030: How Letting Go of Control and Learning to Surrender Will Change Your Life (Part 2)

In episodes 29 and 30 we'll talk about how learning to let of control will change your life, the importance of learning to control your thoughts, what we can control, what we can't control, and my very favorite philosophy: High Intention, Low Attachment (HILA).

If you are a busy, working mom, and you are used to having a lot on your plate and achieving, there is a good chance you are also a control freak (said with so much love because I am a recovering control freak, so I totally get it). Living this way is completely exhausting, and learning how to let go of control will relieve so much stress and tension in your life!

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• Access the episode transcript here

  Hi, my name is Katy Blommer and my passion is helping women learn how to put themselves first, I learned all the tools for success on my own 12 year journey that has led me to finally figuring out how to live my best life. My journey included overcoming body image issues, and yo yo dieting, climbing the corporate ladder to a multiple six figure career, navigating mom guilt through a 60 hour workweek turning around marriage issues, and much more. Now, I'm truly living my best life. And I've pretty much become obsessed with teaching others my tried and true methods for creating balance, maintaining healthy habits, improving your relationship, career development, and how to stop tying your value and worth, to the way you look and how you serve others. I'm so passionate about helping others learn this, that I created the working mom happiness method to help you get there too. So if you're ready to learn how to live your best life, pull up a chair or put on your walking shoes and get ready to dive in. This is the working mom happiness method podcast.

