Welcome to another Ask Katrina. The question today is:
“Hey, Katrina, I am so ready to live my life. I’m tired of sacrificing. How do I start living the life of my dreams?”
It’s an interesting question and one that not a lot of us will be courageous enough to ask.
Maybe we will ask that question to ourselves in the middle of the night, we’ll ask ourselves that question while we’re crying in the shower, because we feel like life is so hard.
But we won’t ask it out loud.
So the fact that you were courageous enough to ask that question, I praise you, I celebrate you for that.
Now, the answer is this. Let’s go back to what we teach fundamentally here at Legend Leaders because the answer has to do with the four P’s.
The four Ps are essentially the path that we follow as executive women, when we go from a manager or director, a non-executive into the executive ranks.
The first P in the four P’s is promotion. Women spend, on average, 9.8 years, getting promoted over and over and over again until they finally reached the executive seat.
In that period of time, we are only focused on one thing: promotion.
Why?
We’re doing everything that we can to become an executive. We’re sacrificing, we’re taking on extra work, we’re doing all the things and we’re telling ourselves, as soon as we get to that executive seat, we’re going to have the life we want to have.
We move from that first P “promotion” into the next P, which is preparation.
Preparation represents the phase where we are learning how to exec correctly, we’re building and creating our high performance executive brand.
We can’t just jump in and suddenly know how to exec. That’s not now it works.
The third P is performance. I can’t perform until I prepare because I don’t know what or how to perform, I’ve got no clue.
But once I create my executive brand, now, I’m performing.
Now I’m getting the results that I expect to get within the business, which as a result of getting those those endpoints in the business, I’m getting my bonus, I’m being talked about for a promotion, and I’m getting my pay raises; all of the rewards that we want to see coming to us as a result of execing correctly and having a high-performance executive brand.
That’s what’s happening in that third P; that performance phase.
Once we start performing, and we see the fruits of our labor, we finally move to the fourth P which is permission.
It’s not permission from everybody else, it is permission from ourselves. It’s personal permission.
Until we feel like we are safely and appropriately performing or exec incorrectly in our new executive seat, we will not stop sacrificing.
Living Is a Result of Permission
Rarely will we stop doing whatever it takes to be successful in our careers.
Success is a must for us.
It is part of our identities.
It is required for us to be successful.
Not until we’re performing do we give or will we give ourselves personal permission.
It’s a fact observed over and over in high achieving women.
If you are wanting to live the life of your dreams and yet you’re not, it sounds like you are not giving yourself personal permission to live, which means you haven’t reached that fourth P.
You have 3 ways to do that.
1. You are performing at the level you have defined as “successful and you simply need to recognize that and give yourself both permission and grace.
2. The other situation is you’re not performing and you need to start performing so that you can give yourself permission, in which case, you’ve got to go into that preparation phase, and you’ve got to create your executive brand.
3. The other pathway, is to simply recognize that this is what you’re doing to yourself.
You are holding yourself back from living the life of your dreams.
Your personal permission, your personal freedom, the ability to enjoy your life shouldn’t necessarily hinge on the achievements that you have or don’t have professionally.
You can release yourself from that mindset and say, “I’m going to focus on performing but I’m not going to wait to win. I’m not going to wait to give myself permission. I’m doing it now.”
Seek to understand and answer these questions to give yourself permission to live:
Where are you on that journey?
Where are you mentally?
What are you willing to do and not willing to do?
Based on your answers, take the proper steps.
Either your performing and just need to give permission.
You’re not quite performing and you need to build your brand so that you start performing and can then give yourself permission.
Or, you unlink performance and permission completely in your brain and allow yourself to do both independently.
The choice is yours.
Isn’t that a great feeling?!
Now that you know how to start living the life you want to live, how about you connect with someone on the Legend Leaders team and let us help you identify where you are and which path best suites you? Schedule your call here.