Permission

I have a colleague at work who has a great idea. He keeps bringing it up, talking about it, breaking it down every time we speak. The idea is solid, he knows it's solid, and honestly everyone around him can see it too. But for some reason he just won't act on it. Weeks go by and nothing happens. He just keeps talking about it.

I noticed that immediately because I used to do the exact same thing.

I would come up with an idea at work and just wait. Wait for my boss to bring it up. Wait for it to feel safe. Wait for some kind of signal that it was okay to move. And looking back, it wasn't really about the idea at all. It was deeper than that. I was waiting for permission to be the kind of person who acts on ideas like that. My boss is the boss and I am not, so the idea feels like it belongs to him somehow, like I need him to greenlight it before I can touch it. But my intuition and abilities are different than his. I was sitting on things that were actually good, waiting for someone else to validate them first.

When I stopped waiting and just started moving, I naturally ended up in the position I wanted to be in. The role didn't change right away but I changed, and eventually everything else caught up.

I think what's really happening when we do this is that we're holding onto an identity that keeps us stuck in a waiting posture. I am the employee, he is the boss. I am the student, he is the teacher. And as long as I'm holding onto that identity, I will always be looking to someone else to tell me when it's okay to move. The problem is that permission never comes, not because people are withholding it, but because no one even knows they're supposed to give it. You're waiting for something that was never part of the plan.

I train boxing and the exact same thing was happening there. I kept seeing myself as a student. Always waiting for my coach to give me the next lesson, the next drill, the next thing to work on. And there's nothing wrong with learning from someone more experienced. But I noticed something. My coach doesn't wait. He's aggressive, decisive, he just acts like a fighter in every sense of the word. There's nothing fundamentally different between him and me as people. The difference is that he never stood around waiting for permission to be that way. He just was.

So I stopped waiting for lessons and started training on my own terms. Sparring when I felt like sparring, making my own decisions in the ring, being aggressive without needing someone to tell me it was okay. And I became the boxer I was waiting to be.

Something interesting happened after that. Now when I work with my coach it feels completely different. We're not teacher and student in the same way anymore. We're two boxers sharing ideas, exchanging knowledge. He still has way more experience than me and I learn from that, but I'm engaging with him from a completely different place now. It feels more like equals figuring things out together than me sitting and waiting for the next thing he'll hand me. That shift didn't come from him. It came from me stopping the wait.

What I understand now is that we've been taught that identity works like a title. You put in the time, someone recognizes it, they hand you the title, and then you're allowed to act like it. You get promoted and then you lead. Your coach says you're ready and then you fight like it. It feels logical. It feels like the right order of things.

But it's completely backwards.

The behavior comes first. It always comes first. You act like the thing and then you become it. The title, if it even comes, is just the world catching up to what you already decided to be. No one handed my coach his identity as a fighter. No one handed me my position at work. I just stopped leaving a gap between who I was and who I wanted to be, and eventually there was nothing left to wait for.

The identity you're waiting to grow into is not locked behind someone else's approval. The only thing keeping you from it is the belief that someone else has to give it to you first.

No one is coming. So stop waiting, act like the person you want to be, and watch how quickly you become them.