  Hi, welcome to the episode all about starting to learn how to let go of control. And this is widely known as the term surrender, which I love. And it's really interesting how big this idea of surrender has has been getting, it's not completely new. But now there are things there are people who actually do surrender coaching, there are surrender coaches. So this whole topic goes really deep. And I think that's great, because I think the majority of us, especially if you are a busy working mom are walking around trying to control everything, at least I know that I certainly was, I still am a work in progress, I still tend to try to control things sometimes. But now I have this amazing awareness. And these tools that we're going to talk about today in this episode, that have really helped me and really, truly changed my life. And the reality is that walking around trying to control everything around you doesn't feel good. Sometimes in the moment, it feels good when we have some sort of control when when we took steps to try to control a situation and we were successful. And the truth is we are achievers, we are intelligent, we are capable and productive. And if you're like me, you may have grown up with the ability to actually control some things like just being good at that sort of thing, I have always had a brain that can think a few steps ahead and see the obstacles coming down the road, and have been able to prevent them. However, when you're constantly thinking strategically and when life is this chess game that you're trying to get ahead of. And you're this, you know, extreme planner, which I was, that keeps you from being present, it keeps you from being in the current moment. And it can create a low grade underlying level of constant stress in your life. And I know I definitely had that going on. And I wasn't aware of it at all. It wasn't until I started doing this work that we've learned throughout this whole working mom happiness Method program that I realized it was there and how good it feels to release it. So let's talk a little bit about what we're going to talk about today in this episode, and then we're going to just jump right in a little bit more to that concept I was just going over, we're going to talk a little bit more more about letting go of control what that means, what that looks like, what it feels like and how it'll change your life. We're going to talk about some examples of things we actually can control. And that it's important to focus on those. We're going to talk about the importance of controlling our thoughts. We're going to talk about one of my very, very favorite philosophies Hyla. That's H I L A. And it stands for high intention, low attachment, we'll get into that I think I want to get it tattooed on my arm. That's how big of a deal it is and how good it has been in my life. And then we're going to talk about things that we can't control, which is always an important reminder. So jumping into a little bit more about letting go of control and why it's so important and what it gives you some background and some context. So if you've been listening to every episode, and if you haven't, I highly recommend if you're just jumping in now going back to the very beginning and following along from the beginning because there's a whole life changing program there that I don't want you to miss out on. If you remember from the episode, there were three episodes but from the the series on relationships we talked about masculine and feminine energy, and a quick reminder that masculine and feminine energies have nothing to do with whether you are male or female. All of us as humans have masculine and feminine energies. And from my experience, from my own experience and the experience with the vast majority of the women who I have coached at this point, when we are achievers and successful in our careers and busy people who are can handle a lot of things on our plates, we tend to be sitting more over in our masculine energy, we tend to naturally have stronger masculine energy and masculine energy definitely comes in handy in your job, being in charge, making decisions, taking control of things, leading a team, all of those things, definitely fall over more into the masculine energy side of things. And guess what else does control control is a very masculine trait. And here's the thing, there's nothing wrong with having that masculine energy. Where it becomes problematic is when we are way out of balance. And we're living most of our life over there, and that masculine energy side. And this, this is me, I think, really, for my whole life until I learned about this and became aware. And so for, if you if that resonated with you, and if you think you tend to live more over on that side and try to work on controlling things, and, you know, achieving Getting Things Done productivity, you know, having a to do list having schedules and plans, and all those things, that's all living over in our masculine energy. I think for people like us, it makes sense to focus a lot more on our feminine energy, the idea is to bring it into balance, to have a great balance between the two. But when we're so far over on that masculine side, we almost need to like overcorrect in the beginning while we learn and figure these things out and explore our feminine side and our feminine energy. And that can be really, really terrifying, really scary when you're somebody who is a control freak, who likes to have a plan, you know, type a to do list structure, all these things, to go over more in this feeling side and letting things be and letting go of control and not needing to make all the plans and make all the decisions that's more on the feminine energy side of the scale. And that can be really, really scary. However, what I've learned, I read about all this, I studied all this. And and I've learned what I read and studies studied is true is that my life feels a lot more stressful when I lean into that feminine side and start letting go of a lot of those things that are over on the masculine side. And what I'm getting better at is turning it on when I need to at work my masculine energy and turning it off. When I'm out of that setting. I've even learned to play with my feminine energy side more at work too and letting go of control. And that has allowed me to set more boundaries at work to being more in my feminine energy has allowed my my mind to release having to be the best and get all the top ratings and work all the hours and all those things that are more over on the masculine energy side of the scale. Okay, so that is a huge component of this. And then one more thing I want to talk about as it relates to letting go of control. That's important. And if you're watching on the on the YouTube or the video, you see I'm holding up my fists. This is an exercise I like I just came back earlier this week from a retreat called Susie school Susie Homans retreat. It was incredible life changing amazing. And she did this exercise I have seen it before but loved it and it's fresh on my mind, because we just came off the retreat, I want you to think about in your life, what you are clinging to what you are attached to what you are holding on to so strongly. So it might be that you really think you deserve a promotion at work and you're ready for it. And you're just clinging to that and you need it so badly. You can't really, you can focus a little bit on other things, but it sort of like consumes you. Or maybe it's something to do in your relationship. Maybe you're, you know, struggling in your relationship right now with your spouse something to that effect, and you're just clinging to, you know, oh, I hope I can keep him happy and he doesn't leave me or Oh, he's so awful, or, you know, anything that you're just clinging to this notion of like, Oh, my kids are so difficult, or I wish I had a different house or I wish I had a better job. whatever this thing is that you're clinging to are these things. It's like you're walking around all day clenching your fists. So if you do that, now clench your fists super tight. I'm doing it right now. My voice is changing to the point where it almost like kind of hurts, right? That's control that's control.

  And now I want you to release your fists and hold your palms up into the air lightly, gently, softly. And just notice how much better that feels your shoulders release, you had tension in your back, your upper arms and your chest from squeezing that so much. It's kind of a physical representation of what you're actually carrying around with you when you cling so tightly to whatever it is you want or need. And what is quite interesting and ironic is that energy of cleaning, especially if you're in a relationship with a man will actually push you for further away from getting what you want. It's the energy because of because of the energy because of the way that you think about it, that desperation, energy, will actually end up pushing things away. And I don't mean that necessarily in like a woowoo magic sort of way, I really mean it more and like, you will be actually less likely to take the actions to get you there, if you are so desperate and clingy. Because you're going to be afraid of things, you're not going to want to mess things up, you're gonna want to look perfect, it's like very rooted in perfectionism, than if you can release and let go and surrender that word, let go of control, that's going to feel lighter and less stressful, and you're not going to feel like you have so much on the line, which is going to give you a better energy and actually result in doors opening that are more likely to give you what you want, if you sort of just ask for what you want versus clinging and clenching those fists. Okay, so it's just a really great way to have awareness. So I really want you to think about what is that thing or those things you're clinging to? And how can you release and accept that all you can do is what's in your control. And after that you don't have any control over whatever that thing is you're clinging to. And we're going to talk about that more in just a second. In fact, let's move into for right now things we can control. Let's talk about this, we can control our thoughts, which I'm going to go deeper in just a minute, we can control our boundaries. And as I mentioned, before, moving over over more into that feminine side and letting go of that masculine energy and having to control and fix things and be in charge and plan and all those things, allows us to feel better, and be braver about having boundaries, which is amazing. So you can control your boundaries. You can control focusing on your feel good non negotiables, right. We've talked about these many times, if you started from the beginning, this is water, sleep, body movement, eating nutritious foods that make you feel good, and stress management, you can control those actions. And if you're not familiar with those, go back and listen to the earlier earlier episodes. Because we dive quite deep into those. We can control our words, we can control how we react to things, even though it's hard, it's very hard, and we're going to make mistakes, but we can control our reactions. We can control our mindset and our attitude, we can control our values and our beliefs. This is great. If you remember back into the one of the first or it's not the first episode like the second episode, I want to say where we talk about values.

