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Still waiting for someone to tell you it’s okay? Amanda shares why no one else can give you permission, and the simple permission slip exercise that helps you finally give it to yourself.
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“Many of us wait to do what we know we want to do because we feel like we haven’t earned the right to do it yet.”
Today's Guest
Amanda Parker
Amanda Parker is the host of the Don't Step on the Bluebells podcast and an intuitive guide that helps people to deeply trust their inner wisdom, quiet the external noise, and intentionally create a life fully aligned with their true self. She is a Certified Professional Coach (ICF PCC, CPCC) and spiritual guide using a unique blend of shamanic and energy healing practices to support you on your journey towards inner knowing and deep self-trust.
Amanda is a Reiki Master Healer and a member of the UK Reiki Federation, and has trained in psychic mediumship with the College of Psychic Studies and shamanism with the Foundation for Shamanic Studies.
Amanda has worked in the field of leadership and personal development since 2017 - supporting clients from organizations such as World Bank Group, World Economic Forum, UNICEF, Zalando, Nestle, and LinkedIn. She previously worked in wildlife conservation with the World Wildlife Fund - supporting projects in forest and wetland protection across South America.
Amanda is a native New Yorker who has been living in London for the last 4.5 years, after over a decade in Berlin, Germany. She now lives in North London with her husband and their two cats, Zaki & Oreo.
How to get in touch:
Inner Authority Gameplan: https://www.amandaparker.co/gameplan
Website: https://www.amandaparker.co/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amandaparker.co/
Substack: https://substack.com/@theamandaparker
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Show Notes
For years, I waited for someone to tell me I was allowed.
I wanted that reassurance when I brought my marketing background into wildlife conservation. I wanted it from the healers and mystics I admired, some of whom had been doing this work for 20 or 30 years. I even hired coaches partly just to hear them say, “Yeah, of course, go ahead.” Now that I’m writing a book, I’ve caught myself looking at the authors I love and wondering if I’m allowed to call myself one of them.
But no one else could ever give me that permission. It was always up to me.
In this solo episode, I talk about what helped me finally claim it, including a permission slip I wrote during an Elizabeth Gilbert workshop. It’s signed by the highest authority of the land, and on it I gave myself permission to travel alone, to never return a phone call I didn’t want to, and even to stop being a coach. I still use this exercise with my clients, and I’ll walk you through how to write your own.
If you already know what you want and you’re still waiting for someone to say yes, this episode is for you. You don’t need anyone’s permission but your own.
Key Takeaways
No one else can give you permission to become who you already want to be.
Waiting until you feel you’ve “earned the right” is often the very thing keeping you stuck.
Titles, contracts and praise from others can recognize you, but they can’t grant you permission.
You’re allowed to change your mind about decisions you made years ago.
Permission includes the right to stop, and to leave behind what no longer fits.
Writing your own permission slip makes the things you’ve secretly been waiting for visible, and claimable.
Notice when you hire help mainly to hear someone say “yes, go ahead.”
What We Talked About
Why permission feels like something someone else hands us
The quiet “is this okay?” that followed Amanda through every career change
Hiring coaches and mentors just to hear “go ahead”
Writing a book, and learning to call herself an author
Looking up to healers with 20 or 30 years of practice
Elizabeth Gilbert’s creativity workshop and its letter exercises
The permission slip from “the highest authority of the land”
What made it onto Amanda’s own permission slip
Why you’re allowed to change, and to change your mind
Guest Quotes
“Many of us wait to do what we know we want to do because we feel like we haven’t earned the right to do it yet.”
“There was this quiet voice, like, can I do that? Is this allowed?”
“But the reality is that no one can give me permission to do that.”
“There’s different accolades that people can attribute to you, but even then they have no right to give you permission to do the thing that you already want to do.”
“No one else could do that for me, nor would they want to, by the way.”
“So it was always only up to me to give myself the permission that I needed to begin and actually start on a new path.”
“Every new phase of opening, there was always this reconciliation between who I had been and who I was becoming and what would it take for me to reach that next step.”
“I had permission to change the direction of my business at any moment in time.”
“We often make decisions for ourselves and then hold ourselves to account on them forever and ever. But we are changing. We are always changing.”
“We’re allowed to change our perspectives and we’re allowed to change what feels true and right for us today versus perhaps three years ago or two years ago.”
“So many of us are waiting around for someone to give us permission.”
“You are allowed to give yourself permission to do or to not do anything that you want or don’t want to.”
“That permission never needs to come from outside.”
“It’s really that simple to just decide that you want to do something and that you can.”
“I hope that you will understand that you can give yourself permission to do what it is that you want to do at any point in time.”
Resources to Learn More
Elizabeth Gilbert, author whose two-day creativity workshop is where Amanda wrote her first permission slip: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/11679.Elizabeth_Gilbert
Rebecca Campbell, one of the writers Amanda admires: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/16025965.Rebecca_Campbell
Terms & Tools to Dig Deeper
Awakening: a growing sense of connection to something bigger than yourself, often bringing a shift in how you see your life, your purpose and what matters to you.
Healer: a practitioner who supports emotional, energetic or spiritual wellbeing, usually alongside (not instead of) conventional care.
