Ep. 38 Permission - Dirty Chai with Chio

Permission is the topic of today's podcast episode. The host explains that seeking permission is a common practice in our lives, starting from childhood. As children, we ask for permission from our caretakers for various actions. This seeking of permission continues into adulthood, where we seek approval from others in society. The host discusses how this permission-seeking behavior can limit our decision-making as adults. They give examples of how fairy tales and societal norms dictate what we should expect and approve of in relationships and other aspects of life. The host emphasizes the importance of recognizing and understanding our relationship with permission in order to achieve holistic success. Hello. Hi. Welcome to this week's installment of the Dirt Shy Podcast with me, your host, Cheo, the podcast where we focus on holistic professional and personal success by growing and developing the common denominator to all your successes, all your failures, and everything in between, you. It's about the mindset, emotional regulation, and the intentional personal development that underpins holistic success. Today we're talking about permission. Permission is the act of officially allowing an action to be taken by a particular person or in a particular situation. To seek permission is to seek somebody or an authority to allow you to perform a particular action or to do something in particular. Why is this our subject matter today? Our subject matter today has been chosen because permission has a way of weaving its way through your existence and through your life and affecting decisions big and small without you realizing it. In a lot of ways, when you are unconscious to the impact of your relationship with permission on your relationship with the world at large and with yourself, you may self-sabotage in a way that shocks you and in a way that you may not be able to remedy because you have not wrapped words around what it is that is causing you to do this. I have explained at great length in another episode how in order to resolve something, in order to walk your way through something, in order to challenge something that holds you back, it is important to name it. It is important to understand what it is. It is important to wrap words around it. It's important for us now to wrap our words around the concept of permission and why it can sometimes interfere with this holistic success that we are seeking in our personal and professional lives. Long before I started the podcast, I bought a notebook, and in that notebook I would write quotes or things that I thought I would want to talk about. Actually, this is my second attempt to record today's podcast. I had recorded quite a bit, and then I had a little technical mishap and then deleted the whole thing. So I started over, but while that was happening, I dropped my notebook, and it opened to the very first quote I wrote in the book, and I realized, you know, everything happens for a reason, and perhaps I was meant to restart and to tell the story from a different place, from a place of this quote. This quote is from psychotherapist Susan Zinn, and she says, From the moment we are capable of understanding the world around us, we begin observing how people, particularly our caretakers, interact with us and with each other, which become predictors of how we express and respond to love during our adulthood. I would go further to say, from the moment that we are capable of understanding the world around us, we begin observing how people, particularly our caretakers, but all people around us, interact with us and with each other, and this becomes predictors of how we express ourselves and respond to situations, people, and life in general during adulthood. One of the ways people interact with us as children is by giving and not giving permission. So let's start from the time you are able to express. You ask for something. Is it time to eat? Can I eat? When you are a toddler, when you are young, you are being domesticated, and I've taken that word from the book, The Four Agreements, but what I'm truly getting at here is you're being schooled in the ways of being a human being, and the people that are teaching you are people who love you and who have created you, and they can only teach you to the best of their ability. But while they're teaching you to the best of their ability, they are your entire world and your entire frame of reference for love, for life, and for being. That is a really big thing. If you have children, place this in the context of dealing with your children. What I'm trying to say is you are only human. You know that you're only human when you're dealing with your children. You know that you're only human when you're having a tough day, but you're also trying to be the best parent that you can be, or you're having an excellent day, and you're still trying to be the best parent that you can be. But to your child, you are the entire world and its definition, and once upon a time, someone was the entire world and its definition to you. That doesn't make that person good or bad or anything. Simply that they influenced you more than you realized. This is why, despite mocking my mother's dancing skills for many a year, I find myself as an adult, a 38-year-old woman, dancing in her quirky way whenever I feel the little jitterbug in my bones. I do her little dance and I just think, oh my God, this is what they mean when they say the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree. Now how does that extend to our topic today, permission? Now these people, or this person who is the