You're listening to the Overthinkers Guide to Joy, episode 46. This is the one where
we're going to talk about permission to succeed. Let's dive in.
This is a podcast for overthinkers, overdoers and overachievers who are tired of
feeling overanxious and just want to feel better. I'm your host, certified life
coach, Jackie de Crinis. Hey there, and welcome back. So I hope you are enjoying your
summer wherever you are whether you're traveling or camping or having parties or
Barbecues or just spending more time outdoors Hopefully you are giving yourself
permission to have some fun this summer and Permission is exactly what I want to
talk about today But more specifically I want to talk about permission in its
relationship to success. Now, it's funny what a loaded word permission can be.
It's one of those words where it can easily conjure up that image of authority
figures, you know, like a parent or a teacher or a religious figure or even your
boss. Since most of us were raised with rules and boundaries on so many things,
we often grow up and develop the habit of looking to others for permission.
But if you're an adult and you find yourself still in that position of always
wanting to ask for permission or approval just in so many facets of your life,
you may be undermining your full potential. Now look, when I talk about permission,
I'm not talking about breaking laws or borrowing something that's not yours without
asking, nor am I talking about being insubordinate or not taking into account the
feelings of others like your friends or family. I'm talking about the habit of
asking for permission in lieu of being in touch with what you either want or need.
I'm talking about giving away your own power. And when you give away your power,
you may be hindering your own success. Yep, sometimes we limit our success by
wanting everyone's approval or permission. We fear that if we don't get that approval
from our parent or our partner or some other outside source, then we won't have
their support if something should go wrong. It's ultimately like a fear of failure.
And we think Getting permission or approval will act as an insurance plan because we
ultimately are not trusting ourselves. We think that if we take a big swing and
fail, we will be judged. So we ask for permission.
We play it safe and we play small. Well, where does that pattern begin?
Well, usually it comes from our upbringing, like so many other things. If you come
from a family where money and resources were scarce, whether that was real or
perceived, those beliefs often get passed down to the next generation. And I've
talked about this in earlier podcasts. For example, our relationship with money is
often inherited. And I don't mean the money is inherited. I mean your thoughts about
money are inherited. So we have to fight the urge to just accept these inherited
beliefs. We have to challenge our money stories because they're limiting us.
Beliefs like money is the root of all evil or rich people are always messed up or
more money more problems. It's these kind of thoughts that will often result in
people sabotaging their own success because they feel guilty when they start making
money. The one I see a lot is when the adult child is making more money than
their parents did. The flip side of this is when the adult child comes from a
wildly successful parent and then the adult child feels inadequate so they sabotage
themselves in a different way like by not trying at all. But the truth is whether
it's the guilt about making more money than our parents or the guilt of not living
up to our parents' expectations, the thing is we can't change other people's thoughts
about money or success. And that's because we can't change other people's thoughts
about most things. But as I always say, we can change our own thoughts and that
will change our results. So if you want to be successful, you have to give self
-permission for success. So I'll say that again. If you want to be successful,
you have to give yourself permission to be successful, not wait for someone else to
give you permission. Now, if you find yourself creating some monetary success and
your tendency is to either spend it all or hoard it all, you might have also
inherited somebody else's money story. And this is where we have to get in there
and challenge those inherited beliefs. And we do that by replacing them with newer,
healthier, more productive thoughts. I have one client who's in sales and she says
that every time she sets a financial goal, she feels really good about it. But the
closer she gets to the goal, the or internal conflict she actually has. She either
fears not making the goal or she's equally afraid of reaching the goal.
Now that seems terribly incongruent, but it's more common than you think. It's not
conscious, it's just a habit because in the back of her brain, she thinks
salespeople are sleazy. She Sales people take advantage of other people.
She thinks they're greedy and she's a sales person So these are thoughts that she
got from her upbringing and when I asked her about the product. She sells she said
she owns several of them herself She loves what she sells and her clients are happy
with the product too So I asked her again Well, how can it be sleazy or taking
advantage of others, if you own the product yourself, you use it and you like it.
