65: How to Give Yourself Permission

Episode 65-Permission.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:09] You're listening to the Time to Level Up podcast. I'm your host, business life coach Andrea Libros. I help women in business commit to their own growth personally and professionally. Each week, I'll bring you strategies to help you think clearly gain confidence. Make your time productive. Turn every obstacle into an opportunity. And finally overcome the overwhelm so that you can make money and manage life. Let's create a plan so you have a profitable business, successful career. And best of all. Live with unapologetic ambition. Are you ready to drop the drama and figure out the how in order to reach your goals? You're in the right place. It's time to level up.

[00:00:57] Let's do this.

Speaker2: [00:01:11] Hello, my friends, and welcome back to the podcast episode sixty five. We are going to talk today in our series about worthiness, about giving yourself permission. Permission. Remember those permission slips? I bet some of you are still signing permission slips all the time. Or I'm going to guess they're now all digital, do you sign them online? And my kids are in elementary school. It was way back in the day. We still would have to sign them with a pen. And then I do believe that sometimes my children didn't even bring them home or they forged them. I think that is a true statement. I don't know. I'd have to ask them, but I'm going to guess that was true. But anyway, what we're going to talk about today is what it means to give yourself permission as an adult woman and how powerful a tool this is. But before we start, I wanted to share another podcast review with you. Remember, I'm on a quest to get to one hundred. So if you haven't done that yet, please head over to Apple Podcasts, click rate and review. And let me know what you love about the podcast and maybe what you'd like to hear more of. So this is a review from LCF Seattle Light. And he or she titled this review guidance at its best and wrote, Andrea is confident yet grounded and offers the best coaching and advice for anyone looking to up level their business. She is a fierce coach and her messaging is honest and backed by a passion to help others become the best version of themselves.

Speaker2: [00:02:54] So thank you. Sleepless in Seattle. It's not sleepless in Seattle, but I believe you are in Seattle. Thank you so much for that. And fierce, yeah. Fine. Fierce. There was a Katy Perry song. Fine, fierce something. Anyway, because I like that, I like that one of my clients told me the other day that I was brave because I delete things in Google Docs as I'm working on it, like when I'm editing, I just delete it if I don't like it. And she said, You were so brave, I would have to save every word. I never thought about that, but OK, I'll take it. I guess I give myself permission to delete. Haha. All right. So giving yourself permission and how powerful a tool this is, so I don't think it is necessary to specify whether or not I'm talking about giving ourselves permission on how to think or how to feel or how to do, because those are all three different things, because this tool is kind of it doesn't. It doesn't take sides. It's agnostic, it doesn't have to do with a specific subject or thought action or feeling. And what I'm going to talk about today, I'm not even talking about what you deserve. Ok, we're not going to talk about what you deserve. And I'm talking about is permission. And I think a lot of women struggle.

Speaker2: [00:04:26] With permission. But everyone's brain is different, and you have to pay attention to your own thoughts and feelings to see where this permission discussion is useful for you as I as I go through it. Ok, so I'm going to start with the social context and why women have a hard time giving themselves permission in a broad sense. And a real expert on this is Carl Lowenthal. So if you have never listened to her, go find her. But she taught me that women. Are taught that there are a lot of different ways that we are supposed to be. We are supposed to look a certain way. We're supposed to eat some things and not others. We're supposed to care about some things. Mostly other people not. Ourselves. But we're supposed to care about others. And that's just a few of the million things we're taught we're supposed to do or be or how we're supposed to spend our time. Right. We're supposed to spend our time making sure the House is clean, we're supposed to spend our time making sure other people are happy. We're supposed to spend our time cooking and exercising. We're supposed to spend our time being productive, which I've got a whole episode on that next that's going to be episode sixty six. We're supposed to be productive all the time, actually. So some waves are spending our time or virtuous in allowable. And some were slothful in sinful. And we're supposed to care about success in certain external things.

