You don’t need permission
So why are you waiting for it.
So, what will you do?
I will invade England and defeat the English on their own ground.
Invade? But that’s impossible!
Why? Why is that impossible? You’re so concerned with squabbling for the scraps from Longshank’s table, that you’ve missed your God-given right to something better.
Braveheart (1995) Dir. Mel Gibson.
Back in 2002 I was unemployed and, following the 9/11 recession, largely unemployable as an IT technician. I did manage to get myself on to a Government sponsored training course in Cisco Systems and Wide Area Networking (WAN), which I was both grateful for and enthusiastic about. This, I thought, would upskill me, get me back into an expanded skillset market and get me a job.
One day my phone rang mid-class and I stepped out to answer it. It was a job offer, paying well above what I believed I was worth at the time, and it was in every conceivable way the ideal place for me to work, running the systems that I had specific expertise in. It was a no-brainer to say yes.
But, and I swear this is true, I seriously thought about not taking it for a few minutes, because I didn’t think that I should take any job UNTIL I was finished the 6 month course. Why on earth would I have such a thought process?
Our Drivers
Back in 1975, Taibi Kahler, a researcher of Eric Berne’s Transactional Analysis theory, published a paper (Kahler, 1975), in which he claimed that five drivers motivate us and can also cause dysfunctional behaviours.
These are now known as Kahler’s Drivers and are:
Be Perfect
Be Strong
Try Hard
Hurry Up
Please People
According to the good people over at TURAS (NHS_Scotland, 2024), a learning website provided by NHS Scotland, my Kahler’s drivers are Be Perfect and Be Strong.
Not only that but those two drivers win by a country mile, scoring 94 and 92 respectively. (My Please People score was so low that they had to pull a white sheet over it. Do not hire me as a coach if you just want me to tell you that you’re great.)
According to Kahler, our drivers activate our scripts. And the Be Perfect and Be Strong drivers are dominant in the “Until” script (Berne, 1972). The thesis of this script is that something good must be put off until something else is achieved.
For example, a person with the Until script might say, “I can’t watch that movie until I’ve finished my report.” Or longer term, “I can’t spend more time with my family until I land that promotion, then I can relax.”
My own Until script was telling me something similar. However, there’s more to this story. Standing on the street that day and seriously considering not taking a job wasn’t just my Until script at play. I truly felt I had an obligation to finish the Cisco course, that I was duty bound to finish something that I had started. And because of that, I didn’t feel that I had permission to abandon the course opportunity and move on to the job opportunity.
My internal weighing machine was telling me “Don’t”.
Injunctions
In Transactional Analysis (Berne, 1961) we have three “ego-states” of being. These are:
Parent – Behaviours, thoughts and feelings influenced by parents and parental figures from our past.
Adult - Behaviours, thoughts and feelings that are responses to the here and now.
Child - Behaviours, thoughts and feelings replayed from our childhood.
Goulding (1976) lists the injunctions that our child, as a child, hears from the child in the adult, as a negative or restrictive instruction:
Don’t be or Don’t exist
Don’t be you (the sex you are)
Don’t be a child
Don’t grow up
Don’t make it
Don’t (do anything)
Don’t be important
Don’t belong
Don’t be close
Don’t be well
Don’t think
Don’t feel
That’s a lot of Don’t and anyone with an ounce of self-awareness will feel triggered reading that list. Because we have all, to some degree, been given these messages, usually by parents doing their best to raise us well and keep us safe. We in turn will give at least some of these to our own children.
Lots of people spend their entire lives feeling that they are not allowed to do the thing that they really want to do. They have so much “don’t” in their system that they never get around to “do”. They are raised and educated to believe that they need permission to progress but are unable to find anyone from whom they can earn and/or receive it.
The irony of this is that at school we are educated and encouraged to celebrate the achievements of those who didn’t wait for permission; Marie Curie, Florence Nightingale, Galileo, Churchill, Jesse Owens, Steve Jobs, Nelson Mandela, Elon Musk, while in that same classroom, we are force fed rules and injunctions that almost guarantee we will never get to be like them.
The burden was never on our parents to undo these injunctions. The duty of care that we have for ourselves is the start line for dealing with this and any other trauma we feel. We can’t change the system, but we can change ourselves.
