For anyone that knows me, or anyone that spends more than an hour with me, knows that I am a complete and total control freak. In a very Type A, overachiever way. It’s in my DNA, but it’s also a result of a long tenure of working for a micro-manager (see prior blog post of Micro-Management is a Form of Abuse). And with any form of abuse, it can have a long term effect on you.

I am very mindful of my control freak ways and try to ensure that it’s in no way damaging to others around me and that it’s all my own. I don’t expect anyone else to operate the way that I do. There are days when I have to be more mindful to allow delegation to occur, to allow executive decisions, without my input, to occur. And one day, not so long ago, I was not provided the choice……

It was forced on me. About two weeks ago, I was literally laid up in the bed in the worse pain of my life. Come to find out, I had kidney stones. In turn, the pain turned into being completely incoherent with pain medication. Not a fan, btw.

In the state of pain and incoherence, I was unable to answer calls, respond to emails, send emails, manage anything short of sleep and drowning my body in as much water internally as possible.

What did I learn when my kidney stones and my control freak ways collided? I learned that I don’t have to control everything, that no one is actually expecting me to, that things can move along just fine without me, and that it’s okay to actually have a balance between work and home and health. That no one is expecting me to constantly be at their beckon call. That no one is going to be screaming about something when they’re aware that I’m supremely ill. That I don’t have to know everything that is going on.

And guess what??? Everything was fine. No. Let me rephrase, everything was GREAT. The team got 18 LEASES that week. Nothing cataclysmic happened, short of a ton of overtime because of the hard work put in.

My advice to anyone who shares control freak tendencies: let go a little bit at a time, watch what can magically happen in front of you, not WITH you, and relax a little bit. Nothing’s going to explode because you weren’t around to control it or oversee it. Trust me. None of us have that much power.