Speaker2: [00:06:09] And here is something I find so interesting. Women in particular are socialized to never trust their own opinions. I see this so much when someone is deciding whether or not they want to engage in coaching. They think they need to run it by someone else, and I always say the others, those others, someone else's. They're not the ones doing the work. It's only you. Why do we care about what their opinion is? You think this will help you? So let's do it. But anyway, we are told that we need magazines or doctors or celebrity influencers on Instagram to tell us what we're supposed to eat and not eat. Which of course, changes all the time. Or we're also told that we need fashion shows or style bloggers, and we need to watch Emily in Paris to tell us what we're supposed to wear or not wear. What's flattering or not flattering? So we can look. Closest. At how we're supposed to look. Right. We need experts to tell us how we are supposed to have sex or how much sex we're supposed to have and how many hours we're supposed to sleep and how we're supposed to parent and who were supposed to want to date or who we're supposed to want to hang out with on a Friday night. What kind of relationships were supposed to want and when we should text someone when it's too early and when it's too late. So listen. Women are constantly being socialized to undermine their own authority and look outside ourselves for direction.

Speaker2: [00:07:47] And that's because we're taught that we're not inherently worthy. So this is where it goes back to the worthy that our worth is something we have to earn by being cute enough or smart enough, or being productive enough or being self-sacrificing enough. Right, did you hear that one by being self-sacrificing enough, the whole martyr syndrome? Not the impostor syndrome. The Martyr syndrome? And if you're not inherently worthy, you don't trust your own authority and you want someone else quite naturally to tell you what you're supposed to do. You're allowed to do when and how you're supposed to do it or allowed to do any of it. And I talked to so many women who are waiting for direction from others and just won't decide what they want or think on their own for themselves. This happens so often, right? You guys, we are relentlessly socialized to give our authority up to pretty much anyone, anyone else in the world, and to take on their opinion is more important than our own. So I want you to think about this scenario. If a total stranger came up to you in a store and told you that they hated your hair. And it wasn't flattering, and you should change it. I bet a lot of us would stop at the next mirror and look in it and actually think about whether or not that was true. This is a lot of what is happening on social media, by the way, it's creating this and then we might get in the car and we might actually consider that opinion.

Speaker2: [00:09:32] At someone random stranger gave us was right, and maybe we're just wrong about our own here. Maybe it is horrible. Now you might think that you wouldn't care about this, but I bet. And you know what, I'm going to be honest. I bet many of you, including myself, would at least tell the story to a few other people and be secretly hoping that they would agree that your hair is perfect just the way you are and reassure you. And I see this not here, but I see this a lot happening in business that someone suggests you do something differently in your business, maybe because that's the way they do it. And then we spin wondering if that way is the right way. And then we ask a few more people. Maybe we even post about it and we ask another view more people and we look for people to agree with us that the way we're doing it right now is just fine because honestly, we really don't want to put in the effort to create that change, especially when we don't really know if it's wrong in the first place. So notice how we can take random people's opinions more seriously than our own. That's how much we're socialized to care about what other people think and to trust other people's authority over our own.

Speaker2: [00:10:48] Women are socialized to trust any other authority, especially male authority. And they immediately doubt whether they know what they themselves as a woman are talking about. Now, on top of all this socialization that all of us get, some of us may have also had childhood or family experiences where we also can get ourselves into some trouble. We talked last episode about the I'm not intelligent enough. All right. And maybe there were a lot of rules in your family that you were always breaking, or maybe the rules seemed inconsistent, or maybe you got in trouble for normal human things like eating or running? Or not having enough emotions are too many emotions. And maybe you notice that the rules were different for different people in your family or different people in your class in school. So by the time we're adults, we're consumed with anxiety. Ok. And we constantly think that whatever we're doing, we're probably not supposed to be doing in sometimes this is an obvious screaming in our brain. That you're very aware of. But sometimes it's just kind of like a low. Unconscious kind of buzz. Ok, it's like a background, it's like little background noise, like kind of unconscious. Should I be doing this, you ask? No, this is not as important as something else, or at least that's what I'm programed to think. These are kind of what happens. We're like always questioning ourselves. It's like a common background.

