WEEK 47 - I’m giving myself permission to *finally* do this…
Hey HOMwork friends, happy Friday!
For those of you just joining us, you can see 80+ past assignments in our Challenge Archive. No pressure to complete them all, but many of you have asked, so here you go!
You may or may not have guessed that I really enjoy scrolling through Instagram. In fact, the HOMwork assignment from a few weeks ago was built around my love of Instagram creeping.
Remember? The one that started with: “If you have time to stalk your crush on Instagram…”
Yeah. I love Instagram. Sometimes it’s a problem.
But SOMETIMES that scrolling serves up some amazing inspiration! Recently, I discovered a gem of a post that totally made the lightbulb in my head go off, both personally and professionally. It was a “permission slip” that gave the reader permission to _______ (fill in the blank) right now.
We aren’t always that good at giving ourselves permission to do the fun, creative, or audacious thing that we truly want to do. (At least I’m not.) While there are times in our lives that we should make sacrifices, we actually spend most of our time doing things we don’t really like for reasons that aren’t super compelling.
Why is that?! We aren’t in grade school. We don’t need someone else’s permission - we’re grown ups now!
WE get to write our own permission slips.
Let me give you an example of how I immediately applied this to my personal life: My partner Tom and I have been splitting holidays between FOUR families (both sets of parents are divorced) on two coasts for the last few years. We do it because that’s what you do, right? You visit family over the holidays.
But fitting four families into one week is actually an exhausting way to spend the end of the year. And we always end up starting the new year totally drained and wiped out and it takes us weeks to get back up to speed.
So this year we wrote ourselves a permission slip to take an actual vacation over the holidays. We cleared it with all of our families and visited everyone in the fall (in spread out visits!) so that we would still get to see them.
And, instead of spending the last two weeks of the year on planes and in guest beds, we are going to use our permission slip for a lazy week and a half on a beach!
*Note that not everyone in your life will respond positively to this kind of thing. We are lucky to have family that consider us the black sheep (haha) and understand how much traveling we already do. But you can just as often have a negative response when you start giving yourself permission to do the thing. Lisa Congdon has a great perspective on that kind of negative reaction: “the greatest responsibility you have is to your own well-being & happiness.”
I hope this week’s assignment inspires YOU to grant yourself permission to attend to your own well-being and happiness!
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Your Assignment: Design a permission slip for yourself. Think of something you truly want to do (soon) and share it with the world.
Caption idea: Explain what’s been holding you back from doing the thing on your permission slip, and how you’re going to make it happen now that you have permission!
I can’t wait to see what you come up with for your own permission slips! Once you complete your assignment, post it on Instagram using the hashtag #HOMwork. Don't forget to tag me @homsweethom because I'll be sharing my faves in my Story all week.
Love,
Lauren
P.S. ICYMI - Stefan Kunz and I have a podcast! Even though neither of us have done one before, we gave ourselves permission to do the thing and it’s so much fun. It’s all about living that creative entrepreneur life. Check it out here and let us know what you think.
