Destroying the Old to Release the New

Last week I was reading the blog of Christine Martell. Christine published a blog post recently entitled My Business has Cracked! This post really struck home for me, in particular where she says:

“The hardest part for me has been to let go of the dream. To disconnect from the years of effort and begin to allow it all to unravel. Knowing what I’ve been doing isn’t working, and allowing myself to feel it have been two very different processes”

Our businesses are so much a part of ourselves. We get pregnant with ideas and hope and possibilities. We gestate and treasure the development phase, we tolerate the uncomfortable and painful processes because of the potential that we know will be birthed in due time. We labour and sweat and push to give birth to this business and create and develop it to be everything we hope for it.

And then sometimes it fails. Dies. Goes under.

It takes our dreams and vision with it. Our self-esteem, our identity was tied up in that business and now it’s gone. Who are we, what is left of us, when so much of our effort has been wasted and misdirected?

Early this year I closed down the Life Coaching side of my business, Excellence Coaching Solutions. I had delayed making that decision for nearly a year. I was struggling to run it, my heart wasn’t in it, it was agonising work to write anything. My amazing huge vision from when I had started it four years previously, my vision to change the world, to help people, to improve their lives, had died a slow and painful death.

It wasn’t that I hadn’t done a lot of good work, because I had. I had coaching clients, I’d helped people, I’d changed some people’s worlds. However, I had changed and that business wasn’t what I needed to be doing. I had to destroy it before I could move on. And that destroying hurt.

Christine goes on to say “I have new images; some photographs, some illustrations. I’m starting to discern new directions. It’s still big and fuzzy and doesn’t lend itself to coherent description yet. I’m looking in. Surrounding myself with new groups of people who are doing totally different types of things in the world.

I’m realizing I created tools to help people feel more connected and alive inside organizations, to combat soul death. I created soul death for myself doing it. So I need to allow myself to come alive again. Regroup. Find my authentic voice again.”

She’s recreating herself, digging deep to work out exactly what it is that she needs to be doing now, what it is that’s going to create that life for her soul that she craves. She’s replacing soul death with creativity and authenticity. For myself, I can’t wait to see what Christine creates from this, what wonderful new creation rises from the ashes of her dreams.

When we let go of something that isn’t working, be it a business, a toxic relationship, a bad habit, the clutter that ties us down, we feel pain. The pain of change, of our ego letting go. However we’re also freed to start anew. To take the experience we’ve gained and look at what we really want and need and what is important to prevent that soul death.

What are you persevering with that you need to let go of in order to release you for what’s next?