169. Surrender

You have so much power, control, and sway over certain elements of your life.

However, there are also things that are outside your sphere of influence.

The weather.

Whether the busses are running on schedule.

What your ex posts on instagram.

Knowing where your power lies - and where it doesn’t - is a HUGE part of creating a satisfying life.

Because there’s nothing quite as frustrating as wanting to control that which is beyond your influence.

Recently, I was very sick.

Just as I was feeling better, my health took a turn and I got sick again for another week.

It truly sucked.

I hated it.

And also: my control was limited.

I could order yummy soups to eat. I could find fun murder mysteries to watch. I could go to bed early and take NyQuil to help knock me out. I could cancel my calls and other work responsibilities.

But I couldn’t snap my fingers and make myself magically better.

I couldn’t control how long the illness would last.

In moments like this, I turn to the tool of surrender.

While I generally like to live my life by design and choice and intentionality, there are also times when it can be useful to let go.

But letting go is actually a skill, and you might need some help understanding how and when to use it (I know I did).

Join me this week to learn why surrendering in moments of stress or frenzy can be useful, and how to use this framework to create a sense of relief, calm, and comfort, even when things go all the way off the rails.

Want to create more satisfaction & delight in your life, career, relationships, and more? Let’s work together!

Click here to schedule a consult call and we can have a conversation about what’s going on in your life, what you’d like to create, and how coaching can help you get there.


WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:

  • What the concept of surrendering means.

  • How coaching is about understanding where you have power and how to use it.

  • When using the perspective of surrender could be incredibly useful.

  • Why turning to the idea of surrender can be both disheartening and comforting.

  • How to assess if surrendering could be a helpful choice in any given moment.

LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:

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  • Outrageous Openness: Letting the Divine Take the Lead by Tosha Silver

  • 168. Distraction vs Attraction

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

This week we’re talking about surrender.

The Satisfied AF podcast is the place to learn how to create a life and career that’s wildly delicious. Want a steamier sex life? We’ve got you. Want a more satisfying career? We’ll cover that too. And you can be sure we’ll spend lots of time talking about how to build connected, fun relationships that can handle life’s ups and downs. No matter what goals you’re working on, this show will help you create a one of a kind life that is just right for you. Join me, life and career coach Kori Linn and each week I’ll give you lots of practical tips, tools, and proven strategies to help you create all the satisfaction your heart desires.

Hello, hello, hello. Happy Wednesday. I am very sad to report I am still feeling a little bit under the weather, although better than when I last spoke to you. More on that in a little bit. But before we get into this week’s topic, I wanted to take a moment to read a testimonial I have from one of my wonderful clients.

To protect the privacy of my clients, I’m going to give this person a pseudonym and we’re going to call her Martine. Here’s what Martine had to say. “I wanted to work with Kori because my work life was fine, but it wasn’t as fulfilling as I wanted it to be. And her coaching has helped tremendously in that area. But having Kori in my corner as I dated and built my relationship was life changing.

Before coaching with Kori I had been in a few relationships, but they never lasted that long. I was always hypersensitive to how the relationship was going. I was quite avoidant and afraid of intimacy and it always felt like a roller coaster I wasn’t sure I wanted to be on.

I tried all the advice from friends and I listened to all the dating advice podcasts, but nothing seemed to really help. I felt like maybe I would never figure out how to find and keep a relationship I actually wanted to be in. And it was becoming mentally exhausting.

Luckily, I started coaching with Kori a few months before I met my boyfriend, who I now live with. I feel so much calmer and more satisfied in this relationship than I ever thought was possible. Through coaching, I was able to process my feelings and thoughts as they were coming up, which really helped me interrupt my patterns.

I’ve learned how to become less reactive and more intentional with my relationship and that conflict can create closeness and isn’t something to be afraid of. My favorite part of the experience of coaching with Kori was how playful and supportive she is. She’s great at holding you up, even when you aren’t feeling that great about yourself.

She also has the innate understanding of when humor can help you find a breakthrough. I would recommend Kori to anyone who is looking for help at transforming an area of their lives where they have struggled to make change on their own, even though they’ve really wanted to. Kori brings perspective, insight, tools, humor, realness, and heart to her coaching that makes it 100% worth it.”

Thank you so much, Martine, for these lovely words. You are a delight to coach and I am so happy for you and everything that you were able to create with coaching to support you.

And I wanted to read this for y’all because even though I started out as a career coach and I talk a lot about career and jobs and work and how to have a good experience in that arena, I often end up coaching my clients on all kinds of other things.