center of your universe, is raising you and is doing their best to teach you to be a human being among other human beings, to be a useful and loving and kind member of society. And in doing that, they start teaching you what's acceptable and what's not acceptable. And you start learning early on to seek permission for certain actions. Can I do this? No. Can I do that? Yes. Can I do this? Yes. Can I eat at this time? No. Can I have water at this time? Yes. Can I have juice at this time? No. You're already learning to ask for permission. And as a child, you have to ask for permission for everything. In a home-like mind, in a culture-like mind, you have to ask for permission well into your twenties, sometimes maybe into your thirties. Sometimes you're only released from this asking of permission when you turn, when you get married. So this is you as a child learning. Then you go to primary school or preschool. Things are done on a schedule. You arrive at a particular time. You are allowed to wear certain things. You would do certain activities. You have break time. You have to eat your lunch at a certain time. All of these things are permission, implicit and explicit. You are asking for permission and you're being granted permission to do certain things. In all of these things, there is no talk of asking, what would you rather be doing at this time? Not that I'm saying that that should happen. I'm laying a foundation for the way the thread lays itself out as you get older. So this is you in preschool. You go to primary school. Now you must wear a uniform. This is what is an acceptable appearance. I had long hair until about grade five and then we got a new headmaster and he decided that he didn't like it when girls had hair because he felt that they got distracted by it. And we all had to shave our heads so that we could focus more on our schoolwork. I would like to just say that my grades were high before I got a haircut. My grades remained high after I got a haircut. And when I left that primary school and I went to high school, my grades remained high and I had hair. I'm just saying. But anyway, this is the frame of reference that I had. So now I'm told what to wear. I'm told what I can do with my hair. I'm told where I must show up. I'm told how I must show up. I remember there was a discussion about me being a prefect at some point during primary school and ultimately the decision was made that I shouldn't be one because I was simply too quiet. I didn't speak enough. I needed to speak more, which is funny because in my head I thought I spoke a lot, but apparently it wasn't enough. But all of this is to say they're boxes that you take and then you get an approval or you don't get an approval. And this is how you're getting on with life. You write tests. You are given information. You write tests. You have to give back the information in a particular way. You get marks. You're rewarded for this. So there's this complex reward system for behaving in the way that is acceptable. So whether you are in fact saying, can I please go to the toilet, which you had to do in the school system that I was in, you don't just get up in a classroom full of students and go to the bathroom. You have to get up, go to the front, ask for permission to leave the classroom, go to the bathroom and come immediately back. This is how it worked. You go to high school and it's more of the same. We had restrictions on who we could interact with. There were severe restrictions on interacting with boys. I went to an all-girls Catholic school, which reminds me, I was born and raised Catholic. And then I also went to the Catholic Church, which has very defined protocols about prayer and conduct during a church service and how it should happen and the order should follow, like most churches. But I suppose the Catholic Church is known particularly for that. All of these things are telling you that you need permission. You need permission to do this. You need permission to do that. You need permission to even get married. You need permission for all of it. I'm not sure how this permission seeking or this permission giving affects boys, but I imagine that we are affected by the same thing in different ways. So you find, for example, I think one of my earliest episodes, I talked about how 90s fairy tales are sabotaging you. And I explained how the things that we are taught by this implied, this express and this implicit permission are the things that limit our decision making as adults. So for example, in that particular episode, I talk about how fairy tales defined a brave man or a man as a prince who was wealthy, who was tall, who was brave, and who was a rescuer, who came to rescue a damsel in distress. By giving us those shows and movies and TV material to watch, and there was a lot of it, all based on the same thing, by giving us that framework over and over and over and over again, we were taught what we should expect to see in a man that we approve of, which is permission, and we were taught that we should expect to see in a man that we do not approve of. Is it any wonder that a lot of women in my generation describe their ideal man in the exact same terms? I don't know if we even know if that is what we like. That's on the one side of the gender coin. On the other side of the gender coin are the men who were told that they must tick these boxes in order to be sufficient, in order to be acceptable, in order to be a man's man. This is what they were told that they are permitted. The only emotion they are allowed to exhibit is anger, or that they were shown exhibiting in the shows that we watched was anger, or