That permission you've been waiting for? It's never going to come.
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hey, imperfectionists, how are you doing? Let me tell you a story. It’s one from the archive, about the behaviour of young and unwise Rebecca. When I was an undergraduate, I was doing really well, getting great marks in all my assignments, really positive and enthusiastic feedback from my lecturers and tutors, and as I got into my final year of study, I was thinking about staying on to do a masters. And then maybe a PhD too, although that was a bit too long term for my little 20-year-old brain to think about. The more time passed, the more I set my mind on this. I wanted to continue to study. But also … I definitely wasn’t going to tell anyone. I was going to wait for someone to ask me - basically, I waited for one of my lecturers to say, ‘Hey, have you thought about doing a masters? Because you definitely should.’ Now, that eventually did happen - shout out to Professor Robin Le Poidevin in the philosophy department at the University of Leeds - and after that, the wheels started turning, and I started the process of applying for a place on the masters course and applying for funding to do it and all that, reassured in the knowledge that it was ok for me to be pursuing this goal, that someone other than me thought it was a good idea. But, still, I did absolutely nothing about it until someone else encouraged me. Would I have taken the initiative and set the wheels in motion myself, if he hadn’t? I don’t know. I wonder about this from time to time. My hunch is that I would have eventually mentioned it myself, gone to talk to someone to express my interest and find out how I should go about making it happen. But it would have been an incredibly uncomfortable process. I’d have been thinking, ‘Maybe this isn’t for people like me’ and ‘If I was cut out for this, someone would have already mentioned it, and they haven’t, so maybe I should just shut up and go away.’ It - continuing to study philosophy - was really the only thing I wanted to do with myself at that time. And yet, despite how invested I was in it, it wasn’t something I was going after myself. I was waiting for someone else to come along and lead me by the hand towards it. I was waiting for permission; for someone to say, yes, you’re allowed to do this - in my judgment, it is not absolutely ridiculous that someone like you should be able to do something like this, you’re not laughably deluded for thinking of it as a realistic goal.
A little aside before I go on: I think this is such a powerful illustration of how just a tiny bit of encouragement shown to someone more junior than us can make a big difference. Basically, what I’ve just described is a case of someone more senior to me saying, ‘Hey, ever considered this?’ That small act of thoughtfulness, that indication of ‘this is an option for you’, made a big difference to my confidence and what I viewed as a realistic vision of my own future. I try to keep that in mind when I’m interacting with my own students.
Ok, back to the point. Waiting for permission. Why do we do it? Because we do, a lot. Even people who seem completely together and self-assured and focused on what they want. It’s not just a 20-year-old-Rebecca problem. I’ve heard it again and again from coaching clients too, clients who are often at the peak of their careers and far from being flaky or incapable of getting what they want. They say things like, ‘If I don’t get this award, then I’ll feel justified in moving on from this job’, and ‘If relationship counselling doesn’t solve the problems between my partner and me, then I’ll have a reason to end the relationship’. I always ask the same thing: if moving on from this job or ending this relationship is something you want to do, why do you think you need further reason or justification to do it? Why isn’t ‘this isn’t working for me any more’ good enough as a reason to make that decision?
Different people have different answers to this question, of course. But there are a few themes that keep cropping up in these discussions, so let me talk about them here.
