Nobody is going to give you permission to change.
How to change on-demand...
Sometimes we go through life waiting for somebody to give us permission to change, to evolve into the next version of ourselves.
You are like a little kid in a classroom, hand up, patiently waiting for the teacher to call on you and allow you to go to the bathroom.
But for some reason, the teacher never calls on you.
And then one day you realize that there is no teacher, and you aren’t even in a school.
You should’ve gotten up and gone to the bathroom years ago — you could’ve just given yourself permission.
The Punchline
There’s nobody coming to give you permission to evolve into the next version of yourself.
However, the opportunity to evolve is all around us — we just need to become aware of it and know how it works.
We have to engineer environments that will give us the chance to grow and change.
Some great examples of this:
Moving to a new city
Asking to take on a project at work that is going to stretch your capabilities
Doing a 75-day challenge that will push you physically
Signing up to a new workout class
All these environments are engineered for growth.
To push the limits of your current capabilities into new territories.
And you must put yourself in these positions. Give yourself the gift of growth.
Much like how a caterpillar must go into the cocoon on his own to become the butterfly, so must we go into these environments to become the next version of ourselves.
If the caterpillar refuses to go into a cocoon, it’s got no chance of ever becoming a butterfly.
Here’s an example:
Let’s say you are stuck in a job that doesn’t seem to have much upward mobility.
In your head you are thinking, “I can do more than this. I’m meant for more” — and you believe it.
But weirdly enough, month after month, year after year, you remain in the same (or similar) spot.
Turns out your boss doesn’t know the inner most desires (and even if they did, fulfilling them is not something they’d place at the top of their priority list).
They don’t know that you are yearning for more responsibility, more challenge.
And so they never offer it. The teacher never calls on you.
You never take the initiative to evolve into the next version of yourself, and so it doesn’t happen.
You’ll end up waiting with your hand up for decades, never getting called.
Here’s an example from my life to shed some light on this topic:
7 months ago, I really wanted to become more of a business owner and less of a “one-man-show”
I wanted to hire people for jobs
I wanted to have more structure on the back-end of the business to feel like we were running a real operation
And I have wanted these things for years, but I was waiting for them to just happen.
But then I realized — they were never going to “just happen.”
I had to create reasons for them to happen.
So I started thinking a little different.
How could I create opportunities for these things to happen?
What would the version of myself who already has these things be doing that I’m not doing?
Asking better questions led to better answers.
Questions are like a pickaxe for your mind, they help you dig out the gold buried between your ears.
Because your brain is smart, it can come up with answers for any question you give it, we just tend to give it really easy questions, like “what should I eat for dinner?”
Answering new, better questions led me to create new behaviors.
And new behaviors led me to new outcomes.
You can apply this process to anything in your life.
Realize that nobody is coming to help you evolve into the next version of yourself (scary but liberating thought)
Start to ask yourself better questions
If you cant answer the new, better questions — go find the information needed to answer them
Use the answers to those better questions to inform new decisions and form new behaviors
Watch as those new decisions & behaviors create new outcomes in your life.
One additional note is that as you explore these new behaviors, you will feel resistance
Your ego will color your new ideas and actions blue, as if to say, “no don’t try that — it won’t work,” but what it’s really saying is, “don’t do anything new — we are safe and comfortable and happy right with where we are at - what if the new you doesn’t work out the way you thought it would? What if the group rejects this new version of you?”
Don’t listen to this voice, it’s just the ego being funny — ego will always want you to stay right where are because that’s the least risky place for its survival.
If you listen to that voice you’ll never do anything interesting. You’ll never step outside your comfort zone.
This whole thing called life is really an inner game.
Don’t end up as a 80-year kid stuck in a classroom seat, with their hand still up, waiting to be called on by life.
Master your mind, master your life.
Hope this was useful.
Until next time,
Flickman