Permission to Succeed Chapter 1

Chapter 1

The Setup


When I was a kid growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, most father-son conversations with my dad revolved around me asking to do something—“Hey Dad, can I ride my bike? Hey Dad, can I go over to my friend’s? Hey Dad, can I go skateboard? Hey Dad, can I stay up late tonight?” And oftentimes, my dad would say no—“No, you can’t stay up late. No, you can’t ride with your friends. No, you can’t do that,” whatever. Instead of going off and doing it anyway, I did what a lot of kids would do: “Hey Mom, can I ride my bike? Hey Mom, can I stay up late?” And Mom, being a mom, would say, “What did your father say? Did you ask your father’s permission to do that? Did you ask to see if you could do that first?”

This is the common pattern for many of us. Our first experiences in wanting to do something and needing approval involved our parents. They were or are the main source of our confidence. If you have determination and keep asking, eventually you can get your way a lot of the time. If you give up, you wonder what might have happened if you hadn’t. But the point I’m trying to make is, as children, we are taught and trained to ask for what we want to do. No matter the size of the request, it has to meet adult approval before we move forward. When we are young, that is very important. As children, we don’t really know what we want—well, actually we want it all. Our parents or other grownups in our life help us build the framework in how we make decisions and how we move to different levels of achievement. But that’s while we are children.

If you fast forward a little bit, notice that you ask permission to do things even as an adult. We spend a lot of time asking about what we can and cannot do. May I take a vacation, may I set up a meeting, may I devote my work time to this project, may I have your support for my dreams; the list goes on and on. Now, on the outside it doesn’t look like a big deal, but as we get older and less adventurous, we revert back to what we best know how to do: asking for permission. The bottom line is, we want approval and support for what we want to achieve. The upside is that sometimes we get the approval, and the downside is that most times we do not get the permission we need to succeed. But either way, we are waiting for others to give us direction and empowerment for something we want to do or have the vision to create.

Here is a startling thought: the older we get (or the more adult we get), the more we ask for permission. The stakes seem to be higher, and we want to be sure we have it right before we make a decision that can affect our happiness. However, the problem is, as we get older, there are fewer and fewer people to give us answers or the permission we seek. The selection pool becomes even smaller when it comes to getting permission for what we want to do in our personal life. It usually just comes down to our family, spouse, and/or a few friends. Do you really want to get to the point where you’ve relied so long on others for permission that all your sources of approval have disappeared? No—you want to stop looking externally for permission to do what you think you should do and begin looking internally for the permission you need to succeed. It is a change in mental programming, a change in “who” you look to for permission to unleash your potential and allow that potential to become realized energy.

Relying on others for a stamp of approval is a waste of time. One of my favorite quotes is, “If you allow others to define your success, you give them the right to define your failures.” I don’t know about you, but I am not too thrilled about letting someone else determine my success and surely don’t want them to define my failures. One man’s junk is another man’s treasure. My goal in creating this book is to encourage you stop becoming and start being. So when you set your goals and start on your journey to success, you can get to where you want to go regardless of whether other people approve or not. So read this book, practice the tools, and make a conscious effort to give yourself the permission to succeed.


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