of these things and start to believe it’s because we are not enough. Instead we have to try to remember that these events are a part of life. A part of life that, when we work on our mindset, can teach us a lot.
We must let go of the word should in our lives because it brings a lot of guilt and heaviness. Instead of thinking about what we should be doing, we need to flip this around to what we want to be doing. We can start simply by changing our language. Instead of “I should meditate everyday,” we can say “I want to meditate everyday.” Reminding ourselves that we have a choice. When we are less driven by fear, we have many, many choices!
Cool and always in control! This made me smile when I read it. Brené says:
“When we value being cool and in control over granting ourselves the freedom to unleash the passionate, goofy, heartfelt, and soulful expressions of who we are, we betray ourselves. When we consistently betray ourselves, we can expect to do the same to the people we love.”
The truth is, we were never in control anyway. The ego likes to look cool and in control because society values people who look like they have their stuff together. We believe we will be of more value to others if we are cool and in control. But we deprive ourselves of so much joy by trying to portray something that is just not in our nature - nature is always changing and in flux and so are we! Our nature is creative and playful. Control is overrated - there’s an energy from people when they are trying to always be in control - there’s an underlying sense of anxiety, of perfectionism and of overwhelm.
One of the best parts for me about changing my mindset and working on my self-worth has been the transformation of feeling uptight and anxious to feeling more at ease. I plan less, I control less, I have much more capacity for things going wrong or not to plan - it doesn’t throw me off like it used to. Obviously I am not perfect and it’s always a work in progress but it’s been liberating.
Cultivating Meaningful Work
I see this as something that happens as a result of working on your self-worth. I see it time and time again - when someone does the work to heal their limiting beliefs, to care less about what others think, to no longer people please, to have fulfilling relationships in their lives, to find compassion instead of criticism… the next step is very often questioning of whether their lives have meaning. Like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, once the foundation has been set, we can go about moving towards self-actualisation - meaning we want to fulfil our potential.
Meaningful work does not have to mean a meaningful job. It can be any aspect of your life in which you find meaning - it’s the idea of honing your gifts and talents to be of service to the world. I love this TED talk with Ethan Hawke where he talks about giving yourself permission to be creative.
Brené says:
“ask what makes you come alive, and go and do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive”
I’d love you to comment below on what makes you come alive! Please share with me what it is that sets your soul on fire. What it is that gives you goosebumps!
Which moves me onto cultivating Laughter, Song, and Dance. Hence why I asked you to dance with me earlier! Brené says:
“laughter, song and dance create emotional and spiritual connection; they remind us of the one thing that truly matters when we are all searching for comfort, celebration, inspiration, or healing: We are not alone”
Laughter, song and dance have been a such an incredible part of getting through the grief I experienced from divorce. I had one particular friend who I lived with in Bali for a while - she made me laugh so much every day that we would end up in tears, literally rolling on the floor. We would sing along to musicals non stop, in particular Hamilton, Wicked and Dear Even Hansen. It was such medicine. I also started regularly going to Kirtan. Singing created a powerful release for me.
This audio is of Ellen Arthur who is my absolute fave kirtan singer. This is recorded from my phone in Bali. To follow Ellen check out her instagram. She came to sing on my Bali retreat and has such an incredible gift. (Click here to learn with Ellen.)
One thing I ask of anyone who is going through something right now - make a playlist of your favourite upbeat songs. Songs that really make you feel alive! Songs that light your heart up, that bring tears to your eyes, that help you remember how much joy you have inside your soul no matter what’s going on around you. This was my playlist from last summer.
I will leave you with a Mark Twain quote.
“Sing like no one is listening, love like you've never been hurt, dance like no one is watching, and live like it is heaven on earth.”
As always, please comment and let me know what you think of my writing - feedback is really helpful for me. Let me know if there were any lightbulb moments for you or which particular points have resonated with you. It means a lot when I hear from you.
I loved the Letting go section and really resonated with me. Recently on a girls trip I was saying how much I hate my cheesy 'Wallace-style' grin when a camera is in my face, and try and do more of a smoulder to look cool but it's just not natural to me, I will now embrace the goofiness and appreciate I'm just really really happy in that moment!
Kirtan opens me up like nothing else. The recording is beautiful thank you for sharing. And I love the Mark Twain quote. xx