One is fear of making the ‘wrong’ decision. I hope you can hear the scare quotes around the word ‘wrong’ there. Because what does ‘wrong’ even mean in this context? Who gets to decide what counts as ‘wrong’? It seems that, sometimes, what’s going on in these situations when we hold off making a big decision for fear of getting it wrong is that, perhaps without consciously realising, we’re imagining how we might justify and explain our decision to another person. That person might be someone from our past, whose critical voice we’ve internalised. If someone from your past criticised you for being rash or impulsive or giving up too easily, then you might end up viewing the choices you make in your life through this lens. You might, for example, at some level know that this relationship you’re in has run its course, but you’re afraid of ending it in a way that might leave you open to accusations of being rash or impulsive or giving up too easily, or whatever else it might be in your case. And so you end up waiting around for something to happen that would force your hand - something that no reasonable onlooker could deny makes it acceptable for you to make the decision that you wanted to make anyway. Your partner cheats on you, so you’re finally allowed to leave. Your promotion application gets denied again, so you’re finally allowed to start looking around for another job. Nobody is going to shake their head at you and tell you that you should have held out for a bit longer, or tried a bit harder to make it work. Daft, isn’t it? Because wanting to do something is reason for doing it. It might not be the only factor involved - I mean, you might want to quit your job but you also need money to live and so you can’t do exactly what you want. But even so, what you actually want to do is a pretty big factor, and it’s certainly a bigger factor than what an imaginary critic of your life might say about you. Next time you find yourself shying away from making some big life decision that, deep down, you want to make, ask yourself: what’s holding me back here? And then interrogate whatever answer you come up with. If it’s something like ‘I don’t want to act rashly’, ask yourself: what would you do if you weren’t afraid of this? It’s going to be useful here to return to a strategy that I’ve mentioned before: ask yourself what advice you’d give to a close friend who was in the situation in which you find yourself. If a close friend wanted to leave a job that wasn’t making her happy, but voiced a fear of acting rashly, what would you say to her? When I have this discussion in coaching sessions, the answer is usually something along the lines of either, ‘So what? You already know what you want, go and do it’, or ‘But, you’re not acting rashly, you’ve already thought about this way too much’.
So, there’s fear of making the ‘wrong’ decision. What else holds people back? Another factor is a belief in something like, ‘I don’t get to make decisions like this.’ And sometimes this is a fear of the power that we have. Like, ‘Wow, that’s a big decision, and I’m scared that it might be mine to make, I’d much rather someone else made it for me’. Because, much as we celebrate being empowered and taking control of our own lives - it’s really really scary. There’s that whole ‘with power comes responsibility’ thing. The fear that if we make some decision or other and it doesn’t turn out well, then we only have ourselves to blame. This idea of blame is key here. We’re talking about finding ourselves in situations where we have a decision to make, and where we have no guarantee that things will turn out well if we make the decision that we want to make, and our inner critical is standing by ready to pile on the blame if things don’t turn out well. Now, one thing that’s wrong with that is that it’s pretty harsh - I mean, we’re trying our best here to make the right decision under conditions of uncertainty, and so even if things don’t work out, it’s inappropriate to blame ourselves for not making a different decision. A bit of self-compassion wouldn’t go amiss here. But another thing wrong with bringing blame into the equation is that it’s a distraction. It clouds our view. Because, sure, there’s a chance that we make the decision and things don’t work out well, but also there’s a chance that we refrain from making the decision and things don’t work out well. There’s risk on both sides. But being preoccupied with wanting to avoid blame complicates that. We tend to view people as more blameworthy when negative consequences arise as a result of their action than we do when negative consequences arise as a result of their inaction. You’re more blameworthy, for example, if your friend ends up getting drunk and injuring himself as a result of you spiking his non-alcoholic drink with vodka than you are if you simply fail to discourage him from drinking too much vodka. In both cases the same bad outcome results, and in both cases you were able to influence the outcome - but in one case that bad outcome resulted from your action, and in the other it resulted from your inaction. Philosophers call this the act/omission distinction; this idea that ethically it’s worse to bring about something bad through acting than through failing to act. And so it turns out that anything bad that follows from your not making the decision is easier to deal with than whatever bad things follow from your making the decision, because you’ll end up blaming yourself more in the case where you made the decision. The thing is, when you’re weighing a decision about your own life, what you’re trying to do is bring about a certain outcome - more happiness, more fulfilment, greater success, or whatever. It’s the outcome that matters, not where the blame gets directed if it doesn’t work out. When we make blame relevant, we bias ourselves towards inaction, because that’s one way to avoid blame - but the problem is that biasing ourselves towards inaction isn’t a way to maximise the chance of the best outcome. You need to focus on the outcome. If you can’t bring yourself to dump the blame and be compassionate to yourself simply because you deserve to be treated nicely - which you do - then do it because it helps you think more clearly and act more effectively.
