Control v. Trust: Navigating Life's GPS

In this episode, Jojo explores the themes of letting go, control, trust, and commitment in navigating life's uncertainties with the unknown. She shares personal anecdotes and insights on how letting go of control can lead to a more fulfilling and authentic life. The discussion emphasizes the importance of making decisions, trusting the process, and understanding the mental, emotional, and spiritual aspects of personal growth.

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Transcript

Jojo (00:06.99)
Welcome back to the Inside Out Podcast. I'm your host JoJo and this is where we will navigate the mess together that is mental, emotional and spiritual. Let's get into it.

Jojo (00:27.502)
excited about this topic because it's all about letting go, control the unknown and trust. So I've mentioned this before in previous episodes, but for me, the unknown is such a difficult thing for me to grapple with. And because I struggle with the unknown so much, I try to control as much as I can in my life.

which is completely backwards when it comes to spiritual laws and actually how this universe works. We don't have control over anything. We have free will. But at the end of the day, we can't control others. We can only control the way we react and respond to our external environments. But that's about it. And there's this illusion that happens with control when we think that we can just change the reality of certain things. When

In fact, we can't and that's where letting go and trust come into it. And if you're anything like me, maybe this is something you're a little better with or not. If you have tips and tricks, maybe you should send them my way. But I wanted to share something that happened to me this weekend. And it's because I've been asking for the ability to let go and let things unfold naturally and trust, because again, this is stuff that I'm just so not good at. So story time.

It was a beautiful weekend. It was sunny. was about 50 degrees, crisp blue skies. And I decided to rent a car and head upstate for the day and enjoy myself in nature because living in this concrete jungle, it's just nonstop. And when I get out of the city, it really just balances me out completely. And one of my things that I love to do is get behind the wheel. I love country music, so I'll put on country music or I'll put on any kind of music really, but

This drive specifically, I put on country music. had my phone plugged in. had my maps up on the car play and I'm driving along and I'm driving for about an hour and a half and I get to where I'm going and I take a walk and I'm enjoying the nature. And I looked down at my phone and I realized my phone is at 8%. Now my phone had been plugged in the entire time that I was driving. And so I go back to the car.

Jojo (02:52.994)
Mind you, I have to return this car by a certain time. That certain time is in like an hour and 15 minutes. I get back to the car and I plug my phone in and I realize my wire isn't working. I'm jiggling it around. It's like not connecting. I'm like, no. Next thing you know, I'm sitting in this parking lot and my phone just is like kaput. And I was like, good. Okay. So I can't call the car place. I can't get into the app to extend my reservation. I have no idea where I am, where I'm going.

I'm by myself and I literally was like looking up at the ceiling of the car being like, okay, this is how you want me to let go and trust. Interesting. All right, let's see. Let's see how this works. So I'm like, well, what else can I do? I have to figure out how to get home. Dusk is falling in this like forest preserve that I'm in and I'm like, great, let me figure out what I'm going to do here. So

I turn on the car, I start driving. You know, when you're following your GPS, you're not really super invested in where you are. And you're not like, I have to go this way and I have to go this way. You're just kind of like on autopilot. Well, that's at least how I was driving upstate. And I was like, great. I don't really recognize anything. I'm not really sure what to do by this time. It's like five 15 and my car needs to be back by six o'clock.

So I see this gas station and I pull over and I go in and I buy a USB cord. I plug it into the car, but my phone is like dead dead. So it doesn't turn on right away. And I was like, okay, well, I'm not just going to sit here and wait for my phone to turn on. sat there for about 10 minutes and it still didn't turn on. And I was like, okay, well, I have a cord. I just need to trust that this is all going to be okay. And everything's going to work itself out again.

Says the girl with control issues, trust issues, and, not a very good record of letting go. So I keep driving and it's about five 52. think the clock set on the car. was like, I'm just, I was like, universe literally like help. So I continue on my path. And finally, it's like a few minutes to six o'clock when I needed to return my car and I'm still like in traffic upstate. I don't even know if I'm heading the right way. My phone turns on.

Jojo (05:14.606)
So I pull over, I input the address that I need to be at into Google Maps and it literally says 0.5 miles, take exit one. And I was like, are you kidding? Are you kidding? I was going the right way the whole time. Exit one was a nondescript exit in the trees that I never would have seen.

