As a busy working mom, I know that I need to block out time in my calendar for the important things in life in order to create any kind of balance. With the start of the new school year, I wanted to create an updated calendar and family action plan so that everything was organized. I decided it would be a good idea to spend an evening with my husband so that we could sit down, discuss and write down our dreams and goals for the family for the school year.
It sounded like a reasonable plan to me. It’s logical that these are things that I believe are important. And I wanted to ensure that we would be able to do this together. I was going to be prepared and put together an excel template that we could use to make things simpler. I might even have some items already filled out to help facilitate the process. I thought I was prepared for a great discusssion. AND THEN….
As I proceded to speak about my intentions and my approach with my coach, she had a few good questions and observations for me. She asked if I had tried this approach before and if it worked. I told her, that I had tried many times before to encourage my husband to do this type of activity together but it never turned out like I expected. Her guidance was that if I do things the same way as I have done before that I will get the same results. I came to the realiztion that my approach of bringing my laptop and taking notes, was NOT the way to attract the right attention and engagement from my husband. Her recommendation was…
LET GO OF CONTROL!!! YIKES!
Really? But this is something that really needs to happen and I really want his input. I realized that I had high expectations and in previous scenarios like this, my husband would withdraw and let me take control, because I was going to end up doing it anyway so why should he bother.
But this time was different. I allowed myself to shift my perspective and let go of control. I shared with my husband at the start of the evening that I was going to be doing something uncomfortable for me, that I was going to let him lead the discussion and I would talk less and listen more. He gave a little smirk, as I am sure he wasn’t sure how the evening would go. I will tell you this was NOT an easy task. There were many periods of silence and I tried to allow him to speak more and me to listen more. There were times I had to bite my lip to just SHUT UP and not say a word. At the end of the evening he said that he would put the family calendar together and write down the ideas and goals we discussed.
Amazingly enough, the next day he bought new posterboards and put up the entire family calendar on the wall for the next 3 months. (With a family of 6 you could only imagine the # of activities and the color coding for each). Then the following day my older son said he wanted to be in charge of creating and managing chore charts for the family. I thought, WOW. This is great. These are 2 things that I wanted to ensure were taken care of and now I had other people in my family willing to step up and take responsibility for them, all because I allowed myself to LET GO OF CONTROLLING the outcome.
Just imagine, the possibilities that could open up for you if you were to let go of control. What area in your life do you think you could let go of control of? Imagine what the outcome could look like if you shifted your perspective on control. I encourage you to identify one area where you could let go of control and see how your results might be different.