I am a Coach and most of my clients present as high agency individuals who have identified a problem they want to solve and are willing to put in the work. But they’re stuck at some point and cannot make any progress. One part of a Coach’s job is to help clients get unstuck, by getting the client to explore and learn about themselves, find out what their injunctions are, then get past them.
The Cycle of Don’t
When we hear, mostly from ourselves, the word “don’t”, then we are entering into a conversation that requires us to get past the conditionality of the word.
“Don’t…”
“Why?”
“Because…”
In the exchange between William Wallace and his Lords, he didn’t wait for an answer to Why? He had already figured it out and inverted it, ready to use it as a rallying call to arms.
To the Lords in the room, the scraps from Longshank’s table were the “because”. Losing these benefits, wretched as they were, would have meant a loss of status and potential death for their families and their Fiefdoms. The Lords had settled for something less, voluntarily, in order to maintain their status and comfort, even though they wanted more than anything to have freedom.
The pause between “Why?” And “Because..” is loaded with the knowledge of what you really want and the reasons not to pursue it. The “Because” answer will always be exclusively reasons to not pursue, regardless of whether the answer is given with good intention or malice. The “Because” answer tells you to settle, even when what you want is visible and achievable.
Wallace didn’t wait for permission. In fact, Wallace didn’t need permission at all, even from himself. He rejected the Cycle of Don’t completely and bypassed it. This is what true builders do.
Building Better
We are not all entrepreneurs, CEOs or venture capitalists. Very few of us are working to build the next Stripe or ChatGPT competitor, or a new technology that will inevitably disrupt these platforms. But we’re all building something.
Usually, we’re trying to build better; to improve our life, our relationships, our employment prospects. We are not outright creating anything new, and that is okay. Building better is still building, and building strengthens the builder mindset. Building prevents stasis. And building creates future.
Beware the continuous urge to keep building better indefinitely, though. Building better is okay, but it is incremental, safe(ish) and pushes known boundaries in a safe manner, toward a safe place. A ceiling will eventually be reached. And no amount of pushing these boundaries will create anything new.
Building better, in the context above, is also usually done by the largesse of our organisation, spouse or social group. We’re cheered on, kind of, because everyone loves to see their people strive, perpetually, in something that will keep them inside the guardrails, keep them grounded and keep them from pulling away too far or too fast. We are appreciated for the striving, not so much for the achieving. We are operating with the permission of others, toward an end that they have a primary stake in. Our own ambitions do not feature.
Building for ourselves
Our ambitions are a (good) type of problem. We are unhappy with the status quo, and we believe that there is a solution that will make things better. This requires a course of action that will cost time and money (usually) and require a large amount of our personal attention, usually to the detriment of something else.
When we listen to our “Don’t” injunctions at the outset, we are being bounced straight into a passive, poisonous version of the Do-Nothing scenario. We are denying ourselves permission to even explore the Cycle of Don’t and shutting down the project.
For our ambition, this is a failure. But it’s a failure that hasn’t cost us anything in the present. We are still the same people, with the same job, the same qualifications and the same family and friends. We scroll Instagram and forget the dream. We go back to building better and settle for the scraps from Longshank’s table. Later we agonise on this, realising that we could have been a contender, if only we’d listened to our gut.
Final word
While this essay will not apply to everyone (different people have different drivers), there are a lot of people out there who feel that they need permission to overcome their injunctions. Such people can find themselves manipulated or coerced by irrelevant externalities into maintaining the status quo at the expense of becoming who they really are and getting what they really want out of life. I’m talking my own book here, but Coaching really is a great way to begin the process of overcoming this.
Remember the sequence – Don’t – Why? – Because…
Remember your purpose.
Stop waiting for permission – It was always yours to give.
Kevin Conway is an Executive and Leadership coach. For Coaching services, please see www.kevinconwaycoaching.com
References
Berne, E. (1961). Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy. London: Condor.
Berne, E. (1972). What Do You Say After You Say Hello?: The Psychology of Human Destiny. New York: Corgi.
Goulding, R. G. (1976). Injunctions, Decisions and Redecisions. Transactional Analysis Journal, 6(1), 41-48.
Kahler, T. (. (1975). Drivers: The Key to the Process of Scripts. Transactional Analysis Bulletin, 5(3), 280-284.
NHS_Scotland. (2024, October 7). Kahler's Drivers. Retrieved from TURAS Learn: https://learn.nes.nhs.scot/27427