And it just happened to be 0.5 miles away from when my phone turned on. Mind you, this was like almost 45 minutes later. Then I go into the app, I extend the car, everything's fine. And I keep driving. And I started to think about this because the concept of letting go and letting it flow again, like I've said, is so challenging. And for me, it's been coming up with my work.

It's been coming up around this podcast. It's been coming up in my interpersonal relationships. It's been coming up with limiting beliefs that I've talked about in a previous episode. And it's really been an all encompassing kind of suffocating feeling. So I was thinking about this on my drive back. And usually when we're driving, the irony is

You do have a GPS, you do have a map telling you which way to go. For me, I didn't. And I really just had to fully surrender and be like, okay, well, this is the process. What am I going to do? Freak out. There's nothing else I can do. I just have to keep going. And the same thing with life. We have to fully commit to something and we have to go in a direction with determination because otherwise, how are you going to know if you're going in the right or wrong direction?

Let's say you're starting a relationship with someone and you're like, well, I don't know if this is the right relationship or not. You're not going to know unless you go all in. You have to try. If you're like one foot in one foot out and it's like this push pull tug of war dynamic, you're not going to know if this is the right relationship for you because you haven't actually just gone toward it and been like, yeah, okay, let's see. The same thing with me driving this car.

Jojo (07:38.242)
I didn't like go half a mile and then turn around and be like, okay, I'm to go another mile the other direction. Then I'm going to turn around and go six miles this direction. And then wait, maybe I'll go that direction. That sounds insane. But we do this so much in our lives where we're like not fully committed to, to a direction. And I think that has to do with letting go because we want to control. We want to know, we want to make sure that this is the right thing for us all the time. And my gosh, what if I make the wrong choice? Okay, adapt then.

I could have turned the car around if I wasn't on my right path, but we limit ourselves so much because we don't actually commit to something. We don't actually say, you know what? I'm going to trust the process. I'm going to be okay with the unknown and I'm just going to go for it. Think about your career. When you chose what you wanted to do when you're in college, maybe you're in college right now. If you don't choose something and you're just floating aimlessly, it's not going to put you in a direction of anything. You're just going to be

A floater.

If you make a decision, I want to study business marketing. And then you realize, okay, I did business school and you leave, you graduate, it's over. And then you're like, well, I actually have a passion for sports medicine. Then you choose a different path and you go in that direction. But if you just keep flip-flopping between the two, you're still stuck in the same exact place. And all that's happening is the time is just going by. So I found this wildly hilarious because I'm someone who is consciously

trying to rewire and repattern and rework the things that limit me. And right now letting go and just trusting that I am going in the right direction, that the people in my life are the right people, that the situations are the right situations, that my career is the direction it needs to be going. And I will stop myself literally in my tracks and get paralyzed by the fear of the unknown because I don't commit to a direction or I don't just let go of a process and say, you know what?

Jojo (09:41.472)
I did what I could here and if it's meant for me, it will come to me. The same thing with a relationship. If you want a relationship to go in a certain direction and maybe it's not, maybe there's healing that needs to happen on both sides. Maybe there's extenuating circumstances. Maybe there's familial stuff that needs to be worked out. Maybe you just need to be focusing on your career, whatever that is. If you just let go and believe if this is meant for me, it will come to me. There's like a very ancient Chinese proverb that says, let it go. If it's meant for you, it will come back to you.

And then there's a million other renditions of that. That's like, what's meant for you will never pass you by. If you love something, set it free. If it's meant for you, it'll come back. Otherwise it was never meant to be yours. There's a million different ways if this quote goes, but it's so true because if you're sticking to your path, your truth, your essence, and committing to yourself and your choices,

The things that are aligned with where you are in your life and the direction that you're going are naturally going to be magnetized to you. I mean, that's just the law of attraction, the law of similarity of form, all of these vibrations that we attract when we're on course. I found this absolutely hilarious having been asking for the ability to let go and for the ability to trust, to trust myself, trust my intuition.

trust my process, trust everything around me. And of course, the minute I ask, hey, I need to like learn how to trust this ridiculous situation happens with my car. What a perfect example of going in a direction and not knowing if it's the right one. But again, I wouldn't have known if I just didn't go and commit to it. So when it comes to committing to something,

or making a decision and then trusting the process or letting go or whatever it is. Cause I just talked about three different concepts kind of in one. And I will go deeper into these topics in later episodes and in different renditions of it. But these are three things that for me right now are like fully intertwined. And I think for a lot of people, these three things are also fully intertwined for them. And I think a lot of people can relate to this because when you are out of control,

Jojo (12:00.598)
Let's say it's in work and you don't really have the ability to do what it is that you want to do. You need to let go and you need to trust that it'll work out the way it's meant to.