Healing container: a dedicated, held space, often a program or series of sessions, where deep personal work can happen safely over time.
Mystic: someone who seeks direct, personal experience of the spiritual or sacred, rather than relying only on teachings or doctrine.
Permission slip: a letter you write to yourself, signed by an imagined authority, listing what you’re allowed to do (or stop doing). It’s a way to name what you’ve been waiting for and claim it.
Psychic: a person who uses intuitive perception to receive information beyond the usual five senses.
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Episode Transcript
Speaker: [00:00:00] I have learned over the years just how many ways that I have waited for that permission from others and paused or halted taking action on the things that I knew I really wanted to do because there was this quiet voice like, "Can I do that? Is this allowed? Is it okay if I do XYZ?" The reality is that many of us wait to do what we know we wanna do because we feel like we haven't earned the right to do it yet
Welcome to Don't Step on the Bluebells, the podcast where personal healing and transformation take center stage. I'm your host, Amanda Parker, and I'm a fellow seeker on the journey of personal growth. Join me as I delve into the stories of gifted healers, guides, and everyday people who have experienced remarkable transformations.
Listen in as they share their practical wisdom to enrich your everyday life. And don't forget to hit subscribe and never miss a new episode [00:01:00] Welcome to today's episode of Don't Step on the Bluebells. Today, we are going to be talking all about permission. So this is sort of a funny word, right? Most of us have come to associate permission with something that someone else gives us.
You might have been a kid, and you wanted to go have a, a sleepover or playdate with a friend, and you had to ask permission from your parents, or you wanted to go on a school trip, whatever it is. You were always seeking out permission. And somewhere along the way, many of us grew into adults that still felt the need to get permission from others to do the things that we wanted to do, or maybe in some cases, the things that we needed to do.
So I wanna dive in today just to that nuance of what permission actually is, what does that really look like, how does it show up in my life, and maybe some of those reflections for how it might be showing up in your [00:02:00] life, and what you yourself can do to give yourself permission for the things that you wanna do.
So I know for me, there have been so many different phases of my own professional life, my personal life, where I've often just hoped that someone else would either tell me exactly what I needed to do or give me permission to do the things that I already knew that I wanted to. This showed up for me when, actually in every stage of my career, when I became a wildlife conservationist and had my own method of how I worked, coming from a corporate world, coming from a marketing background, and bringing all of that knowledge and wisdom into a nonprofit space for all the conservation work I did.
I would do the work in the way that I wanted, but there was also a part of me that, you know, wanted to check, "Is this okay? Is this something that's fine within the organizational constraints," et cetera. [00:03:00] There were times in my life where I simply wanted to change the work that I was doing. So even in my coaching business or my healing business, as I have grown and evolved, the types of people that I support have also grown and evolved.
And in that case, it might have taken me a lot longer to actually put into action what I knew needed to change, and there was a part of me that was almost waiting for someone to give me permission to do it. In many cases, I've hired coaches or mentors, I think sometimes just to hear them say, "Yeah, of course.
Go ahead. You can do that." And I have learned over the years just how many ways that I have waited for that permission from others and paused or halted taking action on the things that I knew I really wanted to do because there was this quiet voice like, "Can I do that? Is this allowed? Is it okay if I do XYZ?"
There's so [00:04:00] many different places that this can show up in your life, whether that's in a partnership or in your professional life. The reality is that many of us wait to do what we know we wanna do because we feel like we haven't earned the right to do it yet. In this next iteration of my life and my business, if you listened to the last episode, you will already know that I'm in the process of writing a book.
That is the future vision that I'm leaning towards, is being that author, being that motivational speaker, continuing to support my clients in really deep healing containers, but also stepping into something that I haven't really done before. And for me, a lot of this journey has been about looking at the people who have done what I wanna do.
So, for example, the writers that I admire, who comes to mind? Rebecca Campbell, Elizabeth Gilbert. There are so many different authors whose work I [00:05:00] have devoured, and they're authors, and I know that they're authors. And so for me to sit here and say, "I am also an author," I've done the work of permission-giving, believe me, but it took a lot to be able to claim that for myself.
And up until very recently, I wasn't even sure if I was capable of writing a book. I knew I wanted to, but I didn't know if it was possible. So it felt like a massive stretch to envision myself as an author when I wasn't even fully convinced that I could do the thing that I said that I wanted to do. But the reality is that no one can give me permission to do that.
There is no single person out in the world who can say, "You know what, Amanda? I give you permission. You are allowed to be a writer. You're allowed to be an author." Sure, there's different people who could say, "Yes, I give [00:06:00] you a publishing contract or not," or, "Yes, I view you as a highly qualified author or a great writer," or whatever that may be.
There's different accolades that people can attribute to you, but even then, they have no right to give you permission to do the thing that you already wanna do. I faced the same challenges when I stepped into the healing world. There were so many healers that I knew who were doing incredible work and had been for so long.
I surrounded myself with some of the best healers and psychics and mystics that I could find, and many had been doing this work for 10, 20, some even 30 years. If you go back in time on this podcast to the earlier episodes, you'll even have the pleasure of listening to conversations that I had with many of those incredible people who I still greatly admire today.