Speaker2: [00:12:48] It's a little hum of anxiety or discomfort. All right, it's like a little guilt thing that's always nagging at you, and it doesn't even attach to anything in particular. Just always feeling like whatever you're doing is not the right thing or you should have done something differently or you're not good enough in some unspecified way and that you always need to run something by someone else. So here's what I want you to experiment with. I want you to practice giving yourself permission. This is going to require you to pause and reflect for a mere five seconds. And I want you to do this for Real. I I do it for anything where I kind of feel. Guilt or unease or discomfort? Or I have a thought that I should be doing something different. For instance, I kind of learned this when I lost weight. If I'm eating something and I feel that little low level, hum, I'll say to myself. I have permission to eat this. No one said I couldn't. Or sometimes they say, you, Andrea, have permission to eat this like it's a third person and you can do one or the other, you can play around with it, does it feel better to say I have permission or you have permission like you're talking to yourself? And I learned this from Brenda Lumley when I lost my twenty five pounds. There are no right or wrong foods, and I have permission to eat anything. But it helps take a big picture concept, which is permission.

Speaker2: [00:14:24] Into a very small task. Because we're programed that we can't. Can or cannot eat certain things, and we're. That's kind of a sense of right or wrong making the right or wrong choice, but there is no such thing. So I hear my clients and me use this sort of right or wrong permission or no permission to use it for resting or watching TV, and I just heard Adam Grant this morning on the Today Show. Talk about this. Resting is not something that we have to do after we do 20 other things. Ok. My brain always thinks that watching TV is lazy and bad, and I should be improving myself instead by reading, you know, Jane Austen or by doing something more productive, like making dinner or on a Sunday afternoon, I should be prepping for the week and not watching football. This literally happened yesterday. So I'm recording this when. But we are in NFL playoffs, and I watched a lot of football yesterday, and I have to I had to say to myself, I have permission to watch TV right now. I do not have to prep for the week. I also sometimes do this when I have permission to rest or I have permission to spend this day however I want, I have permission to watch this movie instead of work on my business or whatever it is. And what I find really wild about this practice is that it works.

Speaker2: [00:15:59] Even when I haven't changed fully, my thought pattern, for instance. Intellectually, I believe that I should be able to spend my time however I want. That is a thought, I believe, but I also have way back in the thoughts like way over the thought bridge on the land of like, you should be spending your time differently. I've thought that some ways to spend your time are more valuable than others. And I have to continually work on crossing over this thought bridge over the River of Misery, which I talked about in episode sixty four, because often I am on the struggle bus, it's like the bus going over the bridge in the sense that I'm in between the thought patterns. I now do believe I totally get to choose as opposed to thinking there's a right or wrong way to spend time, or I should or shouldn't thing to do. But I also still believe that some ways are more valuable than others. Like, yeah, in my deep recesses, I believe that some ways are more valuable than others. And you know what? That's OK. That's just me. In the process of transferring beliefs from an old thought pattern to a new one. So when you're in the bridge, the middle of the bridge and you're not fully believing you have permission, I kind of find that by creating a thought that attaches permission to X, Y or Z. In the specific moment, activity is a really powerful way to create change.

Speaker2: [00:17:37] Even if you don't have 100 percent belief in the new thought, so. For example. If you've gotten coached by me, you know, I always like to get super specific. Ok? And I am convinced that the part of our brains that really gives us the most trouble that gets us into the most trouble are the primitive parts of our brain where it lumps everything together, like everything is amazing or everything is horrible. There are so many things going on. Versus there's just one thing going on, OK? Our brains are really black and white. We like to see and we like to see things in all colors of the rainbow in reality, but our brain can't always handle that. It's black or white. So as you work through this permission granting process, try to see things as black or white without all the but or maybes. All right. Maybe this maybe that, I'm not sure, do I really give myself permission? Try to eliminate all that and go for black and white because it makes it easier in this? This concept. Ok. Because when we go for like all the colors and things start to blend together, that's when things get fuzzy, like the lines get fuzzy. And that's why we don't try to solve for things like bad self-esteem or not worthy. We don't try to come up with one thought on that. But when I get specific in my coaching, when I drill down. To what's the one thought that you had about yourself in that situation that happened yesterday, let's get super specific when I do that and I work on that one thought with a client.

