Give Yourself Permission to Be WRONG

Will you do it?

Will you give yourself permission to be WRONG?

I stopped to think about this for a moment and asked myself, will I? I leaned into what my body was feeling and all the restrictive thoughts that started coming into play, trying so hard to protect me from not caring if I do. Kerry K, a spiritual coach, mentioned this in one of her YouTube videos, and it took me ALL the way back to what led me to say, “Yes, I am willing to give myself permission to be WRONG.”

Ask me this exact same question a year ago and I probably would have found every possible way not to be wrong. I had too much ego governing my soul that I would have said, “Yes, I do,” but silently hoped that I actually wasn’t wrong. I think I was so attached to being right, to looking like I knew what I was doing and to protecting the identity I had created for myself that the thought of being wrong felt like it had much bigger consequences than it actually did.

But today, giving myself permission to be wrong hits a lot differently, because I genuinely do, and I would encourage you to sit with this one too if you feel called to it.

One of my mentors triggered something similar in me many years ago because he was always so proud to be a lifelong learner, and it felt so true to me too, but I don’t think I fully grasped what that actually meant at the time. 

Becoming a lifelong learner means stepping away from anything that stops you from experiencing something new. Learning happens when we allow ourselves to move beyond our comfort zones, but it also happens when we allow ourselves to completely pivot a business into a new direction. It happens when we release something that once worked and brought us success because we can feel that we are being called towards something completely different, even when we can’t yet see whether that new direction will truly be successful. 

It also means allowing our identity to be released from perfection, from being the hardest worker in the room, from always having the answer, or from holding onto a title that looks great in our Instagram bio or on our CV. When we become lifelong learners, we give ourselves permission to be wrong, and we quickly realise that perhaps there isn’t always such a thing as being right or wrong in the way we have been taught to understand it.

Maybe sometimes it is simply an experience.

Maybe those were the choices that were available to you at the time, based on the information, awareness, resources and perspective you had then, and the power now remains with you to make a change.

And I think this is where we can begin to step away from the constant loop of shame, fear, grief and doubt that can sometimes dress itself up as perfectionism. We can convince ourselves that we are simply striving for excellence, when underneath it, we are actually terrified of being seen making a mistake, changing our minds, admitting that something didn’t work, or acknowledging that the person we were a year ago didn’t know what we know today.

To truly embody our greatness, I think we have to come face-to-face with our self-righteousness and our pride in looking the part, particularly in business. We have to become willing to question the identities we have built around being successful, hardworking, knowledgeable or “the person who always knows what they are doing,” because when we release some of that, we allow ourselves to operate from a sense of freedom of expression, an expansive feeling that trickles down into everything we touch and create.

And I think this applies so deeply to business because when we don’t give ourselves permission to be wrong, we can actually stop ourselves from growing.

We become so attached to getting the strategy right, choosing the right offer, creating the right brand, saying the right thing or finding the right direction that we leave very little room for experimentation. We don’t give ourselves enough space to gather the data that can only come from actually trying something, and we don’t allow ourselves to discover that perhaps the thing we thought would work doesn’t, or that something we never expected to work actually opens up a completely different door.

There is so much information available to us once we are willing to test.

What if we stopped looking at every business decision as something that has to be right or wrong, and instead started looking at it as something we are learning from?

What if we simply said, “Let’s try this and see what happens?”

I simply LOVE clients who tell me, “Let’s see what works.”

Say less.

Because now I’m ready to test.

I’m ready to explore as many options as we need to, gather the information we need, understand what is resonating and what isn’t, feel into what is aligned and what isn’t, and keep refining until we are moving closer towards the desired outcome.

So, what are the things that are siphoning your life force in your personal and business life right now?

Is it the fact that you don’t want to be wrong?

Is there something you are holding onto because changing your mind would force you to admit that perhaps the direction you chose before is no longer the direction you want to take?

Because perhaps you aren’t actually wrong in hindsight. Perhaps you’re simply looking at the same truth from a different perspective, from a different angle, if you will.

It’s like looking at an apple. If I’m facing it directly, I see one version of it, but if I move around to the other side, suddenly I’m seeing something completely different. Maybe there is shadow where there was light before, or light where there was shadow, but the apple itself hasn’t necessarily changed. My perspective has.

So, using this analogy, what would happen if we shifted our focus from “I was wrong” to “These were the options I could see at the time, based on what I knew, and now I have the opportunity to experience something else?”

What happens when we stop making ourselves wrong and instead become curious about what else is possible?

I have gone through many of my own moments of shifting focus, and honestly, some of them hurt badly. My ego was bruised. Haha!

But this was good.

Who knows how many more years I would have spent carrying a false sense of pride if those moments hadn’t happened when they did? How much energy would I still be leaking into protecting an identity that was no longer serving me?

Imagine the possibilities that are now available to me because I no longer have to spend so much of my energy defending a false sense of self.

And now, as I rebuild parts of myself to the best of my ability, I know that all that I bring to the table, all that I can offer to my clients, is the best of me at this moment. Not because I know everything, not because I will always get it right, and certainly not because I have somehow arrived at the final version of myself, but because I am committed to remaining a lifelong learner. And I can continue refining what I do if it means creating a better outcome for my clients, for my business and for my own personal growth.