Letting People Be

I have a confession that makes me a terrible accountability partner.

When someone tells me, "I need you to make sure I actually do this," my honest answer is: I'm probably not your person. Because deep down, I'm going to let you do you.

I have a high tolerance for letting people be exactly as they are. I want your journey to unfold the way it's going to unfold — based on your choices, not my pressure. For a long time I thought that was a flaw. Then I started paying attention to what it actually is.

Bob Thurman died this June, at 84.

He was a Buddhist scholar, the first Westerner ordained as a monk by the Dalai Lama, and a co-founder of Tibet House. To say it in such a one sentence way doesn't do his life justice. But there it is. He spent his life teaching, and one thing he taught stayed with me.

He said he wasn't bothered by anyone believing differently than he did. If a different faith — any faith — helped a person reach a spiritual place they hadn't reached before, then he was glad for them. He wasn't going to be angry that someone walked a road he didn't walk. He may not have been a great accountability partner either, eh? Rather, he went with the flow, he let people be.

Sit with that for a second. He wasn't tolerating other paths through gritted teeth. He was rooting for them. He released the destination. He didn't need to be the one who decided where people were allowed to arrive.

Where in your life are you trying to choose someone else's destination for them?

Now here's the part I keep turning over.

Thurman released the where. But there's a second thing we grip just as hard — the how. The pace. The direction. The push.

Alan Watts talked about wu wei — going with the flow instead of forcing it. Picture water meeting a rock in a stream. The water doesn't argue with the rock. It doesn't push. It moves around it, over it, and keeps going. And given enough time, the water is the one that wins — it carves the canyon.

For years I called my "let people be" nature a weakness. But that's not what it is. It's water, not rock.

Water doesn't shove you. Water also doesn't walk away. It stays. It surrounds. It shapes by presence, not by force. I didn’t realize it at the time, but when I let my kids make their own choices — and I did that as much as I could, even when they were small, and I still do now that they're grown — I wasn't being permissive. I was refusing to be the rock they had to brace against.

Are you being the rock in someone's stream — or the water?

Watts named the flow. Ansel Adams showed it.

He was my hero as a kid — the photographer I idolized, and honestly one of the most beautiful humans I've ever seen. But here's what I understand now that I didn't then: he loved nature so much that he never once tried to change it.

His most famous Yosemite image, Clearing Winter Storm, came around 1937. He didn't summon that storm. He didn't move a single mountain. He stood at Inspiration Point and waited for the weather to break — then received what the valley gave him. You can see wu wei right there in the frame.

"You don't improve nature," he said. "You reveal your impression of nature." That's the whole thing. He surrendered to what was there and poured everything into how he revealed it.

And then Adams said something that could've come straight out of Thurman's mouth — just about creativity instead of faith: no one has the right to dictate what others should perceive, create, or produce; everyone should be encouraged to reveal themselves.

Thurman won't dictate your spiritual path. Adams won't dictate your creative one. I won't dictate your life. Same conviction, three doorways: let people reveal themselves.

Whose self-expression have you been quietly trying to edit?

And the science backs the water.

There's a well-studied idea in psychology called reactance. When people feel their freedom is being threatened — when they feel pushed — they push back. Not because they're stubborn. Because protecting their own choice is human. Lean on the rock and the rock leans back.

Self-Determination Theory says something similar: autonomy isn't a luxury. It's a basic human need. People grow, commit, and last when the choice is genuinely theirs. Pressure might get you compliance for a day. It rarely gets you change that holds.

This is why I coach the way I do. I'm not here to push my answer into you. I'm here to be the conditions where your own wisdom can rise to the surface.

What would shift if you trusted that the people you love already carry their own answers?

So when I say we let people be, I don't mean we stop caring. I mean we let go of two things at once: where they're headed, and how fast or in what way they get there.

That's what life actually asks of us. Not just to make room for people who are different. But to take our hands off the wheel of their lives.  Trust them to know the way, journey with them, not for them.  Be like water and go with the flow.  

What rock have you been pushing against — and what would happen if you finally became the water instead?

Sources & Further Reading

• Robert A.F. Thurman (1941–2026), Buddhist scholar and co-founder of Tibet House US — Tricycle obituary

• Alan Watts on wu wei and the way of water — alanwatts.org

• Ansel Adams, Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite National Park (c. 1937) — the photograph

• "10 Facts About Ansel Adams, the Pioneering Photographer and Environmentalist" — My Modern Met

• Ansel Adams on revealing rather than improving nature — collected quotes

• Jack Brehm, A Theory of Psychological Reactance (1966) — the human tendency to resist perceived pressure on our freedom

• Edward Deci & Richard Ryan, Self-Determination Theory — autonomy as a basic psychological need

Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite Valley (c. 1937) by Ansel Adams