Where are You Giving Permission?

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Hello Beautiful,

I’m here today to audaciously ask you: Where do you give permission?

You may do it knowingly. You may do it unknowingly. But if you are woman living in society today, you are likely handing out permission slips without even realizing you are.

Actually, that’s a lie. You do know you are handing them out because your body tells you, you just choose to ignore your body’s signals that you are handing them out (Ouch 🥊 …. Sorry).

I’ll preface this post by saying I am not here to do any gender bashing. I am here merely to bring to your conscious awareness what you ARE likely doing.

As I have been on my growth journey I have become what I call “awakened” to many things in our society and our culture. Some of which I’m really grateful for and some not so much.

One of the biggest things is how we women hand out permission slips.

Our parents, our grandparents, our great grandparents, teachers, clergy, community, everyone in culture really, has been handing them out left, right and centre to boys and men.

How young were you when you first heard “boys will be boys?”

How young were you when you first said “boys will be boys?”

That statement was a gift for boys. A permission slip for accepting their misbehaviour. But we can see that those boys are now men and those permission slips have permeated our culture in ways that affect women and society gravely.

There, I said it. 🥊

Audacious, Empowered and Taking a Stand

I recently had an opportunity to revoke a permission slip from a man in a store.

Long story short: I was in a Home Depot store waiting my turn to talk to a door sales rep, and although I was at the store with my husband, he had stepped away to shop for other things. When the couple ahead of me was done chatting with the door rep, who was a man, they began to walk away and the gentleman customer paused, stopped, and turned to me singing the praises of the door rep: that “he was very helpful and knowledgeable, and IF I WAS LUCKY MAYBE HE WAS SINGLE TOO” 😳🤬

To answer your first question, yes I paused.

I then took a really deep breath and I revoked the permission slip that that gentleman had obviously been gifted long ago by his mother, other women of society, and God knows how many times by his wife.

In exchange, I gave him what I have come to nickname a (polite) “re-education”. I challenged him about why he “assumed” I was single. Was it because I was standing alone in a construction store waiting to talk to a door rep? Was it because I don’t wear a wedding ring (although I highly doubt he’d noticed that)? Did I look helpless? Did I look single? Did I look heterosexual? Did I look like I had come to Home Depot to hook up with a door rep? (And what do any of those things actually “look” like?)

I told him I had not. That I, like him, was a customer of the store. That I was actually married. That I wasn’t “on the market, needing to be set up”. That I didn’t need “another husband”, that the husband I have, who was in another aisle shopping, is already enough work, and that if my husband departs Earth before I do, I will not be on the market looking for another 😉

I’ll add to this that when he slinked away to ponder his re-education and I turned to the door rep he was the colour of ketchup and said “What the heck was that about?". He apologized to me for that man, to which I told him he was not the person who needed to apologize, and to please stop doing that.

This happened WEEKS and WEEKS ago, and as I share this now I still get riled up and fired up about it. I can still feel it in my body. It was my body that I listened to to revoke that permission slip. I felt it in every cell of my body that what was said to me was archaic and inappropriate. YES I could “let it slide” and hand out yet another permission slip or I could politely say what I wanted to say and what needed to be said.

It wasn’t easy to take action. It wasn’t easy to say - especially politely. It wasn’t easy to revoke a permission slip granted 50+ years ago to that man. And whether he understood what I was saying and got it or whether it fell onto deaf ears, it felt right and true for me to listen to my body and speak the truth that needed to be spoken.

I invite to you to become awakened to where you have been giving permission slips. To get in tune with your body. To not ignore its nudges, no matter what those nudges are about. I invite you to begin to take action when your body tells you to do so.

I invite you to audaciously join me to begin withdrawing permission slips you are unconsciously letting slide by.

With massive love and audacity,

Sharon xo

If you’re intrigued by the things I’m sharing here, I would love to share more about the offerings I have to help you live your best + most audacious life. Visit my website at www.theaudaciousempire.com or pop me an email or DM to say “tell me more”.