What do you need to let go?
Author: Sharina Alongi Adkins, MSA

Spring-cleaning is such a wonderful way to restore energy to a home. Clothes, toys, and other material goods that no longer fit our bodies or our minds have no place crowding our closets. I am very nostalgic by nature, so boxing up my things to throw or give away is always difficult for me. I know that I do save a lot of things for my children since my own parents saved almost nothing from my childhood. When I do clean our closets and take the boxes of nice old stuff to our local homeless shelter or hospital thrift store, I feel a rush of new energy.

As many of you know, the past year has been a year of cleaning out for me professionally. This past week, I let go of an even more difficult part of my professional life, The Gentle People Company business name.

The Gentle People Company was a great business name when I was practicing massage therapy and managing a self-help bookstore, but it just didn't fit where my coaching business was heading in the 21st century. Even though my vision is still for everyone to have a kinder, gentler life, the business name was just too hard to explain to business and personal coaching clients and prospects. Coaching itself is a relatively new profession and has been featured on Oprah, in Fortune magazine, the New York Times, and countless other media outlets, but it is still a profession we have to explain to the average person. I didn't want to have to explain where I got my business name, too.

The hardest part of letting go of the business name is that it has been so tied to my newlywed life. My husband and I came up with The Gentle People Company name after we first visited the Missouri Ozarks in 1992 for my 10th West Plains High School reunion. We were newly engaged and were living in the Philadelphia area. I was finishing up business school, and we started dreaming of coming to the Ozarks to open a business that would help people heal and have a gentler outlook on life.

I realize now that in the course of getting engaged and getting married, I somehow let go my own vision of opening a business consulting practice (in my mind it was named Creative Solutions). I realize now that I let go of my Self. I had a new beloved husband in addition to a beloved female psychotherapist/massage therapist I had been seeing. Instead of pursing my own dream of opening a consulting firm focusing on business people's personal and professional development, I put aside my dreams and started following along in someone else's shadow. I let go of the businesswoman I had become and started dreaming of being a healer like my husband and my therapist. I decided that massage therapy would be a nicer way to make a living than consulting.

With The Gentle People Company now my dream, I entered massage therapy school in 1993 while still in business school. My husband and I bought a lovely old home/office building in the Ozarks and began planning our dream to help people heal their mind and bodies. We moved here in 1995, and while my husband, Dr. David Adkins, continues to practice psychology, I grew bored and frustrated with my massage therapy practice and realized I didn't really like owning the self-help bookstore I started either. I didn't know it then, but I was on my way to letting go of others' dreams, and I began to pursue my own.

After discovering there was a profession called coaching, I started business and personal coaching in addition to massage in May of 2000. For a long time, I had realized that most of my massage therapy clients were in physical (and mental) pain because they had stressful lives. I knew what I was doing in the massage studio was temporary unless I could convince them to change their work or life situations. Now I am doing just that when I coach people. I am supporting them and guiding them as they create their ideal work and life situations. I had also been acting as a volunteer business and public relations consultant for civic and community organizations for many years, so the career shift into business coaching made sense for me. Coaching allowed me to integrate the active, business side of me with my gentler, creative side.

Letting go is so difficult, but I had to do what I tell my clients to do -- Stop doing what you hate and start doing what you love. I hated giving people a quick fix with the massages when I knew their lives needed to shift, and, even though I loved my clients, I grew bored with the routine of the treatments. I hated all of the paperwork and inventory aspects of the bookstore. Now I love that I can use my business and personal coaching skills to make a real difference in peoples' lives and in their workplaces. Now I can just do the part of having a bookstore that I love by having a Barnes and Noble affiliation on my website. I get to read and recommend helpful books to people without the hassle of owning a retail bookstore.

I also love The Gentle People Company name, but this past week I realized that it needed to be let go, too. It wasn't me anymore. In fact, I realized that it wasn't even my husband anymore! We had agreed early on that we didn't want his patients to feel obligated to buy books or massage therapy services, so we worked in the same building, but marketed his psychology practice as separate from The Gentle People Company. Even though it was technically my sole proprietorship, I had always felt that The Gentle People Company was our business, since we had created the idea of a healing center together. When I launched the gentlecoach.com website last year, my husband had a page on it, but it was really my website, not his. He had a thriving practice without me. I was trying to live out a dream that didn't even exist anymore!

When I tearfully told my husband of my decision to let go of The Gentle People Company name and pursue my old Creative Solutions dream, he said, "You lost your Self, didn't you." My husband assured me he was supportive of me going in my own direction and admitted he really liked being on his own in his practice. I had made the mistake of so many women and had lived in my husband's shadow and fed on what I thought were his dreams. Now that I have let go what was not me, I have renewed energy to focus on my own work and life creation. The Creative Solutions domain name was no longer available online, so I got creative and decided upon a name that more accurately described me and my dreams. Thus, the birth of www.CreativeBizCoach.com!

So, what do you need to let go? Have you let go of the wrong things? Have you let go of your Self instead of something or someone else you need to let go? Letting go is not easy. No birthing is. But, just as birthing children is a pain well worth enduring, birthing oneself is worth enduring, too. Spring is the time for re-birth!

May you clean the closets of your life and find new energy lurking behind the old stuff!

Copyright 2001, Sharina Alongi Adkins. All rights reserved.








--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sharina Alongi Adkins, MSA is a Business and Personal Coach specializing in working with people who want support and guidance as they create their ideal work and life situations. Contact: sharina@creativebizcoach.com or visit www.CreativeBizCoach.com.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------