  A lot of us are living are on autopilot with values that society taught us our parents, our church, media, movies, magazines, social media, friends, where a lot of us are running on autopilot living those values. And we don't realize that's why we feel like we're in a rut, because now we're an adult, and we have our own values. But we're afraid we're afraid to break away from our our tribe for lack of a better term, because remember, survival brain thinks you're still a cave person who relies on that tribe to stay alive because back then you did if you didn't have the hunters and gatherers and the tribe and the group all working together, you would literally starve to death and die if you got kicked out of the tribe or you get attacked by an animal if you die, and our brains have not evolved since then they still believe that's the case. And so it is that is why so afraid to break away from those values that were deeply rooted into our subconscious by our parents, our friends, our churches, media, all those things, because we think we're gonna die if we do that, but but the reality is you are an adult, you are living in modern society, you are not going to die. If you go against some of those values that society taught you and truly live your own values and spend your time how you want to, to spend it, you have control over that. And the whole first part of the podcast and the program helps you to figure out what are my values, and you write them down, you prioritize them and it's beautiful and it changes your life. We can control what information we allow into our brains. So we can control what we choose to consume, what we choose to watch on TV on social media, who we choose to follow what we choose to read, who we choose to put in front of ourselves, we get to control that to a certain extent. There is to some extent society has control just if you if you leave your house and go out and just society you are definitely heavily influenced by certain things like one huge example is like the diet fitness beauty industry right you're seeing magazines you're seeing certain pictures you can't you can't avoid it on billboards. You know I in Salt Lake right now there are so many billboards about like liposuction and Botox and all of those things with pictures of these women that are just so photoshopped and changed and and and here's the thing I'm not even saying that Botox is bad or liposuction is bad. I think that they can all be used, you know, in self care type ways. That's fine. I'm not even saying that. I'm just saying like the images that we see are not as rare. With the your typical woman, right, they're fake, they're doctored. They're Photoshop, they're fake. So to some extent we can't control. And it's important to know that, it's important to know when you're hating on your body or the way you look that part of that is from sources that are out of your control. But there are the tools we can use to reprogram our subconscious, which we've talked about in previous episodes. So I won't go into there now. But for the most part, you get to consume what you allow into your brain. We can control asking for help. Right, this is a big one we talked about when we talked about the morning routine where you need your sleep, and a lot of us lose sleep because we ended up going to bed so late, because the only me time we get is after everyone else in our household goes to bed. And then we end up doing something for three hours staying up way too late. And we still have to get up early with the kids or for work or whatever. And we don't get enough sleep where we talked about you are valuable and worthy to inconvenience somebody to ask for help during the day in order to get that meat time in. And you're going to feel better, even though you think you're going to feel better getting the meantime, after bedtime and staying up way too late and missing out on sleep, I promise you, I guarantee you getting that sleep and getting out of that cycle is going to make you feel better overall than taking the meantime after they go to bed. But you have to be brave enough to ask for help. And for most of us guess who most of us need to ask for help from our husbands. We need to be willing to inconvenience our husbands, no matter how hard their job might be, or if they make more money than you. Or even if they don't, my case was that I didn't and I still was people pleasing and doing all the things for the kids and making more money and doing house stuff and doing yard stuff and all the things you are worth it, you're worth getting your me time during the day before everybody else is in bed. And if that upsets your children, or your spouse, that's okay. Or if you need to ask a friend or a family member for outside help, that's okay. And you get to choose that and control it. We can control how much time we spend worrying. It's hard because you know, worry becomes on autopilot. We talked about that. In the last episode when we when we covered anxiety and how worrying about everything does, it causes that anxiety to build up in our bodies. And that's where we can have like random anxiety attacks that we can't really attach to any reason that you get to control how much time you spend worrying. And awareness is that first step noticing when it's happening and logic in your way out of it right. We get to control how we spend our time that goes along with spending time in ways that are aligned with your values, not the values that society said you should have.

