Surrendering

This past week I participated in an amazing one-day conference for 2000 women.  It was an inaugural event and I was delivering the closing keynote, a workshop session to 300 women, my organization was staffing/working a booth and I was signed up to do two book signings (I know, too much …next year I’ll scale back!).

Everything was cruising along fine. The afternoon before the conference began, I was at the convention center unloading boxes and setting up our booth with my assistant, coordinating details for the next day, preparing for sound/AV checks and getting ready to go home, wrap up work and change for a speaker event that evening. Then, my phone rang.

“Your son has lice, you need to come get him from school,” said his sweet teacher. Ugh! I could feel my chest tighten and body stiffen as my mind raced to all I had yet to accomplish by 7:30 a.m. the following day.

The next morning, after a late night of helping my husband de-louse our son (and doing preventative treatments on myself), working late to catch up from losing the afternoon and four hours sleep, I awoke and thought, “There is no way I’m going to be able to physically pull off this ten-hour day and be ‘on’ at this level for this long.”

So, I surrendered. This is not a new concept for me. I’ve surrendered before and like to think I “surrender” all the time (surrender meaning not giving up, but releasing something to a higher power), but if I’m really honest with myself, I find there are some areas of my life I surrender more easily than others. Interestingly, when this blog post came to me, I thought,  “Oh I’ll just go pull up all the posts and newsletter articlesI’ve written on surrendering—I talk about this all the time. But I couldn’t find a single one with surrendering in the title.

After a sleepy early morning meditation session with my husband, we held hands and I asked him to say a prayer with me that I would be able to take my hands off the wheel and surrender this day to the Divine. And by the time I got out of the shower, my perspective had gone from complete stress and overwhelm to seeing what a gift and opportunity this day could be.

Yes, I was exhausted beyond belief and scared about whether or not I would have the stamina to function—let alone be energized–for the closing keynote to 2000 women at the end of the day, but I also felt this unshakable calm and kept hearing a kind reassuring voice whisper, “All is well.”

So I took a lot of deep breaths that day, kept acknowledging and thanking God for being present with me physically, emotionally and mentally and for guiding every thought, word and action, I practiced self-care, conserved my energy, and embraced “good is good enough.”

Guess what happened? Everything flowed and went phenomenally well (so I’m told!).

This morning when I awoke I thought about the wonderful women and men that are participating in the New Way of Being tele-course I’m leading. Together, we’re releasing old habitual ways of being and stepping into new ways of thinking, being and seeing.  We began this program by challenging each person to define what a New Way of Being feels …and then looks like …for them.

For me, I articulated early on that a New Way of Being feels like FREEDOM. A “have to” free zone. And this week, I got that what a New Way of Being looks like to me is SURRENDERING.

• Find Your Tribe: Join or become trained to lead Self- Renewal Groups
• Attend a retreat/event including my Fri., Dec.16 Reflect & Re-Imagine Small Business Owners Retreat
• Join the dialogue and receive weekly inspiration on our Live Inside Out Facebook Community
• Pick up The Mother’s Guide to Self-Renewal from the library or buy it here
• Read past issues of my Life Balance newsletter
• Take Action: Contact one of our career or life balance coaches for 1-on-1 support; receive an initial complimentary consultation
• Empower Others: Schedule Renee for a private workshop or retreat for your company or organization