Early in my career as a residential real estate broker, I realized that when my clients were stalling in taking action it rarely had to do with the so-called obvious issues, such as market conditions or their financial situation.
No matter how excited a client is about the process of buying or selling their home and beginning a new chapter of their life, each of my clients inevitably reaches that moment where they face the reality:
Every new beginning is accompanied by an ending.
There is no moving on, no moving forward, no moving up, without letting go.
As I’ve expanded the scope of my practice to include coaching clients beyond real estate transactions, I’ve seen this same pattern repeat no matter what type of transition my client is navigating.
The Challenge of Letting Go
We all experience moments in our lives when we face the difficult decision to let go of something that we once held in reverence.
It might be a relationship, a job, a home that no longer fits our lives, a habit that’s not serving us, material possessions.
Or it may be something more intangible: a belief, an attitude toward something, a way of working, a commute, a lifestyle, the way we navigate our daily experience, how we perceive the world.
When I work with clients in my real estate practice, they often confront needing to let go in all of these areas at the same time.
Even when we know that what we are letting go has not been serving us, the decision to let go can be challenging.
Life is inherently uncertain. Strategies that worked yesterday may not work tomorrow. Stable ground can become shaky without warning. The smallest changes can create big ripple effects, leaving us feeling unmoored.
When we feel like the earth is rumbling beneath our feet, our instinct is to cling tightly to whatever we can. Clinging feels secure, even if what we’re holding onto isn’t tethered to anything stable.
3 Mindset Shifts to Aid in Letting Go
Letting go can trigger a deep process of self-discovery and growth.
In the past 16 years of helping clients navigate transitions, let go, and move on, I’ve found three crucial mindset shifts that help in the process.
(1) Detach From Expectations
Any Realtor who tells a client “it’s just a house” misses the point.
Beneath everything we are called to let go is an expectation about an outcome that we didn’t meet.
It’s often not the home that a seller is clinging to, but the expectations and vision they had for their life in that home that may not have come to fruition in the way they had hoped.
We enter every situation — a new home, a relationship, a job, a business — with a vision for the potential of the opportunity and an expectation for what might unfold.
Sometimes these expectations are conscious, but often they are implicit — we may not realize we had these expectations.
When we don’t meet those expectation or those visions don’t manifest in reality, letting go can feel like giving up.
When we release our expectations for how we believe something should be, or how we wanted it to be, it becomes easier to let go of what’s no longer serving us without the guilt and shame often associated with giving up.
(2) Accept the Present For What It Is
One of the hardest parts of letting go is the story we tell ourselves about what it means.
I’ve worked with many clients who have sold their homes at a loss. (Yes, it happens — more often than many agents would lead you to believe.)
There’s often a psychological block when it comes to selling for a number that is less than what you paid.
But what can really trip up my clients is the story they tell about the fact and what it says about them: that they made a poor decision when they decided to buy however many years ago; that they overpaid at the time.
It’s amazing how quickly we can reframe decisions we made years ago based on current circumstances.
We often hold onto things from the past because we are attached to a certain outcome or a certain idea of how things should be.
When we can accept the present moment without judgment or resistance, we can begin to see things more clearly and make decisions from a place of clarity rather than fear or attachment.
(3) Remember Your Agency
A crucial piece to shifting our mindset from giving up to letting go is to recognize that we always have a choice.
We have the power to choose what we allow in our lives and what we don’t. We can choose to hold onto something that’s causing us pain, or we can choose to let it go and make room for something better.
When we release something that’s been holding us back, we create space for new opportunities and experiences to come into our lives.
We may discover new passions, new relationships, or new paths that we never would have considered before.
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