  We get to own owning up to our mistakes and being accountable and learning from them. Learning from them, right? The two biggest keys to success are being brave enough to fail and failing. We only learn from our mistakes and our failures. And consistency. Doing something consistently over time and being brave enough to fall on your face look stupid, make a mistake. And what you get to control is learning from that mistake and improving based on it. And I love that so much love. It's a scary thing. But it's it's incredible. Once you embrace it and start taking the risks, you get to control being present. And just on its own, as I talked about a few minutes ago, trying to control everything keeps you out of the present moment, it keeps your brain in the future. And I'm not saying it's not okay to plan or have a strategy or be strategic. In fact, we're going to talk about career development next. And we're going to talk about how to be strategic, because that is kind of this mysterious thing. And like the corporate world or a lot of people get feedback, you need to be more of a strategic thinker, we're going to talk about that. However, there's a time and a place for that. It's not always it's not your whole life every second of the day, from the time you wake up trying to think two steps ahead and plan and control everything around you. That is not how we need to be living our lives. And guess what it can get us a lot of air quotes success on paper living that way it really, really can. But it's going to lead you to burnout, it is not sustainable. Even if you're listening and you're thinking, Oh, I do that, and I do it well, and I've done it for years, you will get to a burnout phase. Because as you grow into more into adulthood, and your life becomes more busy and has more challenges and you grow in your career and all these things, it will not be sustainable to just constantly be in that planning mode, you will get to a point of burnout and something's gotta give and it will be your health or your marriage or relationships or your own happiness. You know, there. There's a whole list of things. It's different for everybody, but something's got to give. So you get to control being present. You get to control your goals. And you want them to be aligned with those values. As we talked about way back in the module on goals and values. You get to control continuously working on accepting yourself and your body and believing you are valuable and worthy just for existing and that your value and your worth is not rooted in the way you look or serving all those around you or your productivity at work. work, you're valuable just because you exist. You don't have to prove anything to be valuable or to be worthy or to earn people's love. And you get to control that. You get to control your intentions, you get to control whether or not you choose to be kind. And you get to control your parenting style and your intention. And it doesn't have to align with what the world, you know, our society tells us that it should be. And I think all those things are so incredibly beautiful. In fact, we could spend on I know, I read through a bunch of those quickly, but we could spend so much time on each one of those. And when I have my coaching groups and my one on one clients, we do we sort of pick the ones that, you know, really come up strongly for you. And we dive really, really deep in those. Let's talk about the importance of controlling your thoughts. If you walk away from one thing from this episode about letting go of control, I hope it is that you get to choose and control sorry, you don't get to choose your thoughts. I take that back. Let me explain that in a minute. But you do have control over where you let your thoughts go within your mind. And

