In today's fast-paced world, leaders face unprecedented challenges and pressures. The constant demands of modern life can lead to operating on autopilot, preventing us from accessing our full potential and that of those around us. In his book "Permission to Glow," Kristoffer Carter introduces a powerful framework to disrupt this cycle and tap into our inner resources. Through the Four Permissions, Carter guides readers on a journey to activate their inner power while helping others shine as well.
Introduction: The Leader's Dilemma
As a leader in today's world, you're confronted with a unique set of challenges. The pressure to perform, compete, and navigate an ever-changing landscape can be overwhelming. This constant stimulation often leads to operating on autopilot – simply reacting to situations without the time or energy to live each moment with intention.
This autopilot mode prevents you from accessing your full potential, and by extension, the potential of those you lead. As a result, you're missing out on crucial resources needed to achieve more, connect more deeply with others, and live in peace.
Carter's book offers a solution to this dilemma through the Four Permissions – a set of tools designed to help you break free from autopilot and fully activate your inner power. These permissions not only benefit you as a leader but also enable you to help others shine.
The Importance of Inner Expansion
When faced with increasing demands in business, the typical response is to expand external resources – hiring more staff or increasing office space. But what about the rising demand for leadership? You can't simply clone yourself to meet this need. Instead, the key is to focus on expanding your inner resources – the qualities that allow you to foster the development of others.
True leadership is about helping others reach their full potential. Carter uses the metaphor of two cliffs separated by a chasm to illustrate this concept. One cliff represents "what is," while the other represents "what could be." As a leader, your role is not to tell your team members how to cross this chasm, but to support them in finding their unique path to flourishing on the other side.
To perform this crucial role effectively, you must first learn to navigate your own chasm. This involves tapping into your potential and fully embracing your power. It's no easy task, given the competing demands of leadership – moving projects forward, hitting targets, and tending to your team. With so much going on, it's easy to lose sight of what's truly important.
The Four Permissions serve as tools to hone your awareness and act with intention. They help you become the best possible leader – one whose team thrives as much as you do. These permissions are not limited to business leaders; they can benefit anyone who nurtures another person, whether that's a child, colleague, lover, or neighbor.
Living Your Vocation: The Path to Peace
There's a stark difference between having a career and living your vocation. Someone with a career might be content and successful, but they often lack a certain spark when discussing their work. In contrast, a person living their vocation exudes enthusiasm and gratitude when talking about their role. It's evident that they're doing exactly what they're meant to do with their life.
Living your vocation brings a sense of peace that comes from doing the right thing at the right time. This peace silences the nagging voice in your head that constantly questions if there's a better job out there for you. Instead, your focus is on what you're already doing, knowing in your core that it's the right place for you.
It's important to acknowledge that craving this peace is a natural part of the human experience. Without this acknowledgment, you might try to silence that inner voice with harmful quick fixes like excessive drinking, comfort eating, endless scrolling, or avoiding stillness through busyness. By recognizing that true satisfaction comes from living your vocation, you can start seeking out the conditions that will bring you inner peace.
The Four Permissions provide a pathway to accessing this peace by creating the space for your soul to expand, fostering your talents, and deepening your connections with others. In this space, you can truly thrive and shine your brightest.
Permission to Pause: Creating Space for Intention
The first of the Four Permissions is the permission to pause. Carter uses the analogy of a VCR's pause button to illustrate the power of this permission. Just as the pause button allows you to step away from a video and return exactly where you left off, giving yourself permission to pause creates a space between a stimulus and your response to it.
In our fast-paced society, there's constant pressure to work harder and faster, to outpace the competition. However, without time to reflect, it's impossible to make good decisions – about business matters or your own behavior. Operating in top gear often means running on autopilot, which limits your long-term outcomes.
By giving yourself permission to slow down, you create space to consider the right response to each situation, overriding the need to stay on autopilot. This reflection leads to better outcomes in the long run, as you avoid taking unnecessary detours.
One of the simplest ways to implement this permission is through meditation. Regular meditation practice increases your brain's ability to adapt to changes and helps cut through the busyness of modern life. It allows you to pay attention to the stimuli around you and how you respond to them.
To introduce meditation into your life, start small. Sit silently and breathe deeply for just five minutes a day. This creates a foundation of discipline that you can build upon, gradually extending the length of your practice to at least 15 minutes. Within 30 days, you'll start noticing the benefits, including an increased ability to pause and step away from the pressure to rush during your day-to-day activities.
Permission to Feel: Embracing Your Emotions
The second permission encourages you to welcome and experience all of your feelings. Social conditioning often leads us to believe that mastering our emotions means not feeling at all. However, this is impossible – as humans, we experience emotions every minute of the day. By trying to lock away our feelings and pretend they don't exist, we miss out on valuable information they're trying to convey.
Carter likens emotions to envelopes full of useful information. By giving yourself permission to open these envelopes and explore their contents, you can access important insights about yourself and your situation.
For example, imagine coming home after a stressful day at work and bursting into tears when your partner asks about dinner plans. Instead of dismissing this outburst as a sign of weakness or inability to cope, take the time to explore what those tears are trying to tell you. Perhaps they're signaling an issue with a team member's performance or a lack of support from your manager. By delving into these emotions, you might discover that you need to have a crucial conversation to clearly communicate your needs.
To benefit from the insights your emotions hold, you must first give yourself permission to feel them and accept their constant presence. Start by using the first permission – pause – and then explore your feelings without judgment. Ask yourself what might have caused these emotions and what important information they're trying to convey. This process will help you identify your needs and take appropriate action.
