LC - Lisa Corduff Rebrand 2023-06

CwL Ep63: The Permission Slip

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Give Yourself Permission – Never miss an episode! Subscribe and listen on iTunes, Stitcher or Spotify.

Women everywhere are getting impatient. Impatient with the stories in their heads keeping them from pursuing what feels good, expansive and true.

In this episode Lisa encourages you to write your own Permission Slip.

She encourages you to stop waiting for everything around you to be perfect before you give yourself permission to go for it!

She reminds you that you’d drop everything for the people you love – but questions whether you give yourself permission to show yourself the same level of love and care.

If you struggle with people-pleasing or unrelenting standards she has ideas around the permission you might like to give yourself!

If you’re tired of waiting and know that so much of what restricts you are the thoughts swirling around in your head then not only is this episode for you – but so is Lisa’s brand new FREE Workshop that you can access right now! Link below.

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Get access to Lisa’s powerful new FREE Workshop: How to Change the Self-Defeating Thinking Patterns Keeping you Stuck.

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Prefer to read? Access the transcript here

Hi, it’s Lisa Corduff. Welcome to the podcast where you can expect inspiring, raw, energising, and transformative conversations with people on the path of personal evolution. I’m here to really live my life. And if you are too, these conversations are just for you. I’m really glad you’re here. Enjoy.

Hello. Just going to start with a full disclosure, and that is that this podcast episode is being filled in my bed very early in the morning. Ah, yep. We’re locked down 5.0 here in Melbourne, which is just hard to wrap your head around. Last year during the extended lockdown that we had, I actually had to put the podcast on pause. And the last few days, I have remembered why, and that is because with three children at home all the time, it’s really tough to get moments of quiet.

Taking full responsibility for the fact that I’m busting to create some new podcast episodes for you. I’m up early and I am recording this before they wake up. Now, look, if this gets a bit topsy-turvy, you’ll forgive me because it probably means that there’s really two feet pattering up steps to me. Oh, but let’s give this a go. I’ve been wanting to talk about this topic for ages. It’s sort of a new concept. It’s something that a lot of people talk about. I remember years ago, my friend Karly Nimmo started to talk about giving yourself permission.

She really talked about permission to fully show up as yourself, that permission to really just be yourself in the world. You know when you hear concepts and you’re like, “Yes, I get that. Wow,” but you don’t fully get it. I wasn’t at the stage of being ready to hear that. Today’s episode might land for you. It might speak to where you’re at. It might not. You might already be like, “Yeah, I do this all the time for myself, Lisa.”

But I thought it would be a really, really good reminder, because I’ve actually created a brand new free workshop that I’m going to have on my website. It just has some of the core things that I love speaking to women about. It’s really about sort of all the self-defeating thoughts that we think over and over and over again that keep us just like doing what we’re doing. I feel like more and more people are receptive to this message at the moment, because we’re just sort of done with waiting. This is something that I’m noticing more and more and more and more.

It’s like we’re being stripped back. We want to strip back to what’s important. We’re like, “Oh man.” I mean, down here in Melbourne and whatever your circumstances of COVID have been, it’s very hard to find someone in the world whose like, “What COVID?” It’s having an impact on us. I think many of us are realising that, oh, we can feel like our life isn’t as we want it to be due to outside circumstances, right? Well, this is years of our life. This is the second time people aren’t celebrating birthdays because of lockdown or whatever it is.

We can’t see our family members. We can’t travel to the places that we might call home. It’s really full on and people feel like it’s stealing their life. And yet, we kind of oftentimes can steal our own in way more subversive ways. You think about… And I share this because literally I speak to women about this all the time is the way in which we kind of put off. Give our power, give our time away to everyone and everything else in our lives and we don’t kind of give the same level of love, attention, energy to ourselves.

This has impacts on our health, on our well-being, our mental well-being, our capacity to do really awesome stuff in the world. It fills us up. We create this waiting period of like… We create a holding pattern I call it in the workshop. We create a holding pattern where we know we’ll be able to be happy and we’ll be able to do this or that or the other when blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. List all the reasons. But if we’ve learned anything from COVID, it’s that we have to take of what we can in our lives.

I just see more and more there’s this revolution of women who are refusing to wait anymore. The amount of women who join Ready For Change just saying, “Do you have to know what you want? Do you have to know what makes you happy? Do you have to know what you want to change? This isn’t okay anymore, but I don’t know what I do want.” I’m like, “That’s okay. You probably haven’t given yourself permission to think about what you want to create space, to build a relationship with yourself.” I know I had it for ages. I was just on the treadmill of life.

