Don't Be Afraid of Letting Go : Detachment Will Set You Free

I'm your host , ryan Spence , the Big Law Dropout , life coach , author , speaker , lover of hoodies , hip-hop and big , hairy , audacious goals . If you're tired of living the life you think you should want , and ready to start living the life you do want , this podcast will help you get from where you are to where you really want to be . So now we're friends .

I invite you to grab a drink , take a seat and allow me to guide you towards living a life that's lit . Hey , hey , welcome to episode 117 of the Triple C Project . Woo , I've got something to talk about today . Before we get into it . Uh , let's give you some updates . So the the upcoming book , the triple C project . It has a release date .

It is now available for pre-order on Amazon and it will be released on the 17th of November , that's Sunday , the 17th of November . So you can go ahead over to Amazon and pre-order now at the pre-order price , because the price will go up shortly after release .

So if you want to get in there and get yourself a good deal , then go ahead to your local Amazon store and pre-order now . And if you're sitting on the fence thinking I'm not sure , if I want to pre-order , I'm not quite sure what the book's about . First of all , you listen to this podcast .

If you listen to this podcast , then the book is definitely something that you're going to be into . Otherwise you wouldn't be here . But because I'm a generous guy , you can still grab a free chapter of the book .

Um , if you head to my website , I am Ryan Spencecom uh , there'll be a link there or a pop-up and you just pop in your email address and you will be sent the introductory chapter , uh , to the book , which will set the tone . Um , and let you know this is a book for me and I need to go ahead and pre-order my copy .

Pre-order is great for us writers because it just helps to helps in this world of algorithms . It kind of helps to kind of show the algorithm that people are interested in the book and allows more people to find the book . So if you have an even an inkling , um , that this book might be for you , if you listen to this podcast .

If you have read any of the things that I've written , if you love the first book , please , please , um , don't wait till it's out . Go ahead and pre-order , um , and , uh , help a brother out , it'd be much appreciated .

Uh , next thing , uh , yoga , as you , as you well , actually you don't know because I haven't told you this , but I have or what you do know is that obviously I've been teaching again this year , loving it really re-energized me , and I'm bringing my yoga teaching and coaching .

I'm trying to bring them closer and closer together and make create this kind of cohesive ball of methods of bringing awareness , clarity , confidence , courage all of that good stuff to people . Um , movement , breath , mindset , all of that , um . But I've also , um signed up to do my next level of teacher training , my 300 hour teacher training .

Uh , I'm just over two weeks into it and , man , I love it . I love learning . I'm so curious . I just like , just want to take all of this stuff in , just go sit in a cave somewhere and just shut out distractions and take it all in . Unfortunately , I don't have that luxury , but it's great .

I'm taking in stuff , I'm applying it in lessons week by week , doing it bit by bit . It's fantastic . One of the things that I've been wanting to do this year since I had this regular class .

I got this regular class teaching at Open House , which is literally the highlight of my week is I want to teach more , and trying to find a way to teach more with everything else that I've got going on and finding that time is a bit of a challenge , but I finally sorted out my Zen Den here where I record the podcast , amongst other things , and I am now

teaching

online .

I have a weekly class 45 minutes , 12 o'clock to 1245 UK time , so that's a lunchtime class here in the UK to just get you out of that midweek slump , you know , get the body moving , get the blood flowing , get you , bring you down to some stillness , get you feeling calm and reconnected with yourself , and I'm really excited about building a community around this

. So I would love you to join me . Join me for that class class if you're in the UK . It's the perfect way to break up the week . It's in the midweek slump , you know .

Rather than sitting and having lunch at your desk because you're overworked and overstressed and staring at your emails , take some time for yourself away from the screen and , trust me , your body , on your mind and your soul are really going to thank you for it .

And if you're in Asia and Singapore or Hong Kong , it's kind of towards your dinner time , so you could get a practice in just before dinner or maybe have an early dinner and get a practice in afterwards , and if you're in the in the US and the Eastern time zone , it's a perfect way to start your day .

