Episode 262 Transcript: How Letting Go of Control Can Change Your Life
Welcome back to The Nancy Levin Show. There is something I’ve been sitting with for a while now, and it’s a quiet but unmistakable shift that has been happening in me and the way that I work, and in the way that I think about what I’m building, and who I’m building it with. And today I wanna bring you in, not because I have it all figured out.
In fact, the whole point of what I’m about to share is that I’m in the middle of it. I’m in the thick of reinvention that is very much unfolding. But I’ve learned that the middle of the story is often where the most important truth lives, so here we are. What I wanna talk about today is the shift from isolation to collaboration.
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From doing it alone to doing it supported. From being someone who prided herself on being able to handle everything to someone who has finally, finally let herself be part of something bigger.
And I wanna talk about why that shift didn’t happen overnight, what it cost me to hold on to the old way for so long, and what I’ve discovered on the other side. So I’m going to begin with a confession. For most of my professional life, I was someone who did not delegate. Full stop. Not because I didn’t know that delegation was good leadership.I taught leadership. I could articulate the case for delegation beautifully in a session with a client.
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But when it came to my own work, my own vision, the things I was building, I held on so tightly. And if I’m honest, if I’m really honest, it came from a few different places. There was the perfectionism. The belief that if I wanted something done right, I had to do it myself. That my fingerprints needed to be on everything. That the quality, the nuance, the specific energy of what I could create could only come from me.
There was also control .The sense that letting go meant losing something. Losing the thread. Losing the vision. Losing the thing that made it mine. And then underneath all of that, there was the sense of aloneness that I mistook for independence. The way I had learned, somewhere along the way, to equate doing things by myself with doing things well.
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Isolation with integrity. I didn’t see it that way at the time, of course. At the time, I called it being self-sufficient. I called it knowing my work inside and out. I called it being close to the material. But what I was really doing, what I can see so clearly now, was staying small inside the story that only I could hold what I was holding.
Here’s what I know now about that story. It’s really common for people like us. For high-achievers, for perfectionists, for people who’ve built something from the ground up and remember exactly what it cost to get us here. There’s a kind of armor that gets built around the work. And it makes sense that it’s here, because the work is precious. Because what we do matters deeply.
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Because we’ve been let down before, or we’ve seen things fall apart when we’ve loosened our grip, and so we hold even tighter.
And for a while, for a long while, that holding works. It keeps things coherent. It keeps things moving. It produces results. But there comes a point where the very thing that protected the work starts to limit it. Where self-sufficiency starts to feel less like strength and more like a sentence. I reached that point, and when I did, I had a choice. The choice we all eventually face in reinvention.
I could keep doing what I had always done, or I could be willing to be part of change. And I chose to be changed. So when I look back at when I was the event director at Hay House, I had a team of five people.
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I never let them do anything because I was so aware that anything they did was a reflection on me, and I wanted to make sure that everything was always perfect.
What that ended up doing was put me in a position of burnout. I had to really learn about the difference between indispensability and irreplaceability. It was Reid Tracy, the president of Hay House, who said to me, “It’s not about being indispensable in your job. It’s about being irreplaceable as a human.” And each one of us is irreplaceable as a human.
I also think back to when I first went out on my own, and at that time it was just me and a virtual assistant.
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And I remember the first time that she sent out an email to my list and there was a broken link in the email. I– You would have thought that the world had blown up. I was so devastated because, again, I was afraid that a broken link in an email would be a reflection on me.
I was so concerned that people opening that email, clicking a broken link, would think, “Oh my God, she is so stupid.” So I really had to investigate what was I making everything mean about me, and I had to get right with the fact that people make mistakes. I make mistakes. Once I was able to be in right relationship with the fact that I’m human and I make mistakes, my compassion for everyone on my team to make mistakes expanded.
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In fact, even today with a large team, I’m very clear with them: “I’m okay if you make mistakes. I just want you to come tell me the truth. And I want you to come to me with a solution.”
This took time for me to grow into. And one of the things that really helped me grow into this was letting myself be changed by who I was in rooms with. So I started saying yes to spaces I would have politely declined before. Rooms with other entrepreneurs. Gatherings of people who were building things, questioning things, reimagining things. People who were at different stages of the journey than I was, and who had things to teach me precisely because of that.
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And I wanna be honest about how uncomfortable that was for me at first. Because when you’ve been in your field for as long as I have, there’s an ego story that says you should be the one in the front of the room. Not the one in the circle learning alongside others. Not the one raising your hand. Not the one saying, “I’m not sure how to do this part.”
And that story that I needed to only be where I was the expert cost me years of potential growth. Years of connection that I didn’t let myself have. And what I’ve discovered, what I now know in my bones, is that being in rooms with other entrepreneurs isn’t about giving up your expertise, it’s about expanding it. It’s about cross-pollination. It’s about hearing someone describe a challenge in their completely different industry and suddenly seeing your own challenge from a new angle.
