There's a pink sticky note on my desk that's been there since January, Reader.

"More public speaking…. Keynote.?."

I've walked past it every day for five months. Some days it feels like an aspiration. Some days it feels like a dare. Most days it asks the question I haven't quite been able to answer out loud:

Can I even do this? Dare I even imagine the possibility?... Do I hold the permission to pursue this?

Not permission in the "You go, girlfriend, you deserve this" sense. In the harder sense. The one that asks: do I trust my history, my experience, my particular way of seeing — enough to walk into that room without waiting for someone to hand me a credential first?

That's the question underneath the question.

A few weeks ago, one of my clients doubled her lucrative business by making a hire she'd been putting off — longer than she needed to. The right hire, as it turned out. Someone who showed up already reorganizing, already pushing back on systems that needed pushing back on, already laying out the first few weeks before my client had to ask.

And something shifted in my friend.

She started spending money — investing, really — she'd been scared to spend. Making moves she'd been avoiding. Moving like someone who'd finally gotten the green light.

She wondered aloud, "Why have I been waiting for permission… in my own business?"

My response: your new hire didn't give you that green light. You did. She just held up the mirror long enough for you to see it.

That's permission. Not the moment someone hands it to you. The moment you stop waiting for them to.

This issue is about that moment — what gets in the way of it, what it actually is, and what it takes to train it as something more than a feeling you stumble into when the conditions are right.

In my work with insanely capable women — and men — permission is rarely the thing they're missing.

It's the thing they're sitting on. The thing that's already there — to be summoned and activated.

From childhood, most of us have internalized permission as something externally bestowed. Something to be asked for, waited for, and then gratefully received.

We didn't invent that pattern, but we installed it. And we got good at it because getting good at it was how you survived those rooms.

We never got the memo that the room changed.

In my case, someone I respect once made an offhand comment — meant as a compliment — that landed sneakier than they intended. "Bryan, you're a master of the short, wise comment. You're probably a great ten-minute talk guy — but not a full TED Talk guy."

I didn't resist. No matter how many people have pushed me to get on stage, that was the story my system accepted. And somewhere between that conversation and January's sticky note, I let someone else's casual observation become a ceiling I built for myself.

That's how it works. Permission gets outsourced so gradually you don't notice it happening. A comment here. A deferred decision there. A spotlight consistently handed to someone else rather than held for yourself. Until one day you're standing in front of a sticky note asking whether you're even allowed to want the thing you clearly already want.

When someone tells me they're ready to take an uncertain step, the first thing I'm listening for isn't their plan, their why, or their strategy.

I'm listening for whether the soil beneath them is solid AND enriched enough to build from.

I spoke this week with someone who has spent years putting their best thinking into other people's work. Genuinely brilliant. Real credentials. A nagging idea they've been sitting on — something born from hard-won lived experience — that could be the foundation of something truly important and entirely their own.

What they were waiting for, they told me, was to get the framework right first. To feel more prepared. To have something more complete before they started talking about it out loud. What they're postponing is the essays, talks, workshops, and retreats that could profoundly change how people move through the world.

I recognized the stall immediately. Not because it's unusual. Because it's almost universal. Getting the framework right first is just credentialing yourself to your own standard — a finish line that keeps moving. The soil under their feet was already rich. The experience was real. The perspective was genuinely theirs. What they hadn't yet given themselves was permission to plant something in it.

What if permission isn't something you wait to receive?

What if it's a muscle memory — built on the values, history, resources, and contribution already inside you — just waiting to be illuminated, remembered, and activated?

The thing with muscle memory: what we focus on is what we train.

Speaking doesn't intimidate me. I do it in front of a crowd at least once a year, guest on podcasts regularly. A keynote somehow strikes a different chord.

It's not the room. It's the exposure. A keynote means putting your thinking into the arena where people can push back on it, poke holes in it, decide it doesn't hold up. Artsy friends tell me this is what it feels like to release an album into the wild. You can work a room. You cannot control what people do with your ideas once they have them.

That's the real permission question. Not whether you can show up. Whether you trust what you're bringing when you do.

That answer doesn't live in credentials. It lives in what you've already survived. In what people consistently seek you out for when you're not charging for it. In the work that makes you forget to check your phone. In the particular combination of experience, history, and perspective that doesn't exist in anyone else you know.

That's your fertile soil. It exists under your feet wherever you go. Nobody gave it to you. Nobody can take it away.

January's sticky note is still on my desk.

Recently, I said yes to two keynotes in 2027. I can't share the topics yet, but the first will be in January at Grow Retreat — Stephanie Scheller's annual event built specifically for ADHD entrepreneurs. A room full of people who know something about running like a fugitive. (Having attended myself, the Grow Retreat waitlist is worth getting on!)

I didn't say yes because I had a sudden surge of fresh internal credibility. I didn't say yes because I finally felt ready. I said yes because the soil under my feet is real, the thinking is mine, and waiting for a better moment was just a more sophisticated version of walking past that sticky note every morning.

Permission isn't the green light from the room. It's the moment you stop waiting for one.

Hit reply and finish this sentence: the move I keep not giving myself permission to make is ______.

Running's for fugitives. Remember to exhale

P.S. Curious what an actual momentum call with me looks like? Got this note after one recently:

"I loved our conversation and left with much more than I expected. I appreciate your understanding of where I actually am and offering a few key distinctions that made me think and reflect."

If that sounds useful, book thirty minutes >>here.<<​