This belief in ‘I don’t get to make decisions like this’ crops up in another way too. It makes us bad at asking for what we need. In fact, it makes us so bad at asking for what we need that sometimes we mistakenly think we are asking for what we need, and then we’re confused about why we don’t get it. Here’s example, which is loosely based on a few clients of mine. Imagine someone whose job doesn’t pay them enough to live on, and they want a pay rise, so they decide to be brave and ask for one, but they don’t get it, and then they feel dejected and frustrated. What went wrong here? Well, sometimes - more often than you’d think - we think we’re asking for something when actually we’re not. I’ve had clients who have told me that they asked for a pay rise and didn’t get one, but then it turns out that they didn’t actually ask directly for a pay rise - by saying something like, ‘Please can I have a pay rise?’ Instead, what they’ve done is tell their boss something along the lines of, ‘I’m finding it hard to make ends meet’, or ‘I need to be paid more than I am’, or ‘I’m hoping that eventually I’ll be earning [x amount]’. In other words, they’re not asking for what they need at all. They’re simply stating, or hinting at, a need, and then expecting someone else to pick this up and run with it and give them what they need. Now, sometimes people will do that for you - but often they won’t, and that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’d be opposed to giving you what you need were you actually to ask for it. You might think that you’re asking your boss for a pay rise when you talk to them about how difficult it is to make ends meet - but your boss might not hear any particular request in that. From your boss’s point of view, you might just be sounding off about something, the way you’d sound off about bad weather or your noisy neighbours or the quality of food in the canteen. It’s not enough to mince around trying your best to create the right conditions for another person to offer you whatever it is you want. What a waste of time. Instead, you need to be clear and direct and ask for what you want. That’s often uncomfortable, sure, but so is feeling sidelined and unappreciated when our endless hint-dropping doesn’t result in the outcome we were looking for. Next time someone doesn’t meet your needs, ask yourself what this means: did they actually refuse to meet your needs, following a clear request by you, or did they just … you know, fail to say something like, ‘Ah, sounds like you need this - here you go!’ This is another form of waiting for permission: it’s waiting for others to recognise your needs as worth taking action to meet. Stop it. When you realise you need something, practise asking for it.
And then there’s our old friend, procrastination. The fact is that, much of the time, there’s nothing to stop us from making the decision that we want to make right now, without any further delay. We can quit our job, end our relationship, sign up to that course, book that holiday, right now. But … why would we do that? Why now? It’ll keep until tomorrow, right? That way, we get to delay all the scary things we’ve already looked at: the risk of doing the wrong thing, the risk of blaming ourselves, the scariness of taking decisive action ourselves rather than having someone else do it. And so, because we can delay, we do delay. We wait for a sign, whether that’s encouragement from another person, or something happening that’s out of our hands. Getting fired, getting dumped, whatever. Something to get things rolling. We’re waiting for what they call in the business world, a compelling reason to act. But what’s going on here, really, is procrastination. We dress it up in various ways: ‘I need to wait for this to happen’, or ‘I’ll wait until I have that thing’ - but often those are distractions from the uncomfortable truth that there’s nothing stopping us from taking action, aside from the fact that it’s scary. And a lot of the time the big decisions we make in our lives are important without being urgent. It might be super important that you quit your job or get a divorce or move house or get fit - as in, doing these things might be crucial to your happiness - but there’s rarely any reason why they can’t be put off till tomorrow. And so we tell ourselves that we’re waiting for something before we act, when in fact what’s really going on is that we’re hiding from the terrifying truth that there’s nothing stopping us from taking action, right now. As Mel Robbins said in her TED Talk, How To Stop Screwing Yourself Over, ‘In any area of your life that you want to change, there’s one fact that you need to know: you’re never going to feel like it’. Now, this is not an episode about how to get over procrastination - for that, go back and listen to episode #13: How to work as efficiently as you procrastinate. Nor is it an episode about how to motivate yourself and take action - you can go and look up Mel Robbins’ TED Talk for that - there’s a link in the episode notes. Our topic here is waiting for permission, and with that in mind, our lesson is this: you might be waiting for permission because that’s more comfortable than taking action right now. It’s easier to wait than to disrupt your entire life by making a big decision, even if it’s the decision you actually want to make. So if you’re waiting for something to happen before you take action, ask yourself: What is it that I’m waiting for? and, Do I actually need to wait for this thing before taking action? Chances are, the uncomfortable truth is: no.
You have the power to give yourself permission, friends. What you want is the reason. Not being wholly satisfied with your life is the sign you’ve been waiting for. Now, be brave, and go and do the thing.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at https://www.patreon.com/AcademicImperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - https://www.academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!