It Will All Work Out: The Freedom of Letting Go

by Kevin Hart

if you don’t have your shit together, it’s that very lack of togetherness that becomes your sentence to pain and suffering.

To be asleep in your day-to-day means to be living it without awareness. To let your bullshit take the lead. And living this way has its consequences. You’ll be reading about some of mine here.

sometimes the only thing that will shake you hard enough—that gets the message through your skull that you need to change your ways and get better—is to hit a bottom. And every bottom is different for every person. I’m talking about the darkest times when you hit that bottom. When everything is going wrong. When it seems like God woke up and came down to earth just to slap you across the face in front of everyone. Then left, and decided to come back one more time to slap you again for good measure. There are all kinds of bottoms. They’re different for every person. In some cases, people hit a bottom when they do some stupid shit and end up in the hospital or a courtroom. For an unlucky few, the only bottom is death.

when you have to sit with the consequences of your actions, and you really don’t want to live with them, you almost have no choice but to gain a new perspective and become a different person.

these monsters cannot eat when you’re living right. Why? Because they have no food. Their food is your attention. Their food is your trust. Their food is your unthinking obedience.

You have to know your enemy. Learn how they operate. Find out what they eat. What they’re using you to get, and how they’re doing it. Once you’re able to recognize them, then you can start outsmarting them and put them back in their place. ’Cause they do have a place. We’ll get to that.

you only fear what you don’t know.

Then a single word popped into my mind: Control. I just wanted control. When I had it, I felt like I could breathe. Like everything was going to be okay. And when I didn’t have it, I was filled with anxiety, feeling like every little thing could go wrong.

But no matter what form your Control Monster ends up taking, they all serve the exact same purpose: to manage anxiety, and make sure you’re safe and successful.

Some people’s control happens right out in the open, in plain sight. That’s the style my monster loves. Whereas other people’s control can happen more beneath the surface. This style is less obvious and harder to spot, since it’s mostly operating inside someone’s mind.

Control is having power over a situation, yourself, or others, and being able to influence what goes down.

When you can’t release control, you’re uptight and tense. You might never ask for help or you refuse it when it comes, because you don’t want someone else coming in and messing things up.

In the sneaky version of this monster, one of its key methods of control is avoidance. If certain situations or people make you feel anxious, you’ll steer clear of them. And for a lot of people, one of the biggest causes of anxiety we avoid is conflict.

Let’s take failure as an example. Nobody wants to feel like a failure or have a plan they care about go wrong. And if the Control Monster sees failure as a potential outcome at the end of the road, it can try to avoid that outcome by jumping into action nonstop. It has you fighting your way through and doing everything yourself, because it doesn’t believe other people can do a good job or look after your best interests.

Any form of control is really just protection. And you get protective because you’re afraid. And you’re afraid because you don’t trust.

Let me say it again: Any form of control, at the end of the day, is really just protection. And you get protective because you’re afraid of something bad happening. And the reason you’re afraid of something bad happening again is because you don’t trust yourself or others to handle a situation.

take another look at the kind of behavior we’ve been talking about: you either charge into a situation and take on everything yourself, or you run away from it.

you start prejudging others. When you step out on the field, you may feel like the other players don’t match your level of passion. They don’t push as hard at practice. They don’t want the win as much as you do or understand your vision for how to get it. They might have a different strategy—a different way of doing things—that you judge as stupid or being less effective than yours.

despite this monster’s best efforts to control everything, it will ultimately end up making a bunch of stupid decisions that will get your ass in new kinds of trouble.

Eventually, no one will want to be around you because they are constantly belittled and not seen as having any kind of intelligence of their own. As soon as you lose your success, they will be gone from your lives because it just doesn’t feel good to be around you. Besides, if you weren’t so controlling and took their advice, maybe you’d still be successful. Because the fact is, like everyone else, the Control Monster is wrong just as often as it is right. The only problem is that this particular kind of monster doesn’t notice its mistakes, only everyone else’s.

when you use avoidance as protection, you’re strapping huge limitations on yourself and what’s possible in your life. You may never get what you want because you’re a pushover. There’s so much you never take a chance on, because it involves even the smallest amount of risk. Your dreams might sit on the shelf, collecting dust. You miss out on so many amazing things you could have done and people you could have met. You...

I had to cowboy up and start examining my shortcomings, not the flaws of others. I had to see how I wasn’t working with people in a smart way. I was setting them up to fail, whether it was putting them in a situation they didn’t yet have the experience to handle or not giving them the training and access they needed to succeed or holding them to impossible standards because no one is perfect all the time.

I stopped giving people energy or engaging with them, because I felt their level of go-getting was low. The thing is, most of the time it wasn’t really low at all. They just didn’t go about things the way I did. But I assumed that if their way wasn’t like mine, well, that couldn’t be correct. And if their way was like mine, then I could do it better and they were unnecessary.

EVENTUALLY, YOU’LL REACH A POINT where you are fed up with the Control Monster. You need to destroy it so you can finally be free and happy.

The first thing to understand if you want to be free is that letting go is the only way. And that might sound scary. After all, you’ve spent your whole life trying to avoid this. But if you look back on it, your need to control didn’t make things any safer. It only made them smaller. It will ultimately shrink everything, from your joy to your relationships to your life span.

Letting go frees up so much energy and thought power. It will create space in your life, space that you need to grow into who you can be. More people, more opportunities, and more of life will flow into that space, because nature abhors a vacuum.

Stress is a limiter. The less we feel, the more we can take on.

the first step in training the Control Monster is letting go and giving chances—both to yourself and others.

So the second step to take if you want to train the monster is to give it something better to do. Let’s...

The difference between positive and negative control is ultimately about where the urge is coming from.

When the Control Monster is running wild, it’s usually coming from a place of fear. This can cause you to shrivel up, micromanage, mistrust, or obsess. But when you deal with those feelings, and tame the monster, you become someone who’s proactive and productive. You become a better communicator, manager, delegator, and collaborator.