So , wherever you are in the world , this is a beauty of teaching online .

You can attend and you can become a part of what I am hoping is going to be a beautiful community of lawyers , corporate professionals , people who just need to get off the hamster wheel for a moment and dedicate some time to themselves , to taking care of their mind , their body and their breath , and their breath and their soul . Uh .

So I hope to see you there . Head to IamRyanSpencecom . Slash yoga for all their deets . How to book times of classes , um , and yeah , who knows ? Um , over the coming months there may be more classes added , depending upon how the community grows . So really excited to see you on the mat , cool .

So today's topic is kind of there's a yoga influence to it a little bit . So there's a quote that is often talked about in yoga . So there's a , I guess , a preeminent yoga text , the Bhagavad Gita I can't speak today which anyone who's in a 200 hour yoga teacher training is kind of required reading .

I won't go into what the book is about too much now , maybe I'll do that in a later episode .

But there was a quote that is often attributed to the book which is about yoga , and that quote is yoga is the journey of the self to the self through the self , and I actually use that quote in my chapter of my book , and that journey is a journey related to finding a place of peaceful indifference .

So this journey to yourself is about finding yourself , who is universal consciousness , and in that journey to yourself you shed things along the way and you find this beautiful space of peaceful indifference where it's about detachment , not attachment . So you're not trying to find and attach to a particular thing or feeling .

You're literally trying to shed everything and just detach , and that is the ultimate consciousness . You can get quite deep here and yeah , as I said , I've been doing this training , so I'm getting deep into the philosophy , but that's kind of where I wanted to come at for today's episode .

Is this concept really of detachment , of letting go , because sometimes we can hold on so tight to something that it starts to take over , uh , and the thing that we loved then becomes the thing that , if we don't hate , is the thing that causes us the most amount of stress and grief . Um , and that's no way to live .

So I share a story um this week and the email , the email I sent to my email list Um , if you're not on my email list , you need to get on it .

I'm going to start getting better at sharing more there and less on social media , as I , as I kind of find alternative ways to connect with people that that energize me , um , and sort of reduce my social media , um , my social media use time , shall we say ? Um , so get on that email list .

Uh , head to Iamryanspencecom and sign up and , um , you'll be kept in the loop anyway , slightly , of course . So the story I was talking about is it's about a video I saw when I was scrolling through social media .

I think it might have been Facebook , which I rarely do , actually , but recently I think it was Facebook because you know even , yeah , I'm a coach and I know I know kind of all the things about intention and um , and I'm a yoga teacher as well , but I mean still human .

You know , sometimes you just want to scroll , um , and it's intentional , it's like , yeah , I like I literally just want to scroll now , like I know I'm not really doing it productive , but that's fine , um .

So I was in one of those intentional moments of just scrolling through my um social media and in doing that , uh , I came across a video of um the actor , a martial arts expert , jackie Chan . Um , if you've ever seen Jackie Chan movie , jackie Chan is just , he's just epic . Um .

And if you've ever seen the movie rush hour , um with Chris Tucker , um , the two of them together um , make a really good team in that . Um , in that . But anyway , this was , I don't know , this must have been a good few years ago , but he was on .

Jackie Chan was on this game show and he was kind of showing off well , not showing off , he was exhibiting his martial arts prowess by breaking through 12 concrete blocks with his bare hands .

So if you know anything about martial arts , you've probably seen something like this before , where someone goes up , they kind of get into the zone and then they just , with their bare fists punch through wood , concrete , whatever , without injury , and it's very , very impressive and it kind of shows the power , in some sense , of the power of the mind .

I guess is what is one way of putting it ? Um , so , but in this particular um clip this exhibition in the hand that he was punching through the blocks with he was holding an egg , right , okay . So imagine this open up your hands , imagine you've got an egg in your hand , and then roll your hand up into a fist , okay , trying not to crack the egg .

