I don’t know when my first exposure to the word “surrender” was, but it very well could have been courtesy of the Wicked Witch of the West and her smoke-writing broom.

That visual was horrifying enough to persuade this 6-year-old that surrender was a dreadful, terrible, very bad thing.

But what if it wasn’t?

What if you could reframe surrender into something far more positive? What if surrender didn’t mean giving up, it meant opening up – to whatever is going to happen, knowing all will be well.

Life serves up all sorts of tough experiences – from the mildly irritating to the downright painful – and when we rely only on ourselves to fix every situation we very often bump up against our own limitations.

Instead of asking for help, we find ourselves gripping, grasping, clinging, clutching. “I can fix this,” “Just let me try this.” “Let me do it.” We analyze and agonize until we’re exhausted, but we’re no closer to a solution.

When a friend once asked me if I’d tried just surrendering a particularly vexing project, I was aghast. What? I should just sit here and do nothing and wait for the dogwood bush to burst into flames and intone instructions? Mon Dieu! How could that help?

Thankfully, this friend is very patient with me. She explained the idea of surrender as  letting go, not giving up. She reminded me what was in my control – like tapping into my inner wisdom and leveraging others for ideas.

Then – and this is the really important part – after I had done my best, I was to let the outcome go. That was uncomfortable and unnerving. But I did it anyway. And remarkably, in this particular situation, solutions began falling into place like the tumblers in a complex lock disengaging in succession.

Surrendering outcomes, not beating our heads against a wall, not feeling responsible for fixing the world – all are very difficult to let go. But anything we’ve learned to do, we can unlearn.

And as New York Times best-selling author Gabby Bernstein says in her new book, The Universe Has Your Back, “The moment you embrace your peace within and surrender the outcome is the moment the Universe can truly get to work.”