Balance Ownership and Surrendering
How To Find The Sweet Spot of Ownership & Letting Go
One of the core aspects I learned during my personal journey is the importance of taking ownership. By taking full responsibility for your actions, and reactions, you step away from that feeling that you are at the mercy of external circumstances. Instead, you put your attention and energy on choosing how you respond to circumstances.
Then, further on down the journey, as I dove more and more into spirituality, I discovered ‘surrendering’. This was one of my main insights from Living Untethered by Michael Singer: Accept, Let Go, Surrender.
What I have been reflecting on recently is how to balance both ownership and surrendering, because ownership can take on the mask of control, but surrendering could feel like being passive (thought it is not) - so how can we both take ownership and surrender?
The Stoic Dichotomy of Control
The stoics explained that we need to take action on what we can control, and accept what we can’t control. The tricky part is knowing what is fully in your control and what isn’t. For instance, sure, the weather is not in your control. And yes, obviously, you can choose if you eat that cake or not. But there are many circumstances that you can only influence but not fully control - you can’t ‘control’ making a sale, you can do your very best, and influence the outcome, but you don’t have full control over it, as the ball is not only in your court, so to speak.
When thinking about the stoic dichotomy of control, I see both the ownership and the surrendering. Ownership is choosing your response and actions in situations you can control. Surrendering is fully accepting when circumstances are out of your control.
Is surrendering complacent? Does surrendering mean giving up? No. Surrendering is ACTIVE acceptance. What does this mean? Often, when faced with a challenge or a situation we dislike, we force our acceptance: ‘Nothing I can do about it, might as well accept it.’ Within that thought, there is a resistance. On the surface, we say that we are accepting the situation but we are fighting it within. Surrendering doesn’t feel that way. It’s the full body realisation that the situation is as it is, and a conscious choice to fully let go of any internal resistance.
Conscious Leadership Levels
As I was reflecting on this subtle balance between ownership and surrendering, I noticed something interesting start to happen. Instead of continuously asking myself: ‘What is my next move forward?’ ‘What is my vision?’ ‘What do I really want?’, the questions started to shift to: ‘What is coming through me?’, ‘What is most aligned right now?’
This is quite a strong shift. Instead of being in that place of ownership, that sometimes turns into control, and asking: What do I want and how will I get there? My questions transformed into: What is life/ the universe telling me? What am I not in tune with? What are my next aligned steps?
This was both challenging and a great relief. The challenge was to let go of that control and the relief came from not forcing so much. There is real beauty in realising that we are always dancing with life and not forcing it to fit our own pre-fit boxes.
As I had come to those realisations, I was recommended the book: The Fifteen Commitments of Conscious Leadership, that I devoured in a few days. There, I read that there are 4 levels of conscious leadership:
As Me – “Life is me”: At one with all of life, experience peace, no more questions – just knowingness, experience oneness & non-dualism. Unlimited freedom & peace.
That level sounds pretty epic! Work in progress…Through Me – '“I cooperate with life happening”. Co-creator. Allowing, flow, wonder and awe. Believe: Things are perfect, whole complete. Core question: ‘What wants to happen through me?’ Unlimited possibility!
Wow! That was what I was experiencing this inner shift from Level 2 to Level 3 of conscious leadership, or from: ‘By me’ to ‘Through me’! Reading this in the book anchored what I was feeling, and encouraged me to continue surrendering.By Me– '“I make life happen.” Creator. Curiosity, appreciation. Believe: Problems are here for me to learn from. I created the problem, so I can solve it. Key Question: What can I learn? What do I want to create? (that used to be my go-to question!!) Personal empowerment. Define your wants & desires.
To Me– “Life happens to me”. Victim. Blaming and complaining. Believe: There is a problem. Someone is at fault. Someone should fix this. Key Question: Why me? Whose fault is this? Experience separateness, drama as entertainment, and adrenaline high.
A lot of my work as a high performance and leadership coach has been to support leaders go from ‘To me’ to ‘By me’, from victim posture to ownership posture. According to The Fifteen Commitments of Conscious Leadership, 95% of leaders are primarily in victim mode!!
I used to believe that was the fundamental shift that made the difference: taking full ownership. That was until I discovered: surrendering… So actually it is not a matter of balancing: ownership & surrendering, it really is all about going from Ownership to Surrendering.
For my action oriented friends, you might feel the same resistance I felt. Does this mean that this state of surrendering is stronger than ownership? Correct. Here’s why: surrendering can also mean taking action, you surrender to the action you are called to do in that moment. Surrendering can take on both the shapes of action and acceptance.
Here’s the difference with ownership: with an ownership perspective, we can feel anger, annoyance, stress when we can’t take any action or when things don’t go our way - acceptance can be hard pill to swallow when you are in full ownership mode. Whereas surrendering allows both massive action & progress, and full acceptance and peace. Surrendering is a higher form of conciousness and living.
Taoism and Wu Wei
During this exploration phase (still on-going), I read quite a lot on Taoism and going with the flow of life. This is part of my surrendering journey. In essence, the message is the same as in Michael Singer’s works: Accept, Let Go, Surrender.
For someone like me (engineering background…), it takes quite a bit of reading, reflecting, pausing and meditating, to understand what that means. How do I let go? How do I surrender? And then I remember how: When I feel resistance mounting inside me, I say to myself: ‘I accept, I let go of my internal blockages. I go with the flow of life.’ I pause, I breathe deeply and feel the resistance leaving my body. Most of the time this works well, sometimes this doesn’t work, and that’s OK too. It’s all part of the process. The awareness, the pausing, and the commitment to letting go is what matters most.
If you are also on the journey of taking ownership, growing, learning, then I thought you might want to know about the magic of surrendering. It has been a total game changer for me, my well-being, inner peace and joy so I thought it might be for you too! Would love to hear in the comments your own experience and thoughts on ownership, and surrendering.
Thank you for reading,
Enjoy the journey,
Katie
🙌