Six women sat down with me at the Texas Conference for Women this week. Each one was waiting for someone to give them permission to move.
They were at vastly different places in their careers - some fresh out of college and in their first career job ever, some who’ve been at this for a while. (The following examples are composites of different women I spoke to and clients that I’ve worked with over the past year.)
One woman has been in her role less than five years, and she wonders if it is time to leave. She’s not receiving any feedback on her work; she goes unnoticed to the point of people doing work that she’s already done because they were unaware of her efforts.
Another wants to be a leader. She knows that she has the skills - she’s been mentoring and training others for years - but how does she tell her boss that she wants to lead without sounding like she’s going to leave if they don’t put her on a leadership track?
Another has gone as high as she can go on her team. She got there, she enjoyed it, and now there’s nowhere left to climb unless someone creates a role above her. She’s worn out and wondering if this is all there is.
The need for permission doesn’t stop when you get promoted. Maybe you’ve gone months waiting for someone to tell you you’re doing good work. While you’re waiting for feedback, the voice in your head is filling in the gaps.
Where do you find yourself waiting for permission?
The Voice That Fills the Silence
Let’s give a name to the voice in our head. Naming it is the first step to quieting the voice. In the Positive Intelligence® framework, this is the Judge.1 I could hear the Judge hard at work as I spoke to each of the women. While none of us can really know what’s going on in another’s head, we can guess at what the Judge and its accomplices might be saying to our composite characters. You can read more about the Judge here, but today I want to focus on a couple of its accomplices.
The Pleaser is there to tell you that wanting something for yourself is disloyalty to those around you - your team, your boss who trained you, etc. For the second woman, the Pleaser keeps her from talking about her desire to lead. She doesn’t want to disappoint her boss or seem ungrateful for what she has now.
The Hyper-Achiever tells you that the only way to prove your value is to move up one more rung on the ladder. But what happens when you run out of rungs? For our third woman, the promotions have been the proof that she’s doing well. The Hyper-Achiever tells her that she needs to start building a taller ladder.
Of this pair, the Hyper-Achiever is the louder voice in my head. The Hyper-Achiever says that I haven’t done enough, not as much as so and so. They’re worth more than me - why would anyone choose me over them?
How does the Pleaser show up for you in the middle manager’s seat? Maybe you’re saying yes to every request from leaders so that no one questions your loyalty. What about the Hyper-Achiever? Maybe you’re treating a promotion as the only proof you’re doing well.
Navigate Your Way Forward
If the Judge is the voice in our head passing out verdicts like candy on Halloween, the Sage is the part that can see a hard situation clearly, from all angles, before the verdict comes. The Sage has five moves. I wrote about the Explore move here. Today, the helpful move is Navigate.
Navigate allows you to choose between the options before you. It’s based on your core values, the things that give your life purpose. The women in our story are waiting for permission to come from outside of themselves. They are measuring themselves with someone else’s ruler, but Navigate helps to measure with your own values.
At the conference, Hoda Kotb said, “Not every door is your door. Not every mistake is fatal.” Navigate is how you tell which doors are yours to walk through. Your values point the way, and since not every mistake is the end of the world, you don’t need a guarantee before you choose what you want.
Is It Mine or a Should?
I can hear some of you saying - but I don’t know if my values are really mine or if they are just things that I think I should do. Is this a life-giving value or a should? There are lots of values tests on the internet these days (I’ve even written one myself!), but the questions that I keep coming back to are from a much older practice of discernment. To read more about it, check out Sleeping with Bread: Holding What Gives Life by Dennis Linn, Sheila Fabricant Linn, and Matthew Linn. In it the authors walk you through a daily discernment practice.2 I’ve adapted their questions slightly:
What moves you toward life and other people? What gives you energy and hope?
What makes you feel heavy or restless, isolated and turning in on yourself?
You ask these questions (or questions like them) each day, but the answer shows up over time in the pattern that is forming. It isn’t based solely on a good or a bad day. For me, the pattern looked like being in a role where I felt like I was always fighting to be heard. Meeting after meeting, month after month, pushing and pushing to be heard. That wasn’t life-giving for me. Consider these questions:
Over the past month at work, what made you feel the most alive or made you feel energized? What zapped your strength just thinking about it?
What do you find yourself doing without even being asked?
Keep asking these questions, and over time, you’ll start to see unmistakable patterns. Arrows pointing you towards or away from things. That is the Sage at work.
To go back to the women from the conference, the one whose work is unnoticed might ask whether the work is still energizing for her, even when no one seems to see it. The woman who wants to lead can look back on years of mentoring and training others and see how this fits the pattern. The third woman, feeling drained at the top of the ladder, might decide to get off the ladder to go back to something that she used to love.
Reflect and Act
Reflect. Go back through the last section and consider the questions listed there. Are you starting to see some patterns that you want to test?
Act. Try these questions out for a week. As you transition from work to home, write one line for what gave you life and one line for what drained you at work that day. At the end of the week, read the five pairs together and look for what repeats.
If the Pleaser or the Hyper-Achiever sounded familiar, find out which of your saboteurs are loudest by taking a free assessment. Email me for a link to the Saboteur Assessment.
The Judge, the Saboteurs, the Sage and its five powers all come from Shirzad Chamine's Positive Intelligence® (2012), along with the PQ® assessment I use with clients. POSITIVE INTELLIGENCE® and PQ® are trademarks of Positive Intelligence, LLC. The framework is his. The conversations and examples are mine.
Sleeping With Bread adapts the Examen, a daily reflection practice from Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), the founder of the Jesuits. In his Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius taught people to pay attention to two kinds of inner movement. Consolation is whatever moves you toward life, hope, love, and connection with others. Desolation is whatever moves you toward heaviness, restlessness, and turning in on yourself. The Examen asks you to look back over each day and notice where each one showed up. Over time, the pattern helps you discern which direction to go. The Linns simplified these into two questions anyone can ask at the end of a day, whatever their faith background.
Ignatius also cautioned against making major decisions while in desolation. That isn't a call to wait forever. It's a reminder not to let the heaviest days force you into a choice that may not be right for you.
I really appreciate what you shared about paying attention to the patterns that emerge over time. There's so much value in giving ourselves the space to notice what consistently energizes us and what leaves us feeling depleted.
Ohhh loved thinking through these prompts! Thank you!