Speaker2: [00:19:34] Things change if we talk about all the thoughts and the reasons why you shouldn't give yourself permission, then it becomes really, really, really hard. So black and white, it really works to our advantage here because I find that this is very effective, even if on some level you still have the thoughts that it's not productive. Watching TV is not productive enough or watching TV is bad or whatever the example that works for you. When I just say to myself that I have permission to watch football right now, it completely lightens that little moment for me. I'm not saying I have permission to watch TV all the time, no matter what, but right now I do. It lightens things up. It makes things pretty black or white. And if things don't feel so heavy, I like to say the Santa's sack that you're carrying around lightens up a little. So how can you tell if you need to give yourself permission? You have to practice tuning into the emotional background hum of your body, even during normal daily activities. So again, for some of you, your brain is screaming. That you shouldn't do this and you shouldn't do that. So you'll know very obviously when you need to give yourself permission. But other times are for some of us, especially when we've already done some thought work in an area.

Speaker2: [00:21:06] There's no more screaming in our brain. But there may be this low level hum, so you really have to practice, it requires discernment. It requires time. It may take a minute. And this really does tie in to learning how to feel your feelings and process your emotions. And I always say we need to feel the feeling before we can work on changing it. So you need to work through you. You you can't work through this quickly because a lot of what giving ourselves permission is is recognizing what our unwritten rules are. Like, we can't. Do this before that. And it's super challenging when you're not used to doing it. And that's true even when emotions are very obvious, so if you are a strong of strong anxiety response about eating something, eating ice cream or resting or. Doing a certain activity, like drinking with your friends or watching football on a Sunday afternoon or delegating something at work, if you have strong emotions around that, that's an obvious sign to stop and try to give yourself permission. But sometimes it's going to be like a little more subtle, like it's like you're a little annoyed or agitated, like you might say to yourself, I can't believe I'm doing this. Now, if I find myself saying I can't believe I'm doing this, then I question, do I have to do it? Can I give my permission myself permission not to do it? Can I give myself permission to do it? Another clue that you might need to give yourself permission is if you're rushing through an activity.

Speaker2: [00:22:57] Or I'm trying to distract myself while I'm doing it. That always means I need to stop and give myself permission. Or if I'm watching TV and then I feel like I can't actually sit still to watch and focus on the program, and I start looking at my phone. That either means I'm bored or I don't want to watch TV and I should stop and do something else. Or it means even though it's an activity I supposedly want to do. I have some thought somewhere that is subconscious that I'm not really allowed to do it or I'm not doing it right. And I'm not actually experiencing it since I am looking at my phone. I am distracting myself at the same time, so you've got to examine that. Are you giving yourself permission to watch or are you giving yourself permission to go do something else? So any time I'm rushing or distracting myself, I will stop and give myself explicit permission. I really think this practice of giving yourself explicit permission. And that means thinking the thought or even saying it out loud, like I have permission to is super powerful. I have permission to do this, whatever the thing is or I have permission or you have permission to do this if you're talking to yourself in that third person. I think it speaks to this primitive part of your brain that's always just so worried about doing something wrong or getting in trouble.

Speaker2: [00:24:34] And again, I'll go back, especially if you had a childhood where things were like unpredictable and the rules weren't clear and you didn't know when you were and weren't going to get in trouble or what was good one day might not be good the next. You kind of develop this hyper vigilance about doing wrong things. Are not doing it right or making the wrong choice or getting in trouble. I think a lot of you can relate to this or you might find that instead of giving yourself permission, you buffer. Because that is also easier to do than giving yourself permission, I think I talk about buffering and episode forty six and so explicitly and consciously with intention purposely giving yourself permission kind of relieves that constant running doubt that's happening in the back of your mind that you're not even conscious of until you pause. I do want to address. An objection that you might have. Some of you may think that by not giving yourself permission in toughing it out or sucking it up. Doing that, toughing it out or sucking it up will give you motivation to change your behavior. And if you were to give in and give yourself permission to watch TV. You never really will change for good. So question, how is that working for you, toughing it out or sucking it up, not giving yourself permission? Is that theory that if you do that, you eventually will create the change? Is that working for you? I'm guessing it's not that you're not changing anything.

