Acknowledging That I Have Enough…and Letting Go

A couple decades ago I had the privilege of hiring and working with a recent college graduate named Molly Israel. I wrote about her in Never Ask for the Sale. At the time, I was running sales and marketing for a hospitality digital marketing company, and she was our crack newbie in the department. I shared my account of her one-year review, when she pushed me on the raise I was going to give her. She did it logically, elegantly, and every bit as forcefully as reasonable given the extreme level of contribution she had made in her first year.

I agreed with her. Gave her what she asked for. Of course. Because she had earned it.

More than 20 years later, when I was looking for a resource to support marketing for my book, I delicately reached out to Molly to see if she would be interested. We had had very little interaction in that gap. She was and is working partial time for an architecture firm doing great work that I could see often.

Unbelievably, she said yes. She agreed to work for three months. I paid her what she asked for (of course), but her “yes” was a favor. We both knew that. If you have followed “my” posts around my book launch, as many of you have (because you’ve shared your appreciation), all of that has been Molly. The best examples are this and this and this. I gave very little input. Very occasional notes. She ingested the spirit and content of the book and translated it, blending that with her sense of me, my heart, my occasional sense of humor. Three months became more than a year.

What could be better?

I’m coming up on a year since publication date, and I feel complete with marketing Never Ask. It has sold fine. People who have read it have expressed what seems like authentic appreciation. It has only five-star reviews. Great. I will let it live on and morph into whatever it chooses to be, and I know that may be (will be eventually) not much. So it goes. It’s been a great experiment. I wrote about the journey here if you’re interested.

But thinking about not working with Molly anymore, that was emotionally crushing. So I went to ChatGPT, and asked “what could Molly do?” Essentially. I got great ideas about extrapolating all my coaching work and blogging and teaching into consumable, purchasable nuggets. I got a great suggestion about resuscitating Leadership Camp. There were ideas about promoting different coaching models, advocating more for the kind of speaking or moderating or facilitation work I most love.

But even after getting a jolt of excitement from those ideas, I realized I have enough. Well, actually, I realized it after my wonder colleague Liz Nelson tested me about my motivations here (again, lucky me) and reminded me that letting go now might not need to be a forever choice.

I have enough work, enough joy and growth with my clients, enough income, enough new things coming in that seem interesting. It’s not that I don’t want to work more or work on promoting more stuff if I have stuff I want to promote. I just don’t have anything right now, and so anything I did to preserve Molly’s connection, to preserve my sense of doing “something,” would be done in reaction to a sense of future possible scarcity. Of money, connection, quality, newness, love. That, my friends, makes no sense, not in conscious leadership and not in any other form of business or personal leadership.

So today, Molly and I spoke and we agreed to pause things. She has other things she’s been noodling. I showered her with the appreciation I’ve shared here. I did all the crying. I suck at transitions. I suck at goodbyes that matter, even ones that are not real goodbyes and not permanent. But, I have sucked at letting scarcity run my show, and this is one of the most memorable instances of letting that pattern go. Surrendering to what might happen without pushing or inventing.

At the end of our call, I said “Molly, I might write about this. Can I? Someone might want you to do this same kind of work for their forthcoming book? Would that be okay?” She said she would not be opposed to that.

So there it is. On we go. Typing this, to you, instead of creating an e-course. FTW.

Any thoughts, feelings, or blurts? Share them here.