But this concept of giving yourself permission really speaks to the heart of what I’m talking about. I mean, who are you waiting for to give you a permission slip to take care of yourself, to even just prioritise five minutes of mindfulness? It’s not going to be delivered to you. Who’s going to give you permission to start to explore the things that really light you up? Give you permission to ditch things that don’t? It’s you. The connection that you want, it’s you who has to give yourself permission to go out and seek it, cultivate it.

If it’s calm that you want in your life, that stuff, it certainly doesn’t magically appear. It’s you giving yourself permission to activate around the stuff that you want. I think that for so many of us, there’s a… Well, I think for me back then, back when I was hearing permission, give yourself permission to do things, I was also looking at it in smaller ways. Just like literally give yourself permission to go to bed with a messy house, because sleep, those hours before midnight are more important to you right now.

I know there’s a lot of people that cannot go to bed with messy house. It’s a fine. You do you. That’s cool. But where we hold ourselves… What I was trying to say there was, I gave myself permission to imperfectly explore this idea of giving myself my own permission slip. I really want you to think about it. What unrelenting standards are you holding yourself to that maybe you could give yourself permission to just cheekily have a go at dropping that standard, see what it feels like? Especially during lockdown, great time to practise this.

What about if your MO is people pleasing? That you feel yourself doing it. You feel yourself saying yes when you don’t want to. You feel yourself waking up in the morning and having no concept, no conversation with yourself about what you might need that day, but you’re just on and you are on and you are getting the people through the things. You are showing up in all the ways for people who expect and might genuinely really need things from you.

But what about if you just gave yourself just permission to ask yourself the question of, what might I need to feel good today? Skis off on your priority list. But when I think about it like a permission slip, it feels exciting to me. It also feels gracious, like I’m giving myself something. What is it that you need to give yourself permission for? Is it to have a hard conversation because it’s just going around and around in your head and it’s going to have to come out sooner or later?

Or on the opposite to that, is it giving yourself permission to pause, take a breath, take a beat before you jump in with your response to something that’s triggered you? Maybe you need to give yourself permission to just rest. Just rest a little. Slow down. Do a day differently. Do it with a different flow. I think we just caught in this trap of more, more, more. We’ve got to be doing more. We have more to do. I’m just not really buying into that anymore. I’m giving myself permission to go less. What does less look and feel like?

How spacious can my life feel? As we work out and grapple with some big stuff as I shared in last week’s episode, it’s not piling everything higher around me. The skinny get me clarity, inspiration, help me feel motivated. No. It’s having less. It’s feeling more rested, which means saying no sometimes. Can you give yourself a permission slip on the no? You can do it. It’s so comfortable. You might have FOMO. But what do you really want to prioritise in your life at the moment? What do you need to give yourself permission for?

Permission to go a little nuts? Permission to not be what everyone expects you to be just for a moment? Maybe you shouldn’t just say what it is that’s really on your heart. Permission to freaking go for it, whatever it is, whatever that’s calling you. No one else is going to do that for you. No one else will give you permission. They might, but also, who are you to be waiting for that? Who are you to be waiting for everyone else, all your circumstances to align, to go for it, to give yourself the green light to go? I mean, you could be waiting well.

And this is what I’m saying. I am seeing more and more women who just aren’t prepared to wait anymore, women who are giving themselves permission to go even if it might not work out, even if they’re scared, even if they’re so far out of their comfort zone. I mean, they don’t even know the way back. Oh, that’s when things get really juicy. We think our lives have been trapped or restricted in so many ways they have by COVID. But can you see that we trap ourselves too?

Can you see that we build up all these reasons why we have to wait, why we have to continue being who we’re being, doing what we’re doing? And we don’t have to. You will never be a person, I’m guessing, I’m guessing, I’m just going to put this crazy thought out there, who’s going to be a nasty, selfish, horrible bitch to the people in your life. And that’s what we think. When this stuff comes up with, we’re like, “I mean, I can’t do that because that would be selfish.” I guess is that you love your people so hard that you give so much of yourself.

It’s not a bad thing to do that. My question is always, do you show yourself the same love, attention, energy? What might giving yourself permission to do that bring up for you? Don’t judge the thoughts. Just get curious to them. Get curious to this idea of selfishness for pursuing what you want. And even if you are on a path where you’re like, “No, I’m pretty much doing that,” go further. What is your next level of liberation? What is your next level of permission that you have to give yourself? Take back your power for your own life to craft it.

