Giving Ourselves Permission
A while ago, I was at a small gathering of social change folks, and what I heard from many of them is that “I need to give myself permission to …” or “I wish I could …”
I joked that I was going to show up to our next meeting with permission slips for adults, so that they could give themselves explicit permission to do what they wanted and be who they were.
We contort ourselves in so many ways to fit into our community; our family; our church. We even hide parts of ourselves based on ideas we have in our mind about how we should be. And so we bury our gifts; downplay our strengths; don’t make time for the one thing that makes us sing.
The worst part is that we don’t even know it. It is so instinctive and so fast that these parts of ourselves go underground instantaneously.
I’m not immune to needing permission. I thought I’d gotten to a point where I wasn’t contorting, but it turns out the roots of some of our core beliefs go deep. I was raised in a family and community that idolized academic success; left-brained thinking; rational plans for the future. It was acceptable to get lost in your thoughts – but not to get lost in wonder about life and imagining what could be, and certainly not to follow a hunch and head off on a spiritual quest. What I hadn’t noticed until recently was how often I try to fit the newly emerged parts of myself into old patterns. I’ve been trying to design workshops that would be acceptable to academic left-brainers; not talking about some of the magic and miracles I’ve been lucky enough to experience; hearing part of my brain mutter “You can’t say THAT!!?!”.
So today I am giving myself permission to be my wild, crazy, disorganized, intuitive right-brained magical self.
What would you like to give yourself permission to do today?
Read MoreTickling the Bear
One of the things I love about the style of coaching I’ve been trained in is that we use metaphors and other tools to get clients out of their left logical brain and into their right intuitive brain. I was being coached the other day, and was talking about being stuck. My coach asked me what that feeling felt like, and to my surprise, what popped out of my mouth was “It feels like a bear is sitting on my chest”.
Now, this seemed like a friendly bear, but it had no intention of moving and was even contemplating settling in to hibernate. So my coach and I discussed ways in which I could approach the bear so it was no longer sitting on me. Rolling the bear seemed too difficult, but something smaller – tickling it – seemed just right.
And this is how I discovered the perfect way forward: doing something playful and small to get unstuck. I don’t need to move the whole darn bear NOW. I simply need to get the bear to shift around a bit so I have more breathing room. And indeed, after the coaching session, I made a few small FUN actions towards my goal. It turns out, I didn’t need to have it figured out all at once after all.
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