WAIT FOR PERMISSION, OR GIVE YOURSELF PERMISSION TO SPEAK?

I used to be really good at making people feel safe in training. Then I saw how my “safety” was backfiring.

It was actually the lowest point of my professional career, where I lost confidence in who I was and what I was doing.

A participant who I had a great relationship with and was “transformed” through our sessions – affectionately called Dr. Giggles by the group – turned out to be completely unchanged in his real world meetings. Unchanged meaning 

“He still doesn’t speak up in meetings, James.” 

Hearing this, my self-esteem threw itself on the floor and wallowed a bit.

Two years later, I saw clearly what I had missed. It changed everything about how I work with Japanese participation in global meetings.

It comes down to self-permission. I had become very good at giving people permission to speak—directly and in subtle, indirect ways, too. 

Self-permission, that’s what Dr. Giggles was lacking. If I created a situation where he knew he had my permission to speak (explicit or implicit), he was able to see it as a game with clear rules. Rules that didn’t require him to give himself permission to speak. 

So he never did. 

Even when he spoke in training, it was the psychological safety I had given him that made speaking possible. When I left the room, when he left the room, that permission evaporated, along with the progress. The progress was, in essence, dependent on others – not Dr. Giggles himself. 

The solution was not “spartan” training. I’ve seen that, and there is something off about that. It encourages a type of aggression that works for yourself, but can be toxic for teams. 

Where is that middle zone, then? 

It’s a challenge every trainer, coach, leader can face head on, once you have a north star – self-permission. Conditions have to be created where self-permission is the only path forward. 

I’ll cover the how in later articles. For now, the question for anyone is, in what ways are you trying to help but accidentally giving permission that causes self-permission to become irrelevant?