softness in response to the woman that they were going to rescue, or softness in response to her loss. So maybe she gets killed and it inspires them to go on a revenge whatnot. That's generally how it went, or softness in response to finding the woman as a damsel in distress or a Rapunzel in a tower and kissing her hand or whatever. That was what they were allowed. Those characters that we grew up seeing did not have a full range of emotion. Consequently, we have a generation of people who are just now, as the consciousness movement gains ground, starting to accept that men have other feelings that they are permitted to express. But they were never told that they could permit them. They were permitted to have them. In fact, this permission is new, and we are all learning to give it to ourselves. That's the one thing. Then in the exact same scenario, think about the women. Think about the manner in which girls have been taught to present themselves. Soft, beautiful, delicate, unable to help themselves and so they must wait for this prince to come and rescue them. Usually poor, usually with no money at all. Is it at all surprising that we spend so much time trying to fit into this damsel in distress thing to be rescued by someone? Is it at all strange that we have long discussions about why women who are empowered are problematic? Do we even know why they're problematic? Is it because we were taught implicitly that, or we were taught covertly, that that is not an acceptable state for a woman? Is it that we were taught covertly that a woman must be poor and in rags and waiting for somebody who is brave and tall and dark? Even if they're white, they're still dark, olive or whatever it is. Their skin could not be pale. I mean, God forbid you come from a Scandinavian country. What was the plan there? That was not permitted in the narrative of what the perfect man rescuing the perfect woman looked like. And we watched lots and lots and lots of this. And here comes the important point. All of those permissions that we were given and not given have compounded in our minds over time to affect the decisions that we make now. Here's the thing. A lot of us fail to make decisions because we're waiting for someone to give us permission. We fail to jump off a cliff or to try an idea because we're waiting for someone to give us permission. And I'm not saying this in order to criticize. I'm saying this in order to sensitize. I'm saying this in order to let you know that the idea that you must be a certain something is not coming from you. And it is time for you to understand that the permission that was externalized for so long in whatever shape or form, it doesn't even have to be the narrative that I've used as an example here, because the narrative I've used here is an example. It is one way in which the idea of permission has pervasively entered our lives and stayed. The question or the issue that I'm bringing to your attention is that the manner in which these permissions have been given to us or not given to us, the definitions of those permissions were set by someone else who was just trying to figure it out like you and me. It is okay for you to pause and assess the decisions that you're making as far as your love choices, your friend choices, your work choices, and ask yourself, are you the one truly making those decisions or you're purely following the script of permission that you were given? Are you purely following the idea of what is right and what is acceptable that you were fed, that you have never questioned? And maybe it is time to question it. When you do the things that you've been told that you should do, do they feel right to you? If they feel right to you, do they feel right because you tended to get approval for those things, or do they feel right because they align with who you are? These are important questions. It is a big question that you need to ask yourself in order to truly be successful because if the success that you are seeking is not the success that you truly want or that is truly true to you, if you're simply seeking to be a doctor because everyone in your family is a doctor, not because that is the calling that you want to follow, you might find that when you're looking at a broken bone that needs sitting that you feel queasy and you might pass out because that is not where you're meant to be. There are many people who've studied whole degrees and completed them only to turn around and find maybe this is not the place that they wanted to be. That is something that happens when you follow the permission script that you've been given. It is not at all shocking or even judgment worthy that we are doing these things, that we are seeking out marriages, that we are seeking out a script, that we're trying to fulfill these things. Maybe simply because when I say seeking out marriages, I want to say we're seeking out marriages purely because that is what we are meant to be doing at this time. Right? Some of us are. Ask yourself why you are doing something. It is okay to want anything, marriage included. It is okay to want it, but it is also okay not to want it. The most vital thing is that you learn to shirk by choice the permission script that you've been given because what you were given by the people who loved you dearly was the script they knew best in order to get you started and to show you how life works. They were not giving you this so that it would be your forever and a day, that you could never steer from it. No. It was to raise you to the point where you know how to use your own brain, you know how to master your own emotions, you know how to be the best version