Letting Go to Win Who You Are

It seems like everyone is struggling or striving for something. It seems endemic to living, to progress, to surviving. And in many endeavors, trying harder is important. It can spur us on to greater efforts, longer hours, more focused attention. But we mustn’t fall into the trap of thinking that trying harder is always the answer to personal growth.

Trying harder is best suited for results that are primarily limited by our effort. These are tasks that we have the knowledge and skill for, but require our volition, making time for, focusing on. These are tasks that we understand how they work, what we need to do, and we simply have to show up and do those things.

But those tasks are not going to transform us. For quantum leaps and transformation, we need to work on our limitations, our limiting beliefs, on how we conceive of ourselves. This sort of work requires us to let go of things, to let go of how we think of ourselves, to let go of what we believe is true in the world, to deeply examine how we think and how we experience the world.

This is the work of letting go. This is the process of identifying and resolving emotional barriers that we have built within ourselves. And, it can resemble the rote work of trying harder, but that’s largely because we experience it as effort to release things. And if we dwell in this effort long enough, we experience it as drudge work, and that’s where the similarity ends.

The work of letting go can be draining to us because it’s laden with emotional work. It’s all about untangling our emotions and beliefs around ourselves and the world. And that’s emotionally taxing work. So we easily fall into avoidance games like amusing ourselves, daydreaming, philosophizing, blaming or countless other forms of diversion. It takes dedication to keep returning to the task of letting go. That dedication comes from returning to the priority of self-compassion. And that is often the exact obstacle that we are wrestling with.

The daily work of continuous improvement and incremental growth is the polishing of who we are. The deepwater work of letting go of what is not us is what liberates who we are.

And, gratuitous plot twist: The *practice* of letting go is a try harder task.

If you’d like to get unlimited reading at Medium, and support great writing, please consider becoming a member at: https://medium.com/@ImprovCowboy/membership

Not ready for a commitment? Buy me a coffee if you’d like: https://ko-fi.com/improvcowboy