The Gift You Need to Give this Holiday Season... to Yourself
It won't make a dent in your wallet, but it just may change your life.
Welcome to Lead without Limits, where I share weekly insights earned in the C-Suite: building businesses and teams, while creating a career worth savoring.
The end of year often feels like a mad-dash.
Between focusing on what you need to do for your team (hitting end-of-year targets, running annual reviews, and setting the strategy, goals, and budget for the next year) and your family (gift giving, travel plans, hosting, and more) there isn’t a moment to breathe.
Your calendar is intentionally overscheduled and overwhelming, trying to fit in all the pieces and still making room for magical moments.
“Agency is the capacity to act deliberately in the world.”
— Albert Bandura
In the sea of content telling you to buy more and do more, this post is the opposite. This holiday season, I want to give you permission to lead, choose, and live differently. Without apology.
The beauty of permission is that it’s yours to give.
The most ambitious, heart-led leaders are often the ones who forget their own agency the fastest. Between caring for your stakeholders (investors, customers, partners), and caring for your team, you load up your obligations faster than a child rips through Christmas present wrappings.
And yet the burden you place on yourself doesn’t have to be so heavy.
Each time I made a decision that was aligned with what I knew to be the right way forward, I didn’t just feel a weight come of my shoulders, I could feel momentum building in my energy and thinking.
When we stop doing things that are no longer feel right, and instead choose actions and paths that are in alignment with what we know would work better, that’s when we are leading with our full power.
Write yourself a permission slip that’s right for you.
Below are just a few examples of how you can gift yourself permission this holiday season. Choose one or several, whatever feels right to you. Don’t see one that works for you, write your own.
When you give yourself the permission slip(s) you need, you’ll close out the year with greater peace and enter the next year more replenished and ready to move forward.
1. Permission to slow down without falling behind
We only hear about the big wins and view the highlights reel, but almost every successful leader had a quiet season or several:
Vera Wang: After failing to make the 1968 Olympic figure skating team and spending 15 years as a fashion editor, Wang did not enter the fashion industry as a designer until she was 40.
Steve Jobs: Dropped out of college and spent a year traveling through India and meditating before returning to found Apple.
Toni Morrison: She worked as an editor at Random House for years while raising two children as a single mother. She did not publish her first novel, The Bluest Eye, until she was 39, and it was not until she was 62 that she became the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Stan Lee: The Marvel visionary spent 20 years in the comic book industry mostly failing and was ready to quit at age 38 before creating the Fantastic Four.
If your body or your heart is telling you you need a break, listen. Even if you can’t leave your current post, consider scaling back, setting new boundaries, and reorienting your time. Your future self is waiting for you to make space for them to emerge.
2. Permission to redefine success
“When a path no longer serves you, it is not disloyal to leave it.”
— Unknown
I left college with everyone else’s goals and dreams in mind but my own. I knew this. And yet I still took a role doing what left me drained and empty every day.
A year and a half later, when I finally decided (and my body screamed), I needed a change. Not just a different job, but a different company, a different industry, a different role.
Throughout my career, I did that over and over again. Even when the people around me told me I was making a mistake, choosing the wrong path, or leaving money on the table.
It’s your life. It’s your career. Do what feels right for you.
Don’t stay on a path just because it’s the one you’re on. No one else will have to look back on your life and wonder “what if?”
When you reflect on your decisions 20 years, 30 years, or even 40 years from now, how will you feel? Did you take the risks worth taking? Did you aim too low? Did you lead and live to your full potential?
The only person whose answers matter is you.
Pause this end of year and ask yourself, what does success mean to me now?
3. Permission to design an organization, role, or leadership style that fits you
Some leaders seem to have a job designed perfectly for them:
The responsibilities play to their strengths.
The schedule fits their routines.
The requirements fit into their life.
Their secret?
They designed it that way.
And you can, too.
Too many leaders create unnecessary restrictions around how they lead and run an organization. They assume that where they started, what they inherited, or their old habits must remain constant, as if they are calcified.
Some organizations are indeed difficult to change, and for sure, habits can take time, but too often the limitations you create in your head aren’t based in fact. They are based on fear.
What if this holiday season, you stopped listening to your fear and started listening to the vision you have for what you want?
Dream up the ideal role, organization, leadership style that you want to embody. Don’t hold back, don’t think small. Write it all down. You might be surprised how even putting it on paper will help you find ways to make it possible.
4. Permission to speak up — even when it feels inconvenient or uncomfortable
Even if you’ve been leading for years or decades, there are likely some topics, people, or situations that have you clamming up.
But when you shut down, you are doing yourself and your team a disservice:
You’re giving in to your fear and letting it shrink you
The people around you are deprived of your wisdom
Issues that need addressing get pushed aside, delaying outcomes and creating risk
You’re building a habit in your mind that self-reinforces and hurts you and your organization
Speaking up isn’t just for you. When you do so, especially when it doesn’t come easy, you’re modeling to the people around you that they can do the same.
Everyone benefits when there is a free-flowing exchange of ideas. Help yourself and your team build that type of culture by leading the way.
5. Permission to want more and less at the same time
As someone who is curious about everything and loves to support everyone, I often set annual intentions to do less. And yet, if I’m honest, I often still want more.
If this sounds like you, too, what if you didn’t have to choose? What if you can have both?
I just finished reading Amanda Goetz’s book Toxic Grit: How to Have It All and (Actually) Love What You Have. She shares her methodology called Character Theory. It’s a practical set of steps to make the statement, “you can have it all, just not all at once” possible. (I highly recommend it — it’s a great holiday gift!)
Even if you don’t have time to read Amanda’s book. You can take the most important concept and give yourself permission to want it all. You simply have to set seasons and moments for each element.
Don’t make the mistake of trying to cram everything in all at once. Pace yourself, and you might be surprised at what is possible, even in one year.
Reflection questions to help you gift yourself the permission you need.
If you want more food for thought to help you choose the right permission slip(s), start with these reflection questions. They will give you insight into what matters most for you right now:
What belief about success once protected you — but may now be limiting you?
Who are three people you’d love to meet, even if it feels unrealistic today?
What skill, if developed, would fundamentally change how you lead?
What skill or habit once served you — but now quietly costs you?
Where are you asking for permission from others instead of granting it to yourself?
What you need most is within.
As I reflect on what permission I need, I feel a pull to slow down next year. To hone my craft(s) and become more easeful in all that I do. It’s so easy to get swept up by the dopamine hits that come from social media and even hitting my goals.
But I know that even as I celebrate all the progress from this past year, I can make next year that much more rewarding and fun if I can strengthen my approach, smooth my process, and be patient as I hone my how.
I wish you a beautiful holiday season filled to the brim (if you want it to be) or quiet and peaceful (if that’s what feels right).
Thank you for being here, with me, on this journey to lead without limits.