of yourself, and then from there, girl, take it and run. Now take it and use this to make the decisions that are most appropriate and most relevant for you. How do you do that? How do you start letting go of the script of permissions that you've been given? How do you start questioning and asking yourself what it is that you want life to truly look like? How do you begin to work out who you truly are and what truly inspires you? One of the ways that you can do that is to seek out stories. When I was working at RSM in my earlier days, in the early days of my career, I learned to drive. I was very late to this party. My mom had a beat up jalopy of a car, but she hardly ever drove it. It was always in the shop, so technically we didn't have a car. I only learned to drive in my 20s after I started working and I needed a car for work. I really struggled to park this car when I first got it. I would try to get into the parking bay, couldn't get into the parking bay at the office. I tried, I tried, I tried, couldn't get it done. Then one day, a colleague said something to me that changed my relationship with parking forever. After watching me, she was Serbian and she was very blunt. After watching me try to park a few times, I irritated her immensely by failing because I kept coming up and I couldn't get in. Then I'll come back and then I'll try. With her cigarette between her two fingers, she said to me, Jill, what exactly are you doing? I say to her, I'm trying to park. She says, you're failing to park. That's what you're doing. You're failing because you cannot park if you can't see the lines. It was such a straightforward statement to make and it was a light bulb moment for me. I finally understood why I couldn't park. I was coming in too close to the lines. I needed to do a quick loop or steer away from the parking, which felt counterintuitive, and then come into the parking bay. I had to see the lines so that I could steer the car into those lines. Here's how that is particularly relevant to us here. Seek out people who are living the best versions of their lives. Seek out people who are doing things that you think you want to do. Talk to them. Get close to them. Hear their stories. In this modern age that we live in, you don't need to seek out a celebrity, an extraordinary person out there, and be next to them physically. The internet has given us such a wide reach. You can find people who inspire you on Instagram. You can find people who inspire you via blogs. You can find people who inspire you via books. You can find people who inspire you via conversations with people. Look up from your phone. You can do these things, but what's important is that you hear people's stories. Every time I speak to someone and I hear stories, when I speak to the HR executive at our office, she tells me a story from early in her career because now she's larger than life. Now she's an extraordinarily successful person, a person that most women in the organization look up to and think, my God, if I could just make it to a quarter of what she is, I would have made it in life. That's who she is now. She tells me the story of when she started. She tells me the story of when she went through a difficult period like I was going through a couple of years ago. I remember her picking me up in that situation and telling me, I've been here before, right? And this is what I did. And I did great. I turned out great. And I know that she turned out great. But what she did for me in that time was she showed me the line. She said to me, oh, you want to survive a divorce? This is how you do it, right? And do you know what? If you want to, you can get remarried. You can do this. You can do this. This is how you can do it because I have done it. And that's the beauty of stories. What it told me is no matter the pain I feel now and I feel it, I will heal and I will be fine because those lines that she's drawn for me tell me that I can go in there, right? That is what the lines, that's what the stories that people share with us are. It's when someone, I remember a woman in a meeting, she wasn't even particularly telling a story. So she used to work at RSM. She had come there to do her will with her husband. They were obviously doing well. They worked for Nando's, the company behind Nando's. And they were laughing. I was in my mid-twenties, broke beyond, oh my gosh, I had, I did not have two cents to rub together. And then she casually threw out, you know what? I remember being, so she had come in, she had a fancy car, she had a high paying job. And I was just like, guys, when, when, God, when? And then she throws up, throws out in the meeting. I've decided to do this will because all of a sudden I have money. For all of my twenties, I didn't have two cents to rub together. And at 30, it's like all of a sudden I made money. And that gave me lines to drive into. She told me that it was okay for me to be struggling right now. I was looking at her and comparing my present self to a future version of herself, if that makes any sense. So I wasn't comparing like for like. She wasn't in her twenties like me. At the time that she was in her twenties like me, she was struggling and she did ABCD so that when she hits her thirties and she went into her thirties, she had two cents to rub together. And she said, all of a sudden the money came after 30. And I thought, yes, I am looking forward to my thirties. And my thirties in that regard have been a blessing. All I'm saying is in order to test the permissions that you've given yourself, the limitations that you've placed on yourself, speak to the people who are around you. Listen to