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It’s about the kind of thinking that only happens when you’re genuinely in community with people who are also in the same arena. There’s something that happens when you’re around other people who are building, who are risking, who are figuring things out in real time. And it raises your own level. It stretches your thinking in ways that staying in your own echo chamber simply cannot. I don’t want to be in an echo chamber anymore. I wanna be in the conversation.
And part of what shifted me into the conversation was getting a mentor. Now, I wanna take a moment here because I think there is confusion about the difference between a mentor and a coach. And since coaching is my world, I feel like I have a responsibility to name this difference really clearly for you. A coach works with you on your internal landscape.
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A coach helps you uncover what’s in the way. A coach asks questions that reveal what you already know, but haven’t given yourself permission to see. A coach holds space for your growth. Guiding you, but not directing you. A coach gives you permission to access your own inner wisdom and own inner answers.
A mentor does something very different. A mentor has walked a path that you are now walking. A mentor has built something, navigated something, survived something that is relevant for what you are facing. And a mentor shares that lived experience directly, specifically, and sometimes even provocatively. A mentor says, “Here’s what I learned when I was where you are.” A mentor says, “Here’s a mistake I made that I don’t want you to make.”
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A mentor says, “Have you considered this? Because I wish someone had asked me that question when I was at the stage where you are.” A coach holds the space. A mentor offers the map. And here’s the deal, I needed a map. Not because I didn’t trust my own inner knowing, I do. Not because I haven’t developed my own expertise over decades, I have. But because I am entering new territory. Territory where I don’t have my own lived experience to draw from. Territory where having someone ahead of me on the path could save me time, energy, money, and unnecessary struggle. So getting a mentor was an act of humility, and I mean that in the truest sense of the word.
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Not self-deprecating. Not shrinking. Humility as openness. Humility as willingness to say, “I don’t have to figure this out alone.” And that willingness changed everything.
Here’s something else I want to name because I think it really matters. For a long time, I brought everything to my team. Every question, every idea, every uncertainty, every seed of new direction. My team is extraordinary, truly. These are people deeply committed to this work and to me, and they take great pride and ownership in the work, and I am grateful for them in ways I don’t even have adequate words for. But here’s what I started to notice. I was taxing them with my uncertainty. It wasn’t because they said no. Not because anything fell apart.
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But because I could feel it. The weight of always being the one who generates and then also the one who processes the generating out loud with the people who then need to implement it.
It’s a particular kind of pressure that I think a lot of founders put on their teams without realizing it. We come in with ideas half-formed. And we need to think out loud, and we need to pressure test our thinking, and we do it with the people who are waiting to find out what they’re supposed to build.
What I needed wasn’t a different team. What I needed was a different container for the ideation. I needed peers. I needed brainstorming partners who weren’t downstream of my decisions. People who could meet me at the messiness of a new idea. Who could push back. Who could add to it. Who could help me shape it before it ever became a directive.
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So now, when a new idea is born, I have somewhere to take it first. Into these entrepreneurial rooms. Into conversations with my mentor. Into the kind of lateral thinking that happens when you’re talking with someone who doesn’t have a stake in the outcome. And then when the idea has been turned over, questioned, refined, given some shape, I can bring it to my team. And I bring them something to build. Not something to help me figure out whether I should build it at all. And that distinction has been revolutionary.
Now, I’m still in practice with this. It is a process. Which brings me to something I’ve been working with in a deep way lately, and this is the idea of the visionary. I have always been someone who can implement. I know how things work. I understand the mechanics of what we do.
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I can and will roll up my sleeves and figure out how to get something across the finish line. And for a long time, I wore that as a badge of honor. I’m not just a big picture person, I am into the details. I can do the thing. I’m not out of touch with the actual work. But there is a shadow side of that pride.
It kept me doing things I didn’t need to do. And it kept me in the weeds when I should have been in the sky. And there’s a difference between being someone who can implement and being someone who should implement. And for too long, I conflated those things. The visionary’s job is not to do everything. The visionary’s job is to see what’s possible and to communicate that vision so clearly, so compellingly, so precisely that the right people can bring it into being.
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The visionary protects her energy for the things only she can do. And so I had to really ask myself, really honestly, what are the things that only I can do? Only I can hold the vision for where we are going. Only I can be the voice, the presence, the lived experience at the center of this work. Only I can have the conversations that require my specific understanding, my specific history, my specific relationship with the material. Everything else, genuinely everything else, can be done by someone on my team who’s better at it than I am.
And this is not diminishment. This is liberation. And I’m learning how to let it be a liberation rather than an anxiety. Because there are days when not implementing feels wrong. When being the visionary feels like a role I haven’t grown into quite yet.
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But I’m growing into it on purpose, one choice at a time. And as someone who did not identify with the role of the visionary, even when I had started my own business, it is still a practice for me to live into the role of visionary and let others help me with the implementation. And this is why I wanna talk about what’s underneath all of this. Because this is a season of professional reinvention for me.