We don’t have to live as people who don’t know what makes us happy. We get to explore that literally any day. I think this polarity between how restricted we feel in our lives from COVID and the total blindness that we have to the fact that we do it to ourselves all the time. And mostly it’s because of the conversations that we’re having in our head about who we are, what’s possible for us, that are the culprit there. And that’s why I’ve created the workshop, because there’s three things that I hear all the time from women.

You’ve got these things on fricking repeat, and literally it’s keeping you living like a smaller life then you deserve. I bust those wide open for you. We go a lot deeper there, but really, I mean, when it comes down to it, you have to give yourself permission to even sign up for something like that, to know that you’re worth working through stuff on. The amount of times that I had to kind of not convince, but speak to the idea when I would run webinars, I mean, I’ve been creating this stuff online since…

I don’t know. I’ve probably had my first webinar in 2015 maybe. It was like the amount of women who said, “I don’t have an hour to watch something.” Okay. Yep, I get it. I mean, I’m busy too, three kids that were under four, starting a little business, serving people in e-courses. What was I thinking? It was nuts, and I felt maxed out a lot of the time. I felt maxed out. I kept telling myself I was maxed out. I kept saying there was no room in my life for anything else.

I literally had on repeat stories that kept me maxed out, living in total chaos, and feeling like I never had time for me. Yet, I would drop anything and be there. If my husband had said he’d really love to see me for lunch on his lunch break, I could be there for that. Was I being there for myself? I didn’t put myself on the priority list. I put work, the kids, the house, my husband. And if I was lucky, I could squeeze something in, go to the market by myself on weekend, which I usually had a baby on my chest and the carrier.

Now, I think we need to go a whole lot further. I think we need to give ourselves permission to be the women unbound by the junk in our heads. I think we really need to start paying a tonne more attention to where we’ve restricted ourselves in our lives. I think we need to be courageous. I think the world needs us out of our self-imposed limitations, becoming active members of our communities. Not feeling like just one extra little thing is going to tip you over the edge.

I remember for years I said it’s like the life I was living, it felt like an elastic band pulled to the point of literally one extra thing, one thing, a kid had to get sick, snap. Everything was like… It was broken, the whole thing. It was so to the max all the time. For me, my permission came in learning how to massively straight back, create calm, create a few systems around my house. Start saying no. Start being responsible for my… Well, I mean, I would just always… I would create chaos. I would literally go create it if I didn’t feel it in my life.

I had to give myself permission to literally pull back a bit when I want to go. Sometimes I have to give myself permission to pause and look around and think what it would create if I went ahead and launched that new creative project. I start at a little bit of a rumble with someone in my life, because things are just feeling a bit too normal around here. What’s that all about? What’s this calm? I don’t know. I like it. It wasn’t happening consciously.

It was absolutely coming unconscious, but it was that we always bring ourselves back to what we know, right? Everything in our life mostly is sort of just habitual thoughts. And we don’t even recognise them. We don’t pause long enough to see what’s really going on. Let’s give ourselves a big permission slip today. What might you write on it? Literally write one. You can go right ahead and do that. Where are you waiting in your life? What are you waiting for? Can you give yourself permission to stop waiting and go for it?

Can you give yourself permission to drop the dodgy self-talk or at least get curious to it? It’s hard to drop it, and I explain about that in the workshop too. You can go ahead and get that now. We’ll pop a link in the show notes. Oh, this is really just such a cool thing for you to explore for yourself. I did it in really gentle ways in the beginning. Now I’m like, I give myself permission to talk about my story in an honest way, even talk about my happiness in an honest way. It’s so much easier to talk about the struggle, to sit with people in pain.

When I talk about this is a crazy thing how good things are in my life, I literally lose followers on social media. I have to give myself permission to be okay with that too, to be light, to be who I feel I am inside out there. It’s that nice juicy exploration of all the things. I’d love to know what you give yourself permission for. I would love you to share that with me. You can send me an email, lisa@lisacorduff.com. You can share with me on socials. What do you give yourself permission for? Have fun with it, and I’ll see you next week.

Hey, if you’re enjoying the conversation, then it would mean the world to me if you head over to iTunes and give us a rating and review. It really makes a difference, and it’s my intention to get as many of us involved in real conversations that really change the game as possible. Thanks so much for your help, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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