people's stories. Beware of people who peddle purely the narrative that is designed to limit. Beware. And I understand that there are race issues. I understand that there. But beware of people who wish to wallow and to stay there in that narrative forever. Seek out the empowering narratives. Seek out the people who seem to have done well despite. Go there. Have that conversation. And your mind will be blown by how not complex it is. By the fact that it was them giving themselves permission to do things a little differently from what they thought they were meant to be. You will find that it's a story of learning how to set the rules for yourself. It's a story of learning how to navigate the rules up to a point in your life. And then when you have mastered that, figuring out how to set rules for yourself so that you can define the life that you are living now. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. Seek out the stories of others to inspire you. Understand that it is normal for you to have a script that you are given because otherwise we would be raising all of our children in some dear MacArthur fashion where nobody knows what to do when they reach a zebra crossing. We all have to be domesticated in some way. But it is your, that is society's responsibility to us. But it is our responsibility to ourselves to grow to a point where we then say, right, thank you very much. Thank you for everything that you've taught me. I will keep how to use the zebra crossing, but I will not keep that vanilla ice cream is the best one. I will have pizza with pineapples on it. That's you living the life that you've been given to the fullest potential and understanding that the people who are giving you permission in the earliest of your days, we're standing in for you while they waited for you to grow enough to be able to do it for yourself. Nature's trick is they don't tell you that that's what's happening. They don't tell you that that's how the game is played. You wake up one day and you think, how do I go from the girl who needed to ask to go to the bathroom and I have to make a big decision for a corporate without asking anybody for permission. It is wild. And if you don't learn to shirk and to let go of that idea of constantly needing permission, you will make your way up to middle management and then you'll stay there. You will build your business up to a certain point and then you will stay there. You will build your life up to a certain point and you will stay there because the rest of that journey is unlocked by you saying yes to yourself. That's what the Year of Yes in Shonda Rhimes book was about. It was about her giving herself permission to figure out what it is that meant the most to her and how to live her best life. That permission comes in so many shapes and forms. The reason why you seek out the stories of others is so that you can be inspired and then you can pick and choose which of those stories do it for you. Which of those stories give you tools that are relevant to you? Which of those stories speak to you in a way that you wish to give yourself permission for? And then by George, give yourself permission to do it. Go out there and live your best life. This is not a drill. You don't get another life. You don't get a do-over. You don't get to come back and say, oh, oh, oh, oh, I figured it out, I figured it out, I figured it out. If I were to do this again, this life thing, this is how I would do it. I told you in one of the episodes, I'm not sure which one anymore, about keeping counsel with three versions of yourself. Your eight-year-old self, your present self, and your eight-year-old self. This makes me so emotional. Your eight-year-old self with the wonder with which she saw the world, with her idea that everything was limitless and beautiful and full of life and wonder. Your present self with everything that you've been through, good, bad, beautiful, ugly. You are whole. And your eight-year-old self. Your eight-year-old self will inspire you. Your present self will keep you grounded. Your eight-year-old self will tell you what you would like to look back and be proud of. Keep counsel of those three at all times. Would eight-year-old you and 80-year-old you be proud of the life that you're living now? When the three of you sit together, would you be able to say, we made our own rules and we thrived within the society in which we were born? Would you be able to say, I figured out that I actually like short, pudgy men with pale skin and red hair? Contrary to the 2000 fairy tales that I have watched. If you are able to make a selection, whether it is the stereotypical choice or a completely left field one or a gently different one, but that choice is made by you truly, then you are winning at life. You finally understood that it is not about taking permission and tossing it in the bin. It is about taking permission and owning it. Thank you for joining me this week in this installment of the podcast. I hope you enjoyed it and if you did, please share it with someone. Please like, subscribe and please leave me a review. I appreciate every single review that I get. I received a review recently that said that I have consistently posted an episode every week since June 2023 when I started the podcast and it hit me like a ton of bricks because I hadn't realized that this is how far we've come and that we've managed to do this recording on a Tuesday, every Tuesday, rain or shine, Vegas or the mountains or Johannesburg and we've posted this on IM. Oh my goodness, God is good and what a gift it is to be able to share this with you. Let's grow together this week. Thank you.