How Letting Go Of Control Can Be The Best Thing That Ever Happened To You

by Marci Shimoff

Have you ever felt that it’s totally up to you to make everything in life happen?

Maybe you feel this way all the time. I know I did.

You think it’s up to you to keep all the plates spinning in the air. Up to you to make everything happen—your love life, your career, your goals for the next year. Or ten.

It’s also up to you to make sure your kids make all the right decisions, and it’s up to you whether your mom finally learns how to manage her money.

Because you think it’s all up to you, you also have a terribly hard time making decisions. What if you pick the wrong thing? What if you fail?!

It’s exhausting and totally stressful.

I call it trying to be the “General Manager of the Universe.”

And it’s ruining your life.

You Think That If You Can Control Circumstances, You Can Control What Happens

In short, you think it’s your job to manage every single detail of how life runs—and not just your life, but everyone you care about.

Let’s say you think it’s entirely up to you to get married and start a family.

So you go on X number of dates, read a bunch of books, and start panicking when he hasn’t appeared.

Or if you’re already in a relationship, you give him a deadline, and you tell him all the reasons you should be committed.

Or if you’re broken up, you put all your energy into trying to get your ex back.

You think that if you take certain actions and in a certain order, you can control how this whole thing goes down. And by default, you believe that if you’re not scheming and strategizing about how to get married, you’re going to lose out.

Specifically, you want to control whether or not you suffer, and you want to avoid suffering at all costs.

This was me. The harder I tried, the more it became clear that living in this state of control was costing me, and it was no fun.

Living in “control mode” is draining—both emotionally and physically. For one, believing you are solely responsible for how life turns out keeps you up at night. With thoughts and worry racing through your head, you’re bound to get less sleep than you need. And the sleep you DO get will be fretful.

Then, instead of waking up trusting that life is unfolding just as it should, you jump into analyzing, strategizing, and with a general sense of impending doom.

All of this negative emotion causes you to vibrate at a lower energy frequency, which actually puts you out of alignment with the flow of life.

In my life, all of this added up to me feeling like a total wreck—and looking like one, too. And despite all my overthinking and micromanagement, life was NOT turning out the way I wanted it to.

Then I learned all about giving up control, and in the most unexpected way.

What Taking Improv Classes Taught Me About Giving Up Control

My pivotal lesson in letting go of the reins happened in a way I could never have planned.

I was smart enough to sign up for improv classes. Improvisation is exactly that—nothing is planned.

One of the key tenets of improv is what is called having a “yes mind.”

Simply put, you have to just say YES to whatever life brings.

In improv class, I was tasked with being a 90-year-old rock star. I winced at the thought. This wasn’t what I had in mind. But I had to say YES.

So I started gyrating and acting like an elderly rocker. Can you even picture this?

Then, I was put into the role of a teenager who was shoplifting. And I went with this, too.

And, to my surprise, I had the best time. The scenes totally worked. But, more importantly, the exercise taught me to just let go, go with the flow, and relax.

When I focus on each moment, rather than planning out my entire life, somehow my life unfolds just fine—and in ways I could never have anticipated, no matter how much overthinking I do!

For one, I sleep better and wake up more rested, excited for what the day may bring. More importantly, when my mind is not absorbed in analyzing and strategizing, I am more able to be in tune with—and recognize—the diving guidance that appears throughout the day.

These “signs” point the way for what I should pursue next. And when I follow my intuition like this (rather than my logical, planning mind), I end up experiencing “coincidences” and opportunities I could never have imagined!

How To Say Yes To Life And Watch Life Go Your Way—Every Day

Giving up control is kind of like being a trapeze artist.

You have to trust that when you let go of one rung, the other one will be there. You trust that if you keep going and saying yes to the next thing, and the next thing, then you will wind up exactly where you need to be.

When you say no, you resist life and block energy—as if you were dangling from that one rung.

But when you say yes to what’s happening in life—and to the next rung life presents to you—you connect more deeply with the universe in a trusting way.

So, if your desire is to get married, you give up having to manage exactly how it will all unfold. Because you have no idea whether your actual husband is going to bump into you on the way to the grocery store.

All of this takes practice, but it’s so worth it. And once you get the hang of letting go, you won’t want to live any other way.

That’s what my program 30 Days to a Happier Life is all about. You’ll learn about what TRULY makes for a happy life, so that you can stop spending so much precious time and energy engaging in thoughts and behaviors that only lead to more unhappiness.

You’re going to learn how to trust life and work with it by giving up control and being in the flow.

You’ll learn how to live a different way, with the specific habits and practices I use to create an ecstatically happy life that flows my way (even if it doesn’t appear that way initially)!

I learned these habits after interviewing scores of the happiest people on the planet, all who have one major thing in common: they TRUST that they’re not alone, and that a higher power is helping them out.

The exercises I’m going to teach you are simple and fun, and you can drop them into your day, including in any situation where you feel the need to start being the General Manager of the Universe:

Pretty soon, you’ll be saying, “You know what, everything is going to be okay. The universe has got this.”

With love and happiness,