Okay , that in itself could be quite challenging . Now then imagine taking that fist with the egg in your hand and punching down into a concrete block , into something hard . What do you think is going to happen ?

Well , if it was me , the egg's going to crack , right , because the combination of squeezing your hand into a fist and then the force of punching down into a hard surface , surely the egg is going to break . But that isn't what happened . He finished his performance , opened his hands and that egg was still intact . It wasn't cracked .

He did show that it was a real egg by cracking it at the end . So it wasn't like hard boiled or a toy egg or a dummy or anything like that . It was a real egg , but it was intact .

And it was quite amazing because , as I just sort of tried to illustrate to you through that imagery , you'd expect that , to break through those blocks , the force that was needed and to protect his fingers by creating a tight enough fist the egg would crack because he'd be squeezing too hard .

But the fact is , in order to create the force to achieve the goal , he didn't need to squeeze that hard . And that's kind of what got me thinking , in conjunction with , um , the philosophy that I've been looking into as part of my um 300 hour yoga teacher training um , this concept of letting go , because sometimes you can want something .

You probably think about something that you've wanted really , really bad .

Um , you know , whatever it is , whether it's a it's it's a particular gift , whether it's a promotion , it is , whether it's a particular gift , whether it's a promotion , whether it's a particular opportunity that you're desperate to come your way , that you're trying to achieve , and there's this kind of fine line between being focused on the thing and then allowing the

thing to basically take you over , take you over to consume your every waking moment , to the point where you become so laser focused . You have this tunnel vision , to the point of rigidity that you just can't see anything that's beyond this thing you're trying to achieve . You're almost obsessed with it , and it's kind of how we're conditioned . In a way .

It's kind of like if you want something bad enough , you've got to give it your all . I mean , everything you've been told to this point is you've got to hustle harder , you've got to grab hold of that thing a little bit tighter . I mean hold on to it . But actually , is that healthy ? Is that the best way of getting what it is that you want ?

Because in the process of becoming so consumed by this thing , you fail to notice everything around you . You neglect your friend , your family , your health in pursuit of the thing , and the thing that you thought was going to make you happy , was going to make you successful , is actually the thing that does the complete opposite .

It's the thing that makes you start to lose yourself , and so I was thinking about this in relation to a couple of things really .

So , for example , when I was in big law and knowing it wasn't right for me , but also feeling I had to cling on to this prestigious career because what else was I going to do , and it was only once I let go , I guess , let go of the idea of what it meant , let go of the identity of being a lawyer , of that being who I am , and really kind of started

to figure out who I actually was . I mean , I wasn't this job , I wasn't this career , it was just something that I did . And once I started to detach from what that meant , I started to see myself and my life more clearly .

I started to see myself and my life more clearly and even if I had decided to stay in big law , I would have done it completely differently to how I'd been doing it to that point . I wouldn't have been so attached to what that meant to other people . It would have been this is the job that I do , but I am all of these other things .

This is not who I am , um , I mean . So ultimately , yes , I decided to to walk away , but that could have been another way that I could have done it , because approaching it from a sense of detachment would have just may reduce the reduced , the stress , made it a lot more , a lot easier really to be in that world .

I also was thinking about it in relation to this podcast , funnily enough . Um . So I had a couple of weeks where I just didn't put an episode out and I was really sort of soul searching about whether I wanted to continue doing the podcast .

I'd started the podcast to promote my first book and the idea was that it had to be easy , like I had to do it because it was easy and it felt good . And if at any point it didn't , then I would reevaluate . So I had a little period of the last couple of weeks where I was sort of thinking you know , do I really want to do this ?

And again I got to a place of detachment .

I started off thinking you have to do it . You've committed to this . This is kind of what you need to do . It's a very important part of your business , of what you're trying to achieve , of the message that you're trying to share . You can't possibly give it up .

And so there was a part of me that was very much kind of clinging on to you have to do this . But then I realised that but it's that obligation that is actually not making this fun for me anymore . And the whole point of this is that it had to be fun , it had to be easy .

