Toastmasters Speech 4: Why we hold on: a guide to letting go

Why we hold on: a guide to letting go

Thank you for that introduction (x). Good afternoon fellow Toastmasters and any esstemed guests.

My speech today is titled: Why we hold on, a guide to letting go. 

In the last couple of years I have had to let go begrudgingly, of different things in my life.

Somethings were so ingrained in me that I thought that they were part of my identity. I don't know about you, but for me I like getting up and having a place to go to everyday. When my day is filled with nothing, it leaves me feeling, well...empty. 

I am not one to sit and watch TV. I am one for always doing something. The bible calls it 'busybody.' I am always going and coming, going and coming. Any free time I  quickly fill it up with an activity.

So you should know how shocking it was when my world stopped. The year was 2012 and the last 2 years of my life I had devoted all my talents, gifts and abilities to my employer, a major US bank. My time at the bank ended abruptly in a 2 minute meeting. I was escorted out right after, by a crying manager and a guard. I asked her why she was crying and she said 'I hate when we let go of the good ones.' I was shocked because for 1. I wasn't crying, why are you? 2. You are not even my manager!!

Cut to me having to move out of my apartment where me and my mother lived, no more paychecks meant I could no longer afford it. The  credit card I got to build good credit was going to go into collections. I found a place with 3 other roommates in my college town. What I had been trying to do on my own for months (get out of my current job, get my own place, change my environment) had happened quickly and honestly without any input from me. God's timing is always the best. 

At my new place, I woke up everyday having nothing to do. Yes, I did the responsible thing of applying for unemployment but I struggled with  my new reality. Soon enough, I realized I did not know who I was outside of being an employee of the bank and having to go there everyday to work. It was so hard for me to accept that I had nothing to fill my days.

I am not alone in this, having difficulty letting go and accepting my current reality. In Psychology Today, Judith Sills Ph.D.  states: 

"Letting go means something has to open in your head and in your heart, but that shift, that easing, comes up against our own invisible, often implacable resistance. A great deal of that resistance comes from nothing more.... than the great human reluctance to change. Even change for the better is still change, often initially dreaded and avoided."

Here I was, in my new place. Did not live with my mother anymore, I had time freedom and I did not have that job that I had been praying to find a way to get out of. But this is not the way I imagined! My goal and plan was to keep applying for other banks and get hired, then get an apartment in NY, I had even interviewed at Chase Bank, where a co-worker was still working at. But alas, sometimes we make plans and God laughs. New Brunswick was hell for me. Being broke again and not having money and being in the town where I spent 5 years getting my college education was so similar to me. I felt like I had gone back in time, and I had not just graduated and worked for major banks and gotten the salary I desired finally. I went back a step and now I was here, reflecting on how I got here and where I was supposed to go and what to do next.

Even though I wanted the change, I was afraid when the change came. Outside circumstances created my change. Due to this, I felt out of control and out of whack, like a baby who went from the comfort and warmth of the womb into a water-free, air borne, noisy and disruptive new world. 

I been let go, forcebly so, and I was mourning my past life and its financial comforts even though most days it felt like a prison. I want to let you know since then, I have  to let go of more things. I have had to let go of jobs, friends, of my hometown like my last speech. What I have learned is on the route to our goals and dreams, we have to let of of what we currently have. 

These are some of the changes: I eventually met a boy, fell in love, had a baby, moved back into my hometown, went through postpardum, went back to school, went back to work at banking, got back the financial security to provide for my new life, then left it all behind for Jesup, Georgia. Some changes are sprung upon us, others we have to create ourselves. In all of it, we have to let go of the person that we thought we were to allow the possibilities of who we want to become.