Permission to Shine: Befriending Your Fear
The third permission encourages you to shine brightly and unapologetically offer your unique gifts to the world. However, fear often holds us back from fully expressing ourselves – fear of overshadowing others or being reprimanded for standing out.
It's important to understand that even those who seem to have embraced their true path still experience fear. The difference is that they've learned to accept fear as a travel companion on their journey. They've befriended their fear and use it as fuel for growth and self-expression.
Our egos play a significant role in generating fear. Like an overzealous parent, our ego's job is to keep us safe. At any hint of danger, it waves red flags, urging us to stay within our comfort zones. However, true growth and the ability to shine come from venturing into unfamiliar territory where possibilities await.
To deactivate your ego and give yourself permission to shine, start by acknowledging that fear will always be present on your journey. Accepting this allows you to move forward despite the fear, rather than being paralyzed by it.
Once you've accepted fear as a constant companion, you can work on transforming it into excitement. The physical difference between fear and excitement is primarily in our breath. When we hold our breath, our body interprets a stimulus as a threat. By consciously breathing deeply and steadily, even in the face of fear, you can convert that nervous energy into positive excitement that fuels your journey and feeds your inner light.
Permission to Help Others Shine: Increasing Your Own Power
The fourth and final permission emphasizes the importance of helping others shine. Carter uses the analogy of the '80s cartoon Voltron to illustrate this concept. In the show, five individual robotic lions, each with its own special talents, combine to form a powerful robot capable of defeating alien invaders. This serves as a metaphor for the power of combining individual strengths to create something greater than the sum of its parts.
Many societies encourage competition, leading us to isolate ourselves out of fear of missing out or not being enough. However, this goes against our inherent need for connection. Humans crave connection not just for emotional fulfillment, but because it benefits everyone involved. Like bulbs on a grid, we give off more power collectively than we do individually.
As a leader, it's your responsibility to help others shine. When every member of your team can contribute their unique gifts and perform well, everyone flourishes. To achieve this, create an environment that allows team members to determine how they execute projects. Share the importance of each project and work together to articulate what success looks like. Then, support your team in finding their own way to realize that vision.
Celebrate diversity by inviting different team members to share their thoughts and perspectives. Emphasize the value of diverse ideas by acknowledging when a team member presents an idea that wouldn't have occurred to you. Shift your focus from what team members did for a project to the gifts they brought to it. Publicly thank them for their contributions and share what you've learned from them. This empowers them to keep growing and fuels their ever-growing lights.
By helping others shine, you'll discover a deep sense of fulfillment that comes from supporting the growth and success of those around you. This, in turn, increases your own power and potential.
The Journey of Practicing the Four Permissions
Implementing the Four Permissions is a transformative journey from panic to transcendence. Each permission builds upon the last:
- Permission to pause leads you out of anxiety and into a space where peace exists.
- Permission to feel reconnects you to your humanity, allowing you to gain useful insights.
- Permission to shine unleashes your potential.
- Permission to help others shine enables you to transcend the self and support others.
This transformation doesn't happen overnight. It requires a commitment to practicing the permissions every day with awareness and intention. It's natural to veer off the path occasionally, but by cultivating self-compassion, you can begin again from wherever you find yourself.
Learning to implement the Four Permissions is like any new skill – it has its ups and downs. It can be particularly frustrating when you're usually a high performer to find yourself struggling with these new concepts. Carter encourages readers to embrace their inner toddler – that determined child who got back on their feet every time they stumbled while learning to walk. What matters isn't that you never fall, but that you never give up.
To practice self-compassion on this journey, Carter suggests several strategies:
- Set a specific, achievable goal for the next 30 days. Start small to ensure success and boost your confidence.
- Focus on consistency rather than duration. Honor your commitment every day, even if it's just for a few minutes.
- Commit to the long game. Living with peace, awareness, and power is a lifelong journey, not a task to be checked off a list.
Final Thoughts: The Essence of True Leadership
At its core, "Permission to Glow" teaches us that true leadership is about supporting and guiding others to reach their full potential. This journey begins with following your true calling – the path that allows you to offer your greatest gifts to others and the world. By committing to this path and defying the fears and social conditioning that hold you back, you can fully support those around you to do the same.
The Four Permissions provide a framework for this journey:
- Pause to create space for intention and reflection.
- Feel your emotions to gain valuable insights.
- Shine by embracing your unique gifts and potential.
- Help others shine, increasing your own power in the process.
By integrating these permissions into your life, you can become a more effective leader, nurture deeper connections, and live a more fulfilling life. Remember, this is a lifelong journey of growth and self-discovery. Embrace it with patience, persistence, and self-compassion, and you'll unlock not only your own potential but also the potential of those around you.
As you embark on this journey, keep in mind that small, consistent steps are more powerful than sporadic grand gestures. Start by incorporating short meditation sessions into your daily routine, practice pausing before reacting to situations, and make a conscious effort to help someone else shine each day. Over time, these small actions will compound, leading to significant personal growth and positive impact on those you lead and interact with.
In a world that often pushes us towards constant action and reaction, "Permission to Glow" reminds us of the power of intentional living and the profound impact we can have when we fully embrace our potential and support others in doing the same. By giving ourselves these four permissions, we not only enhance our own lives but also contribute to creating a more compassionate, connected, and thriving world.