Okay , yeah , it's not always fun , but I mean , it definitely didn't need to be making me sort of miserable and stressing me out . And so I actually got to a point where I was like you know what , I'm going to let it go , maybe I'll just not do it anymore .

And once I did that , once I released the grip on this thing that I had to do , I became lighter and I could breathe this sigh of relief and then I could approach the whole process a whole lot differently , with a clearer head , you know , with greater insight .

And that's why I'm recording this episode today , because I was like , actually , yeah , I'm good , I'm going to do it , but I'm going to , I'm going to reevaluate , um , I'm going to do it in a way that feels good , but at the same time , if I decide it's not working , then I can quite easily let it go . And I think that's the thing is .

I'm at a place where I like doing it . I hope that you find some value from it as well . That's why I do it , but it doesn't define me . So if I decide I'm not going to do it anymore , I don't have to do it anymore .

And sidebar , the funny thing is is that before I recorded this episode , I kind of went to just look at the stats for the last week just to kind of see , I mean , what the download numbers were and that kind of thing .

And there were a ton of downloads over a hundred downloads in the last week , even though an episode hasn't been released for a couple of weeks .

So people are finding it , people are listening and there's a body of work there that I've created that , even if I decided to stop today , people could still gain value from and they still would have done what I set out to do when I created this podcast .

So that's just two examples from from my own life where , detaching from the outcome I mean letting go of the thing not holding on too tight , um , to kind of how things , how I thought things should be or what I thought I should do , and kind of loosening the grip has allowed me to just feel a little bit more free and to gain a little bit more clarity and

ultimately , to have a little bit more fun . Have a little bit more fun .

And so , going back to Jackie Chan and the egg and the fist and the breaking of the concrete blocks a question I have for you , or what I kind of guess I'd like to leave you with is , as you think about something that you want , that you're trying to achieve , that you're trying to make happen , that you're putting a lot of effort , a lot of your heart and

soul into , if you feel that it's taking over and you have very little time to think about or to do anything else , I'd like you to think about this what if , like Jackie Chan , you just loosened your grip a little bit , you didn't hold on so tight ? What if you softened your focus ?

Rather than staring like a laser at this thing that's in front of you , you just softened your gaze a little bit and allowed your periphery vision to come into play ? What might you see that you'd be missing ? What other options or opportunities or ideas might present themselves to you ? What support might they be , what people might be there who could help you ?

Because when we let go a little bit , when we don't hold on so tight , we create a little space for other things to appear , for other things to happen , for other people to enter in , and that can actually help us get to where we're going quicker and in a way that's more sustainable than if we just do it all ourselves . Hold on tight and don't let go .

So that's what I'd like to leave you with this week Don't be afraid of letting go , don't be afraid of loosening your grip .

I saw something on Instagram recently about the concept of giving 80% rather than a hundred all the time , leaving a little bit of space for rest , for recuperation , for inspiration , for blue sky , thinking I mean just space , just leaving that space , because within that space , things can occur . Things can happen .

You'll see things that you didn't know were there , see things that will make you think , hmm , maybe there is another way of doing things . Okay , I can riff on this for who knows how long , but I'm going to leave it there . So don't be afraid of letting go . That's all from me this week .

Thanks for being here and until next week , stop living a life of lethargy . Stop living life of lethargy . Thanks for tuning in to the Triple C Project . In the spirit of the Triple C , here's three things that you can do to support the show Head to ratethispodcastcom , slash tripleC or over to your favorite podcast app and leave a review .

Reviews really help people checking out shows to see what they can expect and how the show can help them . Second thing you can do share , share this episode , share a previous episode with a friend , someone who you feel could benefit from what I'm throwing down on this here . Show and number three head to IamRyanSpencecom . Get on the mailing list .

I'll be sharing news about the show , news about what I'm up to my new book start writing soon . So to be the first to be in the know , you need to get yourself on the list . Really appreciate you being here and until next week , stop living a life of lethargy . Start living life lit .