And I say that not as a marketing phrase, I say it as a lived reality. Something is shifting in my work, in my offerings, in how I’m showing up, in what I’m creating. I’m not ready to share all the specifics with you yet, and I will say more about that.
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But I want you to understand the internal texture of this reinvention because I think it will resonate. Reinvention from the outside can look like a clean arc. Like someone who had an insight, made a decision, and stepped into their next chapter. But from the inside, reinvention is much more non-linear. It’s more like I keep catching glimpses of something new, and sometimes I lose the thread, and then I find it again. I have a day of total clarity, and then I have a day of complete doubt.
I feel the pull forward, and I also feel the gravitational pull of the familiar. What makes the difference, what makes the difference for me, is having people to navigate this with. Not just my team to execute.
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Not just clients to serve. People who are with me in the in-between. People who can hold the uncertainty alongside me without needing me to resolve it prematurely and not trying to resolve it for me. And that’s what community does. That’s what the right mentor does. That’s what being in rooms with people who get it does. It keeps you regulated when the reinvention wants to dysregulate you.
I want to sit with that word for a moment, regulated. Because I think this is a piece that doesn’t get talked about enough in conversations about professional growth. Because reinvention, returning to the essence of the truth of who you are before you began packaging yourself to be palatable to others, reinvention is destabilizing.
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You’re releasing something known and moving towards something you may not even remember. And your nervous system, which is wired for safety, for familiarity, for predictability, is going to have a lot of feelings about that.
The old way of managing that, for me, was to just push through, to white-knuckle through a transition, to perform certainty when I felt anything but. And the new way that I’m practicing is to stay connected to people and resources that help me remain regulated while the landscape is shifting. This is the most sophisticated thing I know how to do right now.
Staying regulated doesn’t mean staying comfortable. It means staying grounded enough to keep making clear decisions even when the path isn’t clear.
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It means having enough internal stability to tolerate the discomfort of not knowing yet without abandoning the vision or collapsing back into the familiar.
Regulated reinvention is what I’m practicing. And the collaboration, the mentors, the peer rooms, the brainstorming partners, the shift away from isolation, all of this is in service of that. So here’s what I want you to take away today. Wherever you are in your own work, in your own becoming, first, isolation is not the same thing as integrity.
You don’t have to be alone with your work to be devoted to it. Some of the most important breakthroughs in my thinking have happened not in solitude, but in conversation. In rooms where I had to articulate something I’d only felt before.
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In moments when someone else’s question cracked something open in me that I couldn’t have accessed on my own. Second, know the difference between what only you can do and what you’re doing because you haven’t yet trusted someone else to do it. That’s the question worth sitting with. Not, “Can I do this?” But, “Should it be me who does this?” Third, get yourself in rooms with people who are also in the arena. People who are building, failing, pivoting, growing.
You don’t need to learn from people who have everything all figured out. You need to learn with people who are figuring it out in real time like you are. Fourth, consider the difference between a coach and a mentor, and whether there’s someone ahead of you on the path who could offer you the map.
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Both are incredibly valuable. A coach to support you in accessing your own answers, and a mentor who has been where you are to provide a map of support. Having both a coach and a mentor have changed the game for me. And fifth, and this is the one I feel tenderly about, let yourself be supported through the reinvention. There are people who will be with you in the uncertainty, who don’t need you to have the answer yet, who can help you stay regulated while you’re in the middle of the change, because the middle of the change is not a problem to be solved. It is the change itself. And you deserve to move through it with people alongside of you. Now, here’s the part where I’m just gonna leave you in a little bit of suspense.
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Because there’s something new that I’m creating. There’s something new I’m moving toward, something that reflects all the shifts I’ve been describing. The collaboration, the visionary role, the next iteration of how my work meets the world.
I’m not ready to share all of it yet, and that itself is part of the practice. Letting it develop in this space between knowing and announcing, not rushing to the reveal before the foundation is ready. But I want you in the room for this. I want you to be part of the unfolding, not just the arrival. So consider this your invitation.
Stay with me. Stay close to this conversation, to what’s being built. Come along on the ride with me. I will bring you into it as soon as it becomes something I can share. And what I can tell you is this.
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It’s aligned with everything I’ve been talking about today. It’s about connection over isolation. It’s about collaboration as a practice, not just a concept. It’s about what becomes possible when we stop trying to do everything all alone. It’s about letting us know what we don’t know. And I’m so lit up by where I’m going, and I’m doing my best to stay regulated while I get there.
So thank you for being a part of this. Thank you for being here. This show has always been an honest conversation. The place where I don’t have to have everything figured out before I speak. And today feels true to that.
So if something in this episode has landed for you, if you recognized yourself in the isolation, or if you felt the pull toward a different way of working, let me know. Reach out. I wanna be in conversation, because that’s what this is all about.
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Not doing it alone, doing it in community. I’m so glad you’re here. Thanks for spending time with me, and I will see you in the next episode.