The thing was that by looking up to them and seeing [00:07:00] how far they had come in their journey, it once again felt like I didn't have permission in a way to also call myself a healer or to really take my rightful place as a mystic or as a psychic or as someone who helps people along their journey of transformation and deeper awakening.
I wanted someone to tell me that I was allowed to do that or allowed to want those things. And the reality, as you already know just from listening here, is that no one else could ever give me that permission. I was waiting for someone like, "Hey, you, you've been practicing for 20 years. Could you please tell me that I'm, I'm good enough?
I've done this long enough. I'm capable enough. Could you give me permission to be a professional in this field as well?" No one else could do that for me, nor would they want to, by the way. It was always only up to me to give myself [00:08:00] the permission that I needed to begin and actually start on a new path.
Every new phase of opening, there was always this reconciliation between who I had been and who I was becoming, and what would it take for me to reach that next step. Now, about two years, maybe three years ago, I went to a talk that was given by Elizabeth Gilbert. It was actually a two-day workshop. It was her creativity workshop that I sat through that was incredible.
This is a woman I so greatly admire. I have read her books. I have listened to her on podcasts, and I just genuinely and generally appreciate her, her way of thinking, her thought process, the way that she sees and moves in the world. Throughout that workshop, she had us writing a series of letters to ourselves, and it was really powerful.
She would share a story from her own life, of her own journey, and the way that that specific topic had played a role for her. [00:09:00] And then she would give us a format or a template of sorts that she had used in her own healing journey, which was a letter and then the content, whatever that might have been, and then you sign it from the appropriate signatory, whether that was you or someone else.
And one of the exercises that we did was writing a permission slip to ourselves. And in this exercise, she had us identify Who the highest authority of the land was, or the highest authority that we could possibly think of. Now, someone might come to mind for you, your high school gym teacher or the principal at your elementary school, or maybe it was your grandfather.
So we all have this sort of like authority figure that comes to mind, someone who has been a part of our life that we felt had, like, extraordinary ability to make decisions and make laws and make rules above our own life and the lives of others. So for me, as I just said, [00:10:00] the highest authority, because I could not think of who that was, I did not really respect my principals back in the day.
So I wrote my letter to the highest authority of the land, or rather from the highest authority of the land, and the letter was addressed to whom it may concern. And in that letter said, "Amanda has permission to..." dot, dot, dot. And in the blanks, I could fill in all of the things that I had secretly been waiting for someone to give me permission to do.
Every single thing in my life that I had secretly or maybe even outwardly really wanted but wasn't acting on or was too afraid to take steps towards, or maybe some part of me didn't really believe that I was capable or worthy of claiming it. And I wrote out that letter, adding in every single thing that [00:11:00] felt inaccessible for some reason.
And on that list was that I had permission to never spend time with people that I didn't wanna spend time with, and I had permission to change the direction of my business at any moment in time, and I had permission to never return a phone call if I didn't want to, or to always travel by myself or go off on adventures that are solo when I need to or want to.
And one of the things was that I could stop being a coach if I didn't wanna do that anymore. It was almost just allowing myself to really admit and be open about the things that maybe I didn't really want anymore, or even if I did want them, I didn't have to stay with them. I had the full permission that I could leave it behind if that's what felt right for me now.
We often make decisions for ourselves [00:12:00] and then hold ourselves to account on them forever and ever. But we are changing. We are always changing, and we're allowed to change our perspectives, and we're allowed to change what feels true and right for us today versus perhaps three years ago or two years ago.
The letter was signed by the highest authority of the land or whatever that highest authority was that you had identified. In that instance, because we were in a workshop, the person next to you would also read through and sign off on it to give it a bit more gravitas. And I still remember, 'cause I use this exercise with my clients all the time, and I have since written other permission slips for myself, and I just realize that so many of us are waiting around for someone to give us permission to claim what it is that we want, to become who we wanna become, to earn money the way that we want, to love who we wanna love.
We're waiting for someone else to tell [00:13:00] us that it's okay. And what I hope more than anything that you will take from this episode is that you are allowed to give yourself permission to do or to not do anything that you want or don't want to. That permission never needs to come from outside. I will say that very often on calls with my clients, I will tell them when they tell me what they wanna do, but they're not sure if they can, and I will say, "I give you full permission to do that," as a reminder that it's really that simple to just decide that you wanna do something and that you can.
So if you take nothing else from this episode, aside from the anecdotes of course, I hope that you will understand that you can give yourself permission to do what it is that you wanna do at any point in time. And if the exercise with the permission slip with that letter speaks to you, then you are equally allowed to steal that.
I'll put [00:14:00] it in the show notes as well so that you can use that permission slip in your own life. I can't wait to hear what it is you're giving yourself permission for, so please get in touch on Instagram and let me know. Thanks for tuning in to this episode, and I'll see you next time. Thanks for tuning in to today's episode of Don't Step on the Bluebells.
If you enjoyed this conversation, please give the podcast a five-star rating wherever you listen. And don't forget to hit subscribe and follow along so you never miss a new episode.