  getting good at this quite literally will change your whole life, it will it will change your whole life. So let's talk about this. As women studies have proven that about 80% of our thoughts throughout the day are negative. And we have 1000s and 1000s and 1000s of thoughts. I don't remember what the study was, like 80,000 or 70,000, or something like that. It's a lot a lot of thoughts throughout the day, and 80% of them are negative. And the majority of those are fake crazy, not true thoughts that our brain makes up our lower brain makes up to try to keep us safe and sabotage us. Well, not, it's not trying to sabotage us, it's actually trying to keep us as safe as possible. And that ends up sabotaging us towards the things that we really want in life because they're scary. And they're breaking away from our tribe, as I mentioned earlier, right? So when I said you don't control, you don't get to control what thoughts come in. crazy thoughts come into our brain all day long. And it's just our brain reacting to stimulus around it could be from past trauma could be something you just immediately saw could be something that happened to you at work that day, whatever, you don't get to control what comes in. But you do get to control how much time you spend with what comes in and whether or not you let it spiral. And meditation is a huge and important gift for getting good at this because meditation, all it is is sitting, breathing, sitting with your thoughts and breathing through them and noticing your thoughts and then letting them pass without spiraling into them. And I know a lot of people I talked to say, Well, I'm so bad at meditation, I just let my thoughts take over. Well, it's not possible to be mad at bad at meditation. That's what meditation is. We all do that. We all feel that way monks who spent their whole lives learning meditation, still have thoughts that come in that take over what meditation is, is catching it, it's like, oh, wow, even if you're five minutes into a spiral of one thought, and you've taken it all the way down the rabbit hole, if you can, at that point, have awareness and be like, Oh, I just did that. I just let that thought spiral out of control. And then you can reflect on it and bring it into consciousness and say, Well, why did I do that? And what's that topic about? That's meditation. And that is life changing. Because once you practice it, and remember, small consistent actions done over long periods of time will change your life. You get better at this and you get better at meditation. And you're gonna get better at not letting your thoughts throughout the day spiral, okay? And here's the deal, our thoughts truly become our lives, our thoughts become our lives. So whatever you think about and focus mostly on your life becomes that, and it is not magic, and it is not woowoo It is literally how our brain works. And let me walk you through it. thoughts turn into words, eventually, not not always, immediately, sometimes immediately, thoughts become words, words turn into actions, actions repeated over time become habits, and truly our life is our habits. Our lives are run 95% on subconscious programming and 5% on consciousness. And so these habits that we create, which are rooted in the thoughts that we have, run our lives, and this is very real and very important. And so if you are clinging, remember the tight fist clinging to something that clinging energy is more likely to lead you to having negative and scary and victim type thoughts about what the thing is that you want. Why don't I ever get chosen? Why don't I ever get the promotion? Why don't they see my skills? why don't why am I not ever in the right time at the right place? When you think those things they become true. They become true when you release control. Simply ask for what you want. Put it out there and think positive thoughts about it that will lead you to taking the action steps towards creating that and bringing it into your life. A tangible way to think about this, that kind of makes it very real. And I may have even talked about it in a different episode. But I think even if I did, it's worth doing it again, because it's really important. Wherever you are, right now, if you just pick something around you, it literally could be anything, pick something around you. That is like man made, or woman made person made, let's say that something that is made by a person around you, whatever that thing you just chose. It started as a thought. At some point, somewhere in history, somebody thought about it. And it literally became a thing. And that's how everything around us everything in our world works. It started as a thought. And then it became a thing. Everything that is made by a human by a person started as a thought, and it became a thing for somebody thought of it, then they thought about it over and over and over again. And they got serious enough about it to talk about it with somebody else, or with themselves, most likely with somebody else, because relationships are super important there.

  And then after they talked about it, they took action, they took some kind of action to start the creation of the process. And then that action turned it into a thing. Thoughts literally become things. What we think about the majority of the time is what will happen to us and become our lives. And so if there's one thing that you take away from this, I want it to be that. Okay. And guess what I'm going to do now, because I like to try to keep these to around 30 minutes, because we're busy working moms, I'm actually going to stop this episode. And I'm going to make this two parts. And in the next part, we're going to talk about my favorite philosophy, high intention, low attachment. And then we're going to get into a long list of things you cannot control. And we're going to dive deep into some of them because they are so common with so many of us. So get excited. And I'm sorry to make you wait for that because it is like my favorite philosophy. But you'll have to tune in to the next episode. Okay. Thanks so much for listening. As always, please feel free to reach out to me, you can follow me on Instagram at Katy Blommer. You can message me there if you have any questions. Also, I am so so excited about moving this program into companies. So if your company might be interested in having a group of working moms within the company, take my program together, I would love to connect with you. So please reach out to me, I would love to talk with your company. I really think this is really important now after the great resignation. And you know so many working moms coming into burnout and leaving their companies I think that companies need to get super serious on making more of an effort to keep their working moms happy. And that's what this program is all about. And there's a lot of career development in it. So, think of me, let me know if your company might be interested in that and I would love to have you make a connection for me. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you in the next one. Thanks so much for listening to the working mom happiness method. If you liked what you heard, please be sure to subscribe and leave a review and share it with others who might benefit from listening. For show notes or to enroll in the working mom happiness method coaching courses, visit www dot women's best life university.com

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