The Day I Stopped Asking for Permission
I was standing in a driveway in La Mirada, handing the magician divorce papers I had filed myself.
No lawyer. No safety net. Just a form I’d filled out at a friend’s kitchen table and the steady, unshakeable knowledge that this chapter of my life was over.
When he looked at the papers, then looked at me, he sneered: “You know what’s wrong with you, Jonni? You think you’re too good for us.”
For most of my life up to that point, a comment like that would have undone me. I would have apologized. I would have shrunk a little. I would have found some way to make him more comfortable with the thing I needed to do for myself.
Instead, I heard myself say: “You know what, Darryl? I am.”
I got in my car and drove away.
It sounds simple. But I want to be honest about what that moment actually cost me to arrive at — because it wasn’t courage born from a place of clarity and confidence. I was not yet twenty-one. I was riddled with shame. I had run away in the middle of the night to marry a man I barely knew, and now I was married and divorced before most of my friends had finished their sophomore year of college — a college I’d had to drop out of because of the chaos that marriage had caused. I had lost my per diem, my spot on the dance team, the music degree I’d been working so hard for.
I had every reason to stay small in that driveway. To apologize for inconveniencing him. To question whether I had any right to walk away from a mess I’d made.
But to stay in that abusive, toxic environment would have cost me even more than I’d already lost. So I held the decision. I kept it. And for the first time, I didn’t ask anyone’s permission to do so.
The Habit Nobody Talks About
Here’s something I’ve noticed in almost every woman I’ve worked with, no matter how accomplished, capable, or self-aware she is: She still checks.
She makes a decision — a real one, one she feels good about — and then, almost immediately, she floats it to someone else. Her partner. Her best friend. Her sister. Even a stranger on the internet. “What do you think? Does this make sense? Would you do this?”
On the surface, it looks like collaboration. Like wisdom. Like the kind of thoughtful, measured approach that smart women are supposed to take. But underneath, something else is often happening. She’s not gathering information. She’s asking for permission. And the moment she hands that decision to someone else for approval, she undermines the very thing she’s trying to build: trust in herself.
I know this pattern because I lived it for years. Not in dramatic ways — I was never the woman who couldn’t decide what to order at a restaurant. I was decisive in my career, capable in a crisis, the one people came to when they needed someone to think clearly under pressure. I was a great negotiator.
But the decisions that mattered most to me personally? The ones about my life, my relationships, my own worth and direction? Those I rarely held on to. I would make them, then immediately look around to see if anyone agreed. And if they didn’t — if there was even a flicker of doubt in someone else’s eyes — I would start to doubt myself too. That’s not self-trust. That’s self-trust with an asterisk.
And the tricky thing is, it doesn’t look like a problem from the outside. It looks like conscientiousness. Like humility. Like being a good listener and a thoughtful decision-maker. Which is part of why it goes unexamined for so long. We’ve been taught that checking with others is responsible. That being certain of ourselves is arrogance. That the wise woman consults widely before she acts.
And sometimes, that’s true. Wise counsel has its place. But there’s a line — a subtle, easily-crossed line — between gathering input and outsourcing your authority. And most of us cross it so often, so automatically, that we don’t even feel it happening anymore.
What Self-Trust Actually Is (And Isn’t)
We tend to think self-trust is something you either have or you don’t. Like confidence — some people are born with it, the rest of us are just managing without it. We talk about it as though it’s a fixed trait, a personality feature, something that belongs to a certain kind of woman. The bold one. The decisive one. The one who never seems to second-guess herself.
But that framing is both inaccurate and subtly cruel, because it suggests that if you don’t already have it, you’re somehow behind. That you missed something everyone else was given.
Here’s what I’ve come to understand after years of doing this work — both on myself and with the women I coach: Self-trust isn’t a personality trait. It’s a practice. And it builds the same way any trust builds: through consistent, repeated follow-through.
Think about what it means to trust another person. You don’t decide to trust them because they told you to, or because they seemed trustworthy on first impression. You trust them because they showed up, repeatedly, over time. They said they would do something, and they did it. They made a commitment, and they kept it. Trust is the accumulation of evidence, gathered slowly, that someone can be counted on.
Self-trust works exactly the same way — except the person you’re building evidence about is you.
Every time you make a decision and honor it — even a small imperfect one — you send yourself a message: I can count on me. Every time you override your instincts, minimize your own read of a situation, or hand your decision to someone else for validation before you’ll allow yourself to keep it, you send a different message: My judgment isn’t quite enough on its own.
Over time, those messages accumulate into a story. And that story shapes everything: what you think you’re capable of, what you believe you deserve, how much authority you feel entitled to claim in your own life.
This is why self-trust isn’t something you can simply decide to have. You can’t talk yourself into it, affirmation by affirmation, without the underlying behavioral evidence to back it up. What builds it — the only thing that truly builds it — is the repeated experience of making a decision and staying with it. Of trusting yourself in the small moments, so that when the big ones arrive, there’s something solid to stand on.
The Difference Between Counsel and Permission
There’s a distinction I return to constantly in my coaching work, because it’s the hinge everything else turns on: the difference between seeking wise counsel and asking for permission.
Seeking counsel means you go into a conversation open to information that might genuinely change your thinking. You’re not attached to a particular outcome. You’re gathering perspective before you decide. That is wisdom. That is how good decisions get made.
Asking for permission means you’ve already decided — you know what you