Surrendering To Growth & Finding Your Path

Within the past year, the world has changed in unimaginable ways. It’s important to have plans of action, set goals, and try to reach certain benchmarks, but as humans, we can’t control everything. Especially our paths – even when it comes to entrepreneurship. That’s why it’s important to understand how to go with the flow, or in other words, surrender. 

In this episode of Making Bank, Kute Blackson joins to talk about how surrendering to life doesn’t always mean giving up. Kute is a best-selling author, next-generation thought leader, and mindful guru who has a new book coming out diving into personal growth. In the past couple of years, he gained insights as his mother was passing away from cancer. Learn about some of the important life lessons that you can apply to entrepreneurship.   

The Path of Surrendering  

As Kute reflects on the book that he has written, he admits that it wasn’t the book that he thought he first was going to write. Kute had other plans for himself, and other plans for the books that he wanted to write. Sometimes, though, the best things in life happen that you can’t plan for, and that’s something he learns while he was writing his book. 

During the years that he spent writing this book, Kute spent time with his mother who was dying of cancer. It was heartbreaking to watch her struggle – but he got to spend more time with her than ever. His mother was peaceful at times, and it taught him the value of surrendering to life itself. 

“We consider surrender as weak. I believe that surrender is in the fact, the most powerful thing we can do. To surrender means to let go of conditions of life, to surrender me, just not negotiate with life. To surrender means you let go of trying to control every single little thing of your life. I mean, as human beings, we try to control everything.” 

Kute says that when we try to control every single thing, it brings more anxiety and more stress. Forcing your way through life isn’t the natural, successful thing to do. By trying to actively attempt to not try and fit everything into your life in the way that you think it’s supposed to be, you start to flow. 

That doesn’t mean giving up, or being passive, or stopping. “It doesn’t mean you don’t give a 100%. It doesn’t mean you don’t take action. It doesn’t mean you’re lazy. No, surrender is powerful,” Kute says. He says that instead of trying to actively force life, we need to reframe how we’re doing it. We need to bring in a new way of living and thinking. 

Looking at the year 2020, we all thought that we had everything figured out., Then with covid hitting and the world on lockdown. It was another reminder that all of the billions of human beings that thought they had everything under control didn’t. We realized quickly that we were under the illusion of control. 

“I think to surrender we have to shift our way of being to a way of the flow. A way of living open, rather than forcing life, trying to put life in a certain way.” Kute says take action, move forward, give it your all. But don’t get attached totally to the results. By putting such emphasis on planning on what you want to happen, it limits the potential of incredible results that you never expected. 

The point of surrendering is to get more than you could imagine for yourself, says Kute. It’s more joy, more love, more purpose, and more than you could even imagine. 

How To Flow With Life  

What is stopping us from surrendering? It’s the fear that surrendering to life is a kind of death. As humans, we are afraid of failures, of the unknown, and afraid to lose our pride. It’s a death of our egos because they’ve created an idea of what we think we should do and what our lives should look like. 

“We have these ideas that we get attached to. We get to test out the outcomes, or maybe we’ve been living a certain kind of life, a certain kind of career path for some time. And now we become so identified with this is who I am, right?” Kute says that we get validated by having an identity, of getting paid, of being in a certain relationship. 

Humans tend to hold onto things that aren’t working out because they try to force them to go a certain way. Surrendering isn’t a death, but rather a freedom that might lead you to a new journey. Being authentic in your heart and your mind is one of the hardest things to do because you’ve got to push past the expectations that you’ve placed on yourself. 

“Maybe you make money. Maybe you’re making bazillions of dollars and you know how to do the job…but you know, this doesn’t light you up. This isn’t what you’ve been put on the planet to do. You know deep down you’re capable of so much more, but you keep doing it because you know what to do.” Kute says oftentimes we hold onto careers because we become so used to the comfort.