And I can apply this in every area of life. For me, the three areas that this is really applying to are my career, whether that's with this podcast, modeling, acting, kind of all encompassing all of the above relationships. Is this right? Is this wrong? my gosh, I don't know what direction is this going. I overthink everything. Those who know that are laughing. Shush, I know. You're right. We get it. And

when it comes to my physical health, my back, which I've also talked about in the limiting beliefs episode. So let's get messy with this. In order to reroute the need for control, the fear of the unknown, the ability to trust the process and to fully let go, we need to identify what the mental, emotional and spiritual aspects of this are in order for us to rewire these things.

So mentally get really clear what areas of your life you are holding on and you have your claws in so deep that you're not just letting things unfold naturally and that you're not stepping back and allowing flow to happen. Or maybe it's you're in a mental tug of war with yourself or on a seesaw teetering between two options and not sure which direction to go in.

And emotionally, that's understanding what that is bringing up in you. What are the feelings around why maybe you can't make a decision about something? Is it fear? What is the root of that fear? And start to get nitty gritty with it. I find journaling to be really helpful. You can always talk to someone you trust, a therapist, a friend, or my favorite little kooky tidbit is talking out loud, which I've mentioned before.

Jojo (14:09.154)
But it really helps because again, you bounce the ideas off of nobody except yourself. You speak out loud, you ask questions out loud and you listen for answers. And usually those answers are thoughts that are coming into your own mind, but it's a deeper intuition. If we tap into that, we can really solve a lot of things in our lives. And spiritually, in order to rewire this stuff, identifying the mental and emotional

is going to ripple out into the spiritual. The spiritual aspect of this is just really trusting and telling yourself every day, whether that's you need to put a mantra in your head or something on your lock screen or my favorite little sticky notes that are all over my apartment of just a constant reminder that ingrains that into your body, into your psyche, into your soul, into every aspect of your life so that

You just naturally start to move differently because you've committed to a direction, because you've let go of the, need to control every sort of outcome, because you've gotten okay with the unknown because newsflash life is unknown. If you knew where your life was going or you knew what was going to happen in your life, it's like reading the last page of a book. Boring. Why would you want to know?

I would rather make choices every single day that are aligned with my values, my morals, what I want, than to have some predestined outcome of my life. And I really don't think I'm alone in that. If we think about the GPS in terms of life, we can always choose a direction that we want to go in, but sometimes there's going to be a road closure.

Sometimes there's going to be an accident, there's going to be a slowdown, there's going to be a detour, construction. And the more that we get comfortable with letting go of control, trusting that the direction we choose is the right one for us, we're going to have a lot easier of a time dealing with the hiccups that happen because those metaphorical road closures of life are going to show up. They're going to show us a different direction. They're going to reroute us. They're going to...

Jojo (16:26.976)
knock us sideways, you're going to have to get back up and go somewhere else or try a different route. And that's completely normal. But that comes once you've chosen the direction you want to go in, committed to that, let go of control of the outcome and surrendering to it and just being like, okay, I'm trusting the process. So let's trust, let's stop controlling. Let's just live a little bit less stressed out about

Is this right? Is this wrong? And just let it be. Let it unfold. Trust that you've made the right decision. Be okay with the direction you're going in. And if you're not, then change directions, but commit, commit to that direction you've chosen. Cause otherwise you're never going to know if it's right or wrong. Thank you for going inside out with me this week. Thank you for getting messy. And as always, don't forget to subscribe on Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcast.

Click that little notification bell so you know when another episode drops. Follow on Instagram at underscore inside out dot podcast and please share this with a friend blast it out to everyone you know. And I can't wait to get messy with you guys next week. Bye for now.