Giving Yourself Permission

The art of making space for yourself in your own life.

“Where can you dial back?” my coach Bella asked me in our last session together. “Where can you find places to pull some energy back into yourself?”

“Where can you reprioritize your efforts to move the needle on what matters most to you in life? And where are you spinning your wheels?”

These are the questions that I, and probably you, need to hear if you want to learn the fine art of making space for yourself in your own life.

Because nobody can do that for you except for… you.

Finding one’s inner compass is not a simple thing to do.

In the busyness of our daily modern lives, there are so many things we know we should be doing, somehow the stack of tasks always manages to overtake the time in which we have to do them.

We have been taught that it is ultimately our responsibility as women to take care of all the things. While it’s true that men tend to do more paid work than women, the data is clear when it comes to the fact that women definitely tend to take on more of the unpaid work of life.

Has life sped up that much? Or are we just conditioned to put everything and everyone else’s needs ahead of our own? I think it’s the latter. I mean, you can’t just skip picking up your kids, or not take care of your aging parents.

It’s all too easy to lose yourself in the flurry of what everyone else needs all the time.

Speaking as the mom of 2 young kids, I know that this is a trap I fall into over and over again.

I get sucked back into the grind of trying to live life at a higher level than I honestly know how to support, and I try and try again until the day I find myself grasping to keep up.

While I know (and I know you know) the mantras of “self-care is super important,” and “put your own oxygen mask on before attempting to help others,” this sage wisdom seems to disappear before my eyes like invisible ink when the bills are due and the schedule is tight and people need to be fed and the house looks like a tornado just whipped through it, and…

How do we first, find and second, support ourselves in finding our inner compass in a world where it’s so easy to forget ourselves in the midst of our full lives?

It’s tough. No joke.

I’ve come to the conclusion that, especially as a woman, an inner compass is something I both need help to find and help to keep.

I know my personal energy is simply too scattered and multidirectional to allow me to hold on to this inner compass without the reflection of friends and mentors that will help keep me accountable to myself.

I’ve found I need structure to thrive. And I know I’m not the best at creating a structure for myself.

We are the weavers. We are the woven ones. We are the dreamers. We are the dream.

We are all participating in this dance of life. We are all moving in time to different tunes, taking different steps, and dancing with different partners.

But we are ultimately the ones responsible for the experience of how we dance.

I think the number one lesson for me at this point in my life is to slow down and be a little kinder to myself.

Instead of getting frustrated when I break down, I need to actually take intelligent and strategic action to avoid getting to the point of breakdown in the first place.

If I want to enjoy this human experience, I have to realize that my inner drive to create, succeed, and thrive can sometimes be my own worst enemy.

It’s not that reaching for success is a bad thing. Not at all. It’s just that pushing myself without first learning how to create the space and support I need to reach my goals is not a sustainable practice. It leads directly to a kind of soul-based burnout, and this is no fun at all.

What does creating space and support look like?

I have learned I must weave a web of my life that produces the support I need to nurture my personal ecosystem.

And I need to allow myself permission to do this without feeling guilty that I’m spending too much energy on myself in the process.

Deprogram, deprogram, deprogram, reprogram…

This means in my relationship with my husband, I need to leverage the feminine arts of receptivity, yielding, and giving gentle guidance to him to help him move towards the support I crave and require to be productive and happy. I know he wants to support me, but I need to help him get there.

Instead of getting frustrated when I break down, I need to actually take intelligent and strategic action to avoid getting to the point of breakdown in the first place.

In my relationship with my children, I need to find the balance between giving them what they need to grow and thrive, while still holding space to take care of myself in the process. This is one of the things that very few (if any) of us have ever had modeled to us in our own childhoods. If that means they eat sandwiches for lunch instead of lovingly crafted vegetarian arts and crafts meals, so be it. Given the proper perspective, they’re going to be just fine!

In my relationship with my own parents, I need to love them for who they are while still holding the boundaries I have discovered that I need for my own healthy functioning as I age. Generally speaking, they actually take this pretty well. It’s my own inner voice of the guilt-trip that keeps me afraid of speaking up for myself in this scenario. Getting over it is a practice. And practicing over time makes this skill easier to enact.

Most importantly, in my relationship with myself, I need to know what it is I want to do with my time and energy, where my zone of genius lays, and what I need to do to create enough time to live in that zone of genius that I feel satisfied with my day-to-day life.

Pulling back energy from the places where I’m wasting it.

In an attempt to create a balanced work/life balance and home, it’s easy to get hyperfocused on one or two things that we THINK are really at the top of the list of priorities. For me, these things are eating well, exercising, sleeping enough, and building strong lines of communication with the people I love the most.

So what’s the problem? Those all sound good, right?

Rent. Bills. The upcoming holidays. WTF. Stressful dreams of always being behind the 8-ball cannot be a good sign of balance. I think the universe is trying to tell me something.

I’ve managed to cultivate such a feeling of scarcity that comes from spending too much time on building quality of life when we don’t actually have the means to support such an elevated way of being. Not just yet.

I have to believe we can get there. But I also have to take action to allow for this future to come to pass.

I think I may have to wake up and smell the coffee (even though I actually gave up drinking coffee) and realize that a little standard lowering might actually do me some good. A little push towards working later into the night and skipping out on a few hours of sleep won’t kill me. Not in the short term at least.

It’s so easy to get myopic about what I consider to be important that sometimes I can’t see the forest for the trees. Hence the need for that outside perspective to keep me on track.

I guess it helps to have someone ELSE give me permission to readjust things first so that I can start to form the habit for myself in the long run. I can’t be the only one feeling this way, right?

Feeling the future me.

My coach ended our last session by inviting me to close my eyes, and start to imagine and feel within my body what it would feel like if I actually had the time and space and support I’ve been craving.

I now think this is my next action step on the path to self-actualization. A simple 5-minute meditation on feeling the body of what the me I want to realize will feel like when I get there.

I’m ready to give myself permission.

Are you?

Kaia Tingley is a writer, artist, podcaster, digital strategy nerd, and sometimes hot-tempered supernova with a wild, free soul. You can find her on Instagram here or on LinkedIn here.