That’s part of why I changed the podcast name from Love Your Job Before You Leave It to Satisfied AF, because what I really want is to help my clients create satisfaction in any area of their lives that they want to focus on and that they want support in. And I wanted to give you an example in my client’s own words of what that could look like and the kind of things that can be created in that space. So thank you, Martine. Now let’s move into this week’s topic.

This week, I want to talk to you about surrender. And this is an interesting thing because surrender is something I’ve thought about and used for a long time now, but I’ve never done a podcast about it. I think it’s a little bit more woo-woo than a lot of the stuff that I do and teach, but it’s something that’s been really helpful to me and it’s something that is especially helpful to me when I am physically unwell.

So a long time ago, before I was a coach, when I still worked in corporate tech, I got really sick one time. I think I was fully out of work for a week and out of the office for two or three weeks, some of that was working from home, and I was really miserable. And one of the things that happened when I was sick is that I had this ebook from the library and when the book had come in I didn’t want to read it because I mistakenly thought it was one thing, it turned out to be something else.

But when I got sick, I was desperate for some comfort. So I went and looked at the book that I had from the library and it was called Outrageous Openness. And it’s this book by Tosha Silver, and it’s all about surrendering to the divine. And if you don’t believe in the divine, that’s okay, I think this idea honestly still works.

Anyways, I tore through the book. I read the whole thing in like 30 hours with lots of sleep in there because, as I said, I was very unwell. And she had this idea to teach that I think if I hadn’t been sick, maybe wouldn’t have resonated. And the idea was like surrendering to something greater than yourself.

It doesn’t matter if what you call that is the divine or God or the universe, or even if you don’t believe in anything. Just surrendering, realizing that you as an individual human only have so much power and control and sway over the things that happen.

Don’t get me wrong. You have a lot of power and control and sway. And often on the podcast, we’re talking about the power, control, and sway you do have and how to use it and how to stay motivated and how to stay fueled up when you’re using it. But sometimes it’s important to talk about the other half, which is that we don’t have ultimate power over everything.

And case in point, like even when we don’t want to get sick, sometimes we do. Even when we try hard not to get sick and take precautions, and sometimes don’t take all the precautions, we get sick. And there are lots of other times, I think, beyond just illness when the idea of surrender can be helpful.

So as a coach, I teach my clients this idea that the way you think about something is really important because how you think about it determines how you’re going to feel about it. And it determines what actions you’re going to take. And it determines if you’re going to do something that aligns with your values or not.

The perspective is really key. And I teach that all kinds of different perspectives can sort of be equally true. Like we’re looking at different windows of a house. The view out of one window isn’t less true than the view out of a different window, it’s just different.

And so with this idea of surrender, I think about it in the same way. I think about it as a perspective. There’s one perspective that’s like, wow, there’s so much I can do. There’s so much I do have control over. That can be a really helpful perspective sometimes. But there’s another perspective that’s like, okay, there’s only so much I have control over and there’s this other part that I don’t have control over. And that can be disheartening, but it can also be really calming and comforting.

And so when I’m sick, this is often a time when I turn to this idea of surrender. It’s two parts, right? Because on the one hand, I’m going to do the things I know to do to try to get my body back into wellness. I’m going to really prioritize sleep. Recently in this time I’ve had some sinus congestion, so I’ve been using a neti pot, even though I find it to be deeply unpleasant to do so. That’s in my control.

But I’ve also been doing a lot of surrendering where I’m saying like, okay, I only have so much control here and I really don’t want to be sick anymore, but I am. So I’m going to do the things I can that are inside my control and then I’m going to surrender the other pieces instead of trying to exert control over things I don’t have control over.

One of the things we teach in coaching is that if you want to see if a perspective is useful or not to you, you ask yourself how it feels in your body to have that perspective. And something I’ve seen again and again with myself and also with clients is that the perspective of surrender can feel very comforting. It can feel like a relief. It can take the pressure off. It can feel calming and soothing.

And that is when I choose it. When I have tried controlling everything I can and I’m feeling stressed and a little frenzied, that’s a time when surrender is often something that’s going to be useful for me. Also, when a big part of something is outside of my control. It is my body that feels unwell and I’m doing the things I can and that I know to do. And also there’s an element of being sick and getting better that’s just outside of my control.

I can’t turn my body off and on again like a computer and try to reboot it back into a healthful state. There is stuff happening at a level that is beyond my direct willpower that is going to take its course and do its own thing.

I think one thing that’s important to see about this though is that surrender doesn’t mean give up. I mean, in some arenas of life, like the battlefield, maybe surrender does mean give up. But what I’m teaching and talking about today is not that. Surrender is surrendering the parts you can’t control to whoever it feels good to you to surrender them to.

