Minute With Mallon: What Are You Holding?

Aug 24

Welcome to Minute with Mallon!

Something I Taught:

My first wife, Leigh, passed away from cancer in August of 2005.

It was the worst day of my life.

I took about five or six weeks off and spent much of that time just walking around the house, totally devastated. I couldn't think clearly. My heart felt like it had truly broken.

Every time I walked into our big closet, I could smell the perfume on her clothes, and I would basically fall apart.

I was a wreck.

I was surrounded by friends and family who loved on me for months, but grief has its own timetable. A person has to mourn for however long it takes, and there is no shortcut through it.

A few weeks after Leigh passed away, a very dear friend of mine and his wife offered to come over and help me pack up her clothing. That included everything in the closet and all the clothes in her dresser drawers.

It took us several hours.

I still remember taking her nightgowns out of one of the drawers and putting them into a box. I held each one, smelled it, and sat there on the floor crying like a baby while my friend's wife knelt beside me and rubbed my back.

Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans on August 29th of that year.

The timing was almost perfect.

We had everything boxed up, so we sent Leigh's clothes down to help people who had lost so much in that disaster.

Looking back, there was something incredibly cathartic about cleaning out that closet and those drawers.

It didn't take away my grief. It didn't mean I was finished mourning Leigh. And it certainly didn't mean I was forgetting her.

But it did help me begin to let go of one season of my life so I could eventually move into the next one.

Had I left everything exactly as it was, I think moving forward would have been much harder.

I thought about that recently while coaching one of my clients.

He's a builder with a growing family, and they need to move to a different home and location that will serve their family better.

But there was something standing in the way.

He told me he has a barn full of construction materials that he doesn't know what to do with. Some of it could be useful someday. Some of it probably won't be. But all of it has accumulated over time.

So we came up with a very simple plan.

Rent a dumpster.

Then spend just 20 minutes a day going through the barn and getting rid of anything he knows he isn't going to use.

Twenty minutes.

That's it.

Because sometimes moving forward starts with letting go.

And I don't think this applies only to closets, barns, or construction materials.

As leaders, we accumulate things too.

Old habits. Old systems. Old responsibilities. Old ways of thinking. Meetings that no longer serve a purpose. Processes that made sense five years ago but don't today. Even relationships, commitments, and expectations that belonged to a previous season.

We keep carrying them because we've always carried them.

But here's a question worth asking:

What are you holding onto that is making it harder for you to move into what's next?

Maybe you don't need to make some huge change today.

Maybe you just need to identify one thing that no longer belongs in the next season of your life or leadership and spend 20 minutes doing something about it.

There are times in life when holding on is exactly what we need to do.

But there are also times when growth requires us to let go.

You can't always carry everything from your old season into your new one.