Ending With Surrender

Dear Friends,

For the past several years, I have prayed for a “word of the year”.  Many of you know that my word for this past year was Surrender. Surrender was “in my face” the entire year.  

My life was a continual act of surrender and the more I leaned into it, the more I realized it was easier to surrender than to fight. I surrendered A LOT of my plans, both personally and professionally. I surrendered my expectations, especially from other people. 

What surrender taught me this year is that much of life is, truly, out of our control. When things don’t turn out how we’d planned and we try, in desperation, to make it work the way we’d envisioned, oftentimes, it makes matters worse. Conversely, if we “surrender” to what’s in front of us, embrace the now, there are lessons that life has for us. 

Our 20th anniversary trip we’d planned for months was unexpectedly cut short - nothing we could do about it! The result of that caused my husband, Rob, and I to think about and discuss how we select vacation destinations in the future. It also resulted in us putting together a legacy plan to ensure we both knew how to access all of our financial accounts and tough conversations around our end of life wishes. 

Our family vacation to the Philippines was cancelled due to scheduling conflicts and all we could do was surrender - it was simply out of our control. This just wasn’t the year to travel for The Ruiz family. We could either freak out, get upset and get angry about how things didn’t work out or simply embrace what is and move on. Getting upset, frustrated, or angry won’t change the situation. One of my clients said it best, “We can’t control the outcome, we can only control our efforts (or how we respond).”

The real estate market has declined over the past 2 years - absolutely nothing that I can control. All I can control is improving my skills to be a better professional. When the business comes, we’ll be more than ready because we’ve used this time to work on ourselves and work on our processes. As a result of improving our skills, the client experience will be elevated. 

The act of surrendering has actually given me so much freedom! Entering into a situation being completely detached from the outcome and fully embracing whatever life presents at the moment is a freeing experience. Not having expectations from people or from particular situations allowed me to be fully present taking on whatever came my way. 

Vacation plans were postponed? That’s okay! I made doctor’s appointments that I’d put off for weeks. My client decided not to sell after all? That’s okay, instead of hosting an open house, Rob & I went wine & food tasting. I got to use that ‘extra’ time to spend with my husband! Appointments were cancelled or postponed … that’s perfectly fine! I used that time to volunteer and help those in need! Or I used the time to work on coaching collateral to help other Realtors improve efficiency in their businesses. I scheduled massages to take care of me, went to my fair share of concerts this year, ran errands I didn’t think I had time to get to and sought out local events for our family to experience and a few “staycation” days around the Bay Area!

What I learned is that life rarely turns out the way you want it to yet, when we embrace the here and now, knowing that there is little we can actually control, life seems to be more pleasant and enjoyable! 

My prayer and hope for all of you is to be able to surrender the things we cannot control and fully embrace what’s in front of us and may we all be reminded that the only thing we can control is how we respond to any given situation.

I’m not sure what my word will be for 2025 … I surrender to whatever it will be! ;-)

Yours in surrender,

Rica