The Art of Letting Go & Moving On
The art of letting go and moving on – the one, major skill you need to learn so that you can more quickly fall in love with your life again after a challenging transition – a job or career change, a break up, the kids growing up and moving on – whatever that transition might be for you, letting go and moving on is an art and once you learn how to do it, any challenging transition you face in life will become easier.
Underneath any challenging life transition is a sea of emotions – and before I go any further let me normalize that for you. First, life is a sea of emotions on the daily and big transitions seem to bring those emotions crashing into your life like waves at the beach where you just can’t get your legs underneath you or catch your breath. You are not alone in having big feelings when you break up with someone, or your kids head off to college, or you get fired from or let go from a job, or a host of any other big transitions that come into your life. Humans are emotional beings – you just can’t ditch your emotions.
There was a time when I used to let the big emotions of life transitions get the best of me – struggling for much longer than I should have – which caused me to spiral into thinking only about the event that took place and not how I was going to let go and move on.
In mid to late May of 2021, my wife and I were preparing for a big move to Massachusetts for her job. Up to this point, we had lived in Raleigh, North Carolina for almost 20 years, having moved there from New York to raise our kids in a place where the pace was slower, where we could live closer to work, and where we could focus on being a more connected family as the kids grew up more so than a disconnected one.
In Raleigh, every day my wife and I got to work in the same school where our kids attended. We could be present for their school plays, sporting events, teacher conferences, and at times just being able to pass them in the halls provided us great joy – well, maybe not so much when they were in middle school – we barely were acknowledged as being alive let alone their parents.
Getting ready to make the big move at the end of June – with about 30 days left of being in the office at my current job – things started to get real for me in terms of change. While the change was an exciting one for my family – my wife was getting a promotion, taking on a big new role reaching a goal she had set for herself. I started to have big feelings about letting go and moving on.
Every day I was faced with an unknown future – while my wife was moving on in her career, I elected to do a full 180 degree change by leaving education and becoming a solopreneur as a life coach and podcast host.
Everyday I felt the big emotions around the change we were about to make and what it meant for me and for my family. Logically, I knew that letting go and moving on from a life we knew for 18 years was actually a good thing for us – it was time for a new adventure. But the struggle of letting go and moving on was always present.
You may be asking yourself right at this moment, how do I let go and move on? You may be facing a work situation, or professional relationship, or friendship or romantic relationship, or your kids might be grown and flown and you are stuck in an emotional river of misery without knowing how it will get better or when.
You’re thinking to yourself – I know exactly what I’d tell other people about how to move on and let go – it's SO easy to point out to my friend what they need to do to let go and move on. But at this moment it is so frickin hard for me to take my own advice.
Exactly, because you can’t see the forest for the trees, because you can’t do what is necessary to move on and let go right in this moment, let me help guide you.
Letting go and moving has a lot to do with self-preservation (staying in the past) and perseverance (focusing on the future). As a human you spend 50% of your life thinking about the past – what you could have done differently, changes you should have made, or wanting life to be exactly how it was because that life was known to you and that is comfortable and easy for your brain to understand. Even if your past was not great, the comfort of what is known always feels better than the uncomfort of the unknown.
The other 50% of your life you spend worrying about the future. You worry that you don’t know how to let go and move on. You worry about all the what ifs in your life. You worry that you don’t know how you will ever feel better again and the weight of the future feels like a 100 pound sack on your shoulders.
Again, let me normalize this for you – living 50% in the past and 50% worrying about the future is 100% what we do as humans. The art of letting go and moving on is learning to spend a percentage of your time in the present dealing with those waves of emotions that keep crashing in on you.
There are four stages to the art of letting go and moving on.
Shock/Denial
Anger
Acceptance
Moving on
The shock/denial phase is hard because everything is so raw, right in this moment. You are going to want to be focused on what you are feeling. You are going to want to be focused on how the situation is making you feel – again, this is our tendency as humans so it is normal but the art of letting go and moving on requires you to zoom out and focus on the facts of the situation first. To be clear, facts are not your thoughts about what is happening. Let’s take an example that the majority of people can relate to – the breakup of a relationship. Your mind is going to want to tell you that a fact is something like the other person is a jerk or didn’t really care about me. In this moment, those might feel like the facts but they are not truly facts because not everyone would agree with you. A fact is more like the other person said something or did something to you. A fact is something everyone could agree upon - yep, they said that to you or did that to you.
If you are in the middle of trying to let go and move on, press pause and write down all the facts of the situation you are facing and then come back.
Ok, once you have the facts of the situation – in our example, let’s say the other person cheated on you – that’s a fact because it happened. Now you want to list out all of the thoughts you had about that situation. And for each thought you will want to write down the feeling that came up for you with that thought. Go ahead and press pause again to do the work and come back when you are ready.
In this example, anger and sadness are most likely the two biggest feelings one has when a person cheats on you. Again, 100% normal so let’s deal with that anger. In other situations you may need to deal with the sadness – the key in this step is to actually focus on the feeling, not shove it down and make it go away by doing any of what I call the OVER behaviors - drinking, drugs, working, shopping, Netflixing, social media rabbit holes.
Here is where I always remind my clients – don’t fight or ignore your feelings – feel them! That’s the first two steps in letting go and moving on and these are key moments for your future because once you have this skill getting to stages three (acceptance) and four (moving on) can happen much quicker – and that’s a game changer for your life from this day forward.
Step three – acceptance. Once you are through the shock/denial and actually dealing with your feelings you can move on to acceptance.
Acceptance is where you will focus on your options for the future. As much as you are going to want to do this quickly, use this mantra I use and my clients find useful – go slow to go fast. First, you are going to reflect on your past using the information you discovered in steps one and two and then you are going to use that to create a vision for your future. Where do you want to be in one year, five, ten? More importantly, who do you want to be in those time frames as well? This is a crucial step in the letting go and moving on process.
Finally, you’re ready – it’s time to move on. Rejoice – you should be in a new and better place right now. The key here is giving yourself time to embrace this new version of yourself. The #1 thing I see in people is they get to the move on stage but they do not allow themselves time to enjoy this new version of themselves. They want to fall back to the previous version of themselves – which is normal because it is safe. My advice, be proud. Remember, it took a ton of courage and work to get to this stage – embrace it, be proud, not everyone makes it here.
The end result of learning how to let go and move is that you will grow as a person more quickly than others in your life and this is one of the most important things you can do to change the circumstances in your life and how you live.
As soon as you stop changing. As soon as you stop growing. As soon as you stop moving forward – really stretching who you are, that is where you find yourself feeling stuck in life and in need of help.
If you find yourself unable to let go and move on, send me an email to coaching@jasonramsden.com and learn how I teach my clients the art of letting go and moving on.