To me, I surrender to my higher power, which is not God in the religious sense. I talk to and about the universe. I talk to and about the divine. But I’ve even had clients who don’t believe in higher powers who’ve been able to find comfort from this tool, from this idea of just saying like, okay, I’ll do my part. I’ll do the part that I can do and I’m going to release this other part, even if I don’t know who I’m releasing it to.

I think it’s a helpful reminder that as powerful as we are, we’re not all powerful. A lot of times coaching is about figuring out what power you do have and how you would like to use it on purpose because something I see over and over again in coaching, both in my clients and also in myself, is that we’ll spend so much energy trying to control what we can’t control, but then we’ll abdicate the things we can control because we feel powerless.

And so I think one of the most useful things that you can learn how to do in this human life is to understand where do you have power that you can exert? Where do you have control that you can exert? And where do you not?

And some things are gray areas. Like some things are too big for us to control directly, but maybe if we get a group of human beings together, we can influence them through things like grassroots activism. There are things that are a little bit too big for us to control personally, but that we can still influence. But there are also things that are way outside of our sphere of influence. And I think getting sick is one of those.

Again, you can take the precautions. And I, like most people in the world, take some precautions and don’t take others. And yeah, to be very honest with you, I have some regrets about some of the choices I made. Oh, I don’t think I mentioned this last week, but because I got Covid. Maybe I did mention that. Honestly, my brain’s not in the best spot. So it’s a little fuzzy up here.

But I had Covid over the holidays and then was getting better and then got either a rebound Covid or some other infection. So I do have regrets about some of my choices, and I made a lot of really smart choices. I was wearing masks in a lot of places and there are some places I didn’t wear masks.

And I made a lot of choices that were very safe; hand sanitizing, washing my hands. And I made some other choices that were less wise, like going to a really big outdoor Christmas market, which was outdoors, but maybe it was still too many people.

And the reality is we don’t know. I don’t 100% know where I got Covid. I don’t 100% know why I was getting better and then got sick again. Although let me just tell you, that was frustrating and there was a lot of crying about that because it’s hard to be sick. It’s uncomfortable. It’s physically painful. And it can also be really disheartening and mentally and emotionally stressful. And I know that it was for me.

And I know a lot of people are sick right now. So if you’ve been sick too, my heart goes out to you so deeply.

So what I want to offer you today is that surrender is something that could feel soothing to you. Is it something that could feel comforting? Is it helpful to have the framework of like, what’s in my control? What is in a gray area where maybe I could influence it in certain circumstances? And what’s totally outside of my control. And then how do I want to think and feel about that?

And if something happens that I don’t prefer, like I get sick or some other thing, there’s all kinds of things we hope don’t happen, and in this world sometimes they do. How do I care for myself in that? The way I’ve been caring for myself in being sick, again, is I’m doing the things that make sense to help my body heal. And I’m doing a lot of soothing myself. I’m surrendering to my higher power and to my body and its wisdom.

And as we talked about last week, I’m doing lots of things to distract myself from some of the uncomfortable sensations of being unwell. And I’m trying to really still add pleasure and delight and satisfaction into my life through the TV shows I watch, through the books I read, through the hot tea I’m drinking, through the delicious local raw honey that is in the tea and on toast and everywhere.

And it’s been mostly pretty unpleasant and it’s not what I planned and it’s not what I prefer and it’s never what I’d order on a menu. And also, it’s life. This is life sometimes, it’s part of it. It’s not the part we prefer, but learning how to handle it and be with it and handle ourselves and love ourselves in it is everything, because there will be more moments like this.

I would love to believe I’ll never get sick again, but statistics tell me I probably will. And so it’s part of life that I need to learn to navigate and it’s part of life that I need to learn to include in my wildly delicious life. And there may be things that you need to learn to include that you would prefer aren’t part of your reality, but are. You know, accidents happen. People aren’t always loving and loyal. Our loved ones pass away.

And if you need some help working through the difficult parts, if you want some help figuring out where you have power that you can exert, where you have the ability to control things and how showing up there might be useful to you and where it might be more beneficial to surrender, I would love to help you do that. And I do have space for a few one-on-one clients and I now have a sliding scale.

So if you want to learn more about that, you can go to korilinn.com, click on the work with me tab, book a consult, and we’ll have a conversation about it. All right, that’s what I have for y’all this week. I will talk to you next time. Bye.

Thank you for joining me for this week’s episode of Satisfied AF. If you are ready to create a wildly delicious life and have way more fun than you ever thought possible, visit www.korilinn.com to see how I can help. See you next week.
 

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170. Rest and Recovery

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168. Distraction vs Attraction