As I sit and reflect on a few words by the great philosopher Lil Wayne, I realize that a few lyrics he imparted upon us in his 2012 banger No Worries, really sums up how I have been feeling these days. If you recall, they went a little something like this:
“Look me in my face, I ain’t got no worries, I ain’t got no worries, I ain’t got no worries.”
Lil Wayne
It’s an anthem about all the things Wayne is not worrying himself about. You see, I wasn’t always this quick to embrace this same no worries attitude, but the new decade was the beginning of owning big mental shifts and changes in how I have been approaching just about everything in my life. I tuned into a podcast episode with Joel Osteen called Release Control, when it suddenly became clear to me how work-centered and money-centered my focus has been my entire adult life. I’ve been so obsessed with achieving this notion of “success” professionally that I’ve made my levels of happiness and self-worth dependent on how well I felt I was doing in my career.
By the end of 2019, the constant pressure I had been putting on myself around business goals and things I wanted to accomplish were weighing me down like a ton of bricks. Not only that, but as I started to look at other areas of my life more closely, I realized how unbalanced and dissatisfied I was. I had a bunch of areas of my life that had grown in importance to me but I had not spent any real time nurturing them. My approach has always been to just focus on getting the business goals done first, then I could start working on other things. But I now understand, life doesn’t work in a one thing at a time fashion. Life is about having balance.
I have always been that girl that needed to stay ten steps ahead of everything with meticulously mapped out plans for every “what if” scenario imaginable when it came to my career. I am sure you can imagine that this type of thinking only leaves you more stressed and anxious because you’re essentially trying to have a strategy for things that may never come to pass and not even within your control. Talk about a waste of time and energy. Sure it’s ok to be diligent and have a plan to work through things. That’s normal and even the responsible thing to do. But I am learning that it’s not just about the plan, it’s about allowing room for flexibility and change because in life, things happen and more importantly, you change. Things may not go as planned and not having the perfect solution is actually okay.
As a matter of fact, not having the answers all the time can be a blessing. It makes you more resourceful when it comes to problem solving the real-life challenges that will come your way. But with me, if things weren’t taking shape the way I envisioned, I was allowing that to derail and control my attitude and response to the situation. Instead of being resourceful, I would internalize whatever happened as if were a personal failure and direct reflection of me and my abilities. I would combat these perceived failures by working harder to change things around, staying up later, and immersing myself completely on the goal no matter what I had to sacrifice. So if it required giving up spending time with friends to relax and recharge, neglecting conversations with my mom or sister, not spending time with my then husband or making time for myself – that’s what I did for the sake of trying to achieve success.
I am learning that there will be things that happen in my life that I won’t always have control over and that resisting this truth will only leave me feeling more frustrated, stressed and unable to move forward from the situation. Living life trying to be in control of everything is exhausting; it can be hurtful to those I care about; and wreaks havoc on my overall wellbeing.
“God is not asking you to control everything. He is asking you to cast your cares.”
Joel Osteen
My faith had clearly been lacking and now that I’ve been doing the inner work I need to do in order to get more spiritually anchored, I understand that God is not asking me to control everything. Much of my frustrations have been because I have been trying to control things I was never meant to control. The truth is, the only thing I can control is my attitude and my response to what happens to me. So I am casting all my worries to God. I will continue to do my part in the realm of what I can control, but leaving the rest up to Him. Life is too short to be worried about things I can’t control. So when you look me in my face these days, just know, I am walking in faith and that I ain’t got no worries.
Have you struggled with giving up control in your life? Sound off in the comments and let me know.