Speaker2: [00:26:22] If you're agitated. While nevertheless, eating the ice cream or watching TV or taking a nap. You've caved and you're still doing that thing. You're actually just ruining the actual pleasure relaxation you could be having by craving, by crazy, by creating and allowing this negative emotion in on it and then holding out and not giving yourself permission. Isn't doing anything positive, it's not actually changing your behavior, so if you're holding out and not allowing yourself. To enjoy or relax or feel pleasure. You're not actually changing your behavior. So try giving yourself permission to do what you're already doing anyway, try giving yourself. Permission to eat the cake, to watch TV, to take a nap, to serve chicken nuggets. I have found that just doing this practice, serving the chicken nuggets. Whenever I notice I might want to not give myself permission. That never works if I give myself permission. It creates a sense of ease and more relaxation and more pleasure and more happiness. I'm going to tell you a story of a client who decided to order their whole Christmas dinner from Qdoba. And if you were listening, I love this story. She ordered the whole Christmas dinner from Qdoba because she did not want the stress of cooking. She gave herself permission to do that, and her mother commented on it in kind of a snippy way.

Speaker2: [00:28:08] And so she questions, should she have done that? And the answer is yes, because how did it feel? Eating Qdoba, it felt easy. She felt present with her kids. Right. And if she had not done that, it wouldn't have been. It wouldn't have made things better. Ok, so. If you are not giving yourself permission already for big things, like to decide which job you want to have. Or giving yourself permission to say no to a project. Or I have permission to not go on a date with this person, I have permission to ask this person on a date. I have permission to speak to this person or not speak to this person. I have permission to live in this place or not live in this place. That would be super powerful, too. So I've been giving examples of the small little daily things because that's the place I see as like practicing and not giving ourselves permission most of the time, but. I also see this kind of come up with big decisions, big decisions we know we can give ourselves permission to make. Often it's really the little things that I think are the hard ones. But notice if you're giving yourself permission even for big things and giving yourself permission to make these big decisions to do what you want to do is incredibly freeing. There's a huge effect from this very small behavior of giving yourself permission for the big and the small.

Speaker2: [00:29:43] So I highly recommend that you try this out, my friends, giving yourself permission and talk to yourself, either I give myself permission or you, Andrea, have permission, whichever works for you. Try it out. Listen to that low hum. Where there's always something going on in the background of your brain. Can you give yourself permission there and turn that hum off? I also give you permission. To download the five permission slips, you most definitely need that you didn't know you need me dead at, Andrea asked for permission. It's like a it's a permission slip for adults. I say, go download it and see what you think and let me know what you think. Send me a message! An email felt the contact form on my website. And work on this because it is life changing. So if you're in committed to growth already, I want you to try it and come post in our private Facebook group about what you realized you needed to give yourself permission for and how you find doing this practice so that we can all learn and discuss from it inside the group. So this month, it's February. We're discussing permission and worthiness and deserving this all inside, committed to growth this month. I would love to have you all in there with us. Which is where we 10-x everything on the podcast and take it to the next level because my friends, it is always time to level up. I will see you next week.

Speaker1: [00:31:35] Thanks for listening to the Time to Level Up podcast with me, your host, Andrea Libros.

Speaker2: [00:31:40] If you know someone who could benefit from listening to this episode,

Speaker1: [00:31:45] I encourage you to take a screenshot and share it with them. Ok, now what about you? You've listened to the podcast, and if you now know that you're ready to upgrade your life, upgrade your business, upgrade, you then stop being only a listener and start being a liver living that upgraded life. Head over to my website and schedule a call right there on that call. We'll start changing the way you think and act so that you can have the freedom to achieve the impossible in life and business and have the resources to do it. You deserve an upgrade. Let's do it.