And so do your clients or your customers. So when she looked at it that way, it
changed her perception about what she does and what she sells. She got out of the
thought pattern that if I hit my financial goals, I'm somehow being sleazy or salesy
or pushy. But just changing that thought, she went on to have the biggest single
sale of her career that week. And she's now on target for her biggest sales year
ever. Just shifting the thought from sales is sleazy, people will think I'm taking
advantage of them to the thought I have a product I love and my clients loved.
That's it, changed her thought, changed the energy around it, and it changed her
feeling, but it also changed her result. She got better results and felt better
about her results. In another situation, I had a client who was raised kind of in
a middle class family, so she began out earning her parents by like 10 times over.
She always felt very sheepish about her success when she was around them. And oddly,
instead of her parents celebrating her success, they judged her. They judged her for
the car she drove. They judged her for the hotel she stayed in. They were always
judging her spending. They thought she was living too extravagantly. What they didn't
know was how much money she actually made, or the fact that she was actually an
excellent saver. But immediately when they would judge her about her car or the
hotels or whatever she was wearing, she stepped into the familiar role of the little
girl looking for approval and permission on how to spend her money. She became
defensive around them and second guessed her decisions about spending, feeling guilty.
So rather than feeling proud of her accomplishments, She felt she needed to diminish
her success by playing it down. She said she didn't want her parents to "feel bad."
Now this is a familiar dynamic when she was a little girl too. She was always
bending over backwards to try and make her parents happy, even at her own expense.
So staying small and always needing their permission or approval, even if they were
wrong. Our brains want to trick us into these old thoughts and patterns. It's easier
to use the neural pathways that are well -worn. It takes more work to create new
thoughts and practice those, particularly when it comes to permission. But it's so
worth it to challenge yourself to find more empowering thoughts. We have to fight
the urge to give away our power and have agency over our own lives and decisions.
Because when we fail to do so, we're simply sabotaging our own success. So just
practicing the thoughts, "I deserve to be successful," or "I give myself permission
to be successful," can be super powerful. Questioning or challenging the limiting
beliefs about success and money are the first steps to unleashing the power of what
is truly possible. So I have another client who struggles with the same guilt about
her success. For the same reasons, her parents were not as successful as she is,
and she feels embarrassed about her good fortune, almost undeserving of her good
fortune. But the truth is she worked her ass off for decades to get where she is.
And it was only in her fifties that she really started making real money where she
felt like she had lots of choices. And that was true for my other clients as well.
They were in their late forties and fifties before the real money started coming.
And yet they were still looking for approval and permission in so many other facets
of their lives, whether it was from their parents, or their partners, or their
friends. Now I had a business coach who coaches hundreds of women a year in these
mastermind workshops, and many of these other coaches would come to her during these
masterminds, and they would ask what they should charge for their program. And their
programs ranged drastically from $500 a month to $30 ,000 a year.
And my coach would always say, "You don't need my permission to decide what you are
worth." But the other coaches felt like they did. They were so accustomed to not
having agency over their own decisions. So they didn't believe in their own worth.
And we would joke that they just wanted the magic wand. So this would happen so
often that as a joke, one of the coaches bought the head business coach, a magic
wand from like, I don't know, Amazon or the Disney store and sent it to her. Every
time one of the coaching clients would say, "Can I charge this amount for this
amount of time?" She would wave her magic wand and say, "You have my blessing." So
anyway, it became a running joke because it wasn't up to our coach to decide what
these other coaches should be charging. It was up to them. A magic wand was a
metaphor for permission. So if you want to take agency over your own business,
your prices, your choices, your spending, your savings, you decide.
Get yourself a magic wand if you need it as a reminder. But grant yourself
permission to make the choices you want for your life. You don't need to let other
people get in your way of your dreams, your goals, or your success.
You're entitled to dream big. You are welcome to set lofty goals.
You are allowed to enjoy and celebrate your success, whether it's little or whether
it's big. You have permission to succeed in life. So permission granted.
magic wand waved. Now go and execute. All right,
friends. I hope you have a great week and I look forward to talking to you next
time. Bye for now. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Overthinker's
Guide to Joy. If you're enjoying these episodes, please subscribe or follow this
podcast so you can always be in the know when the next episode so drops.
