Permission to not have the answers

As I wind down the hours of 2009, I’m reflecting back on some of the themes that have popped up for me over the year. One theme that has been at the front of my mind is that of giving yourself permission. I haven’t really started writing about this, but I’ve been gestating the idea over the last few months, and expect to write a few posts about it in the upcoming year, beginning with this one.

The thesis centers around giving yourself permission to suggest ideas that are not fully fleshed out. I’m not suggesting that we spout off every half-baked thought that comes through our heads, but rather, to pay attention to intuition. There are many times that I will shoot down an idea before I have fully given it a chance to breathe, or I will not have time to fully digest an idea and I’ll put it into my personal notes rather than try to publish it or talk it out with someone else.

The biggest hurdle here is that of perception. What if the idea is perceived as stupid? What if others disagree vehemently? These are certainly risks, but putting aside the ego and allowing a rhetorical question to be phrased can go a long way toward stemming naysayers.

By intuition, I’m certainly not the only one to think about permission in relation to the self and the communication of new ideas, but I have done basically zero research into this so far so I don’t know how well it has been covered yet. I hope that I can add something original to this theme in a later post.