Letting Go . . .Hello Subscriber First Name, I’m feeling really Zen. This is how a client, let’s call her Jessica, opened our session last week. She was absolutely buoyant in the face of deep uncertainty about the future of her career at a biopharma company, where she’s thrived for over a decade. For those of you outside of Boston, you may be unaware of the disruptions in the biopharma sector. For reasons dating back a couple of years, biopharma and biotech companies have been reorganizing and shedding employees at staggering and very destabilizing rates. Thousands of brilliant, highly trained scientists and other professionals are finding themselves out of work. This makes the prospect of looking for, and landing a job frightening and very daunting. And yet, Jessica was calm and clear as she reflected on what might be next for her—whether she’d be joining so many others looking for a new position, or able to stay in her current job. As she shared her updates, Jessica fluidly and joyfully waved her arms in the air—telling me she was coraling—as in the red marine animals that I used to think were plants. She was letting the stress and uncertainty just pass through her, the way water and microorganisms flow through coral. She recognized that although much of her situation was totally out of her control, she found comfort and strength in the things over which she did have control. I had introduced the coral metaphor to Jessica earlier this year. She had come to her session bristling about a challenging colleague, and was visibly carrying the stress of her frustration. I told her the story of another client, let’s call her Claire, who had struggled with the burden of bearing other people’s problems. Claire, then an Executive Director in HR, found it exhausting when people came to her office complaining or looking for solutions. As she recounted these stories, her head and upper torso leaned forward onto her desk, as if she was literally carrying other people’s worries on her back. I asked if she believed it was her job to bear these burdens. Yes. We then explored what it could feel like to not carry her colleagues’ burdens, and to reframe her role as a listener, who allowed her colleagues to vent and then consider solutions of their own. To help Claire gain a felt sense of what this new role could feel like, we played around with metaphors. I offered the idea of the burdens blowing through her like the wind. That didn’t work. She then imagined coral. She loved the idea of the water flowing through her without weighing her down. She suddenly felt lighter and happier. We then created a simple process that she uses every time someone comes into her office with a problem: Claire inquires about their issue, imagines it passing through her, then asks: What is the most important thing you want me to know about this problem? What would be most helpful for you right now? With these two questions, Claire releases the double weight of responsibility of diagnosing the issue and finding the solution. For years, she assumed, it was her job to carry the worries and problems of her colleagues. In our session, she learned that these are not hers to bear. She soon found that she welcomed the opportunity to support her colleagues in crafting their own solutions. What’s more, she realized, if she tried to solve someone else’s problem too quickly, she would most likely be solving the wrong problem! By asking What is most important? Claire invited her colleagues to cut through the muck of the details to get to the heart of what was bothering them. Once they identified the core of the matter, the solution quickly emerged, freeing Claire from the role of the one to figure it out What is most important? This simple, yet vital question—introduced to me by one of my greatest teachers, Jennifer Garvey Berger—reveals the essence of a problem. When we liberate ourselves from bearing the weight of our own—or other people’s—worries, we open up the space to find creative solutions. The burden of carrying what is not ours to bear, stifles our creativity and saps our energy. This brings me back to Jessica. In our session, she shared some of the playful and meaningful ways she and her colleagues have introduced coral into their work: they gifted a bouquet of coral roses to a colleague celebrating 20 years with the company; they bought each other coral-colored drinking glasses to keep on their desks as coral-reminders; and they formed the Coral Club that celebrates letting go of what they can’t control—aka coraling—in the face of fear and uncertainty as they await the fate of their beloved organization. When they released their grip on trying to control what they couldn’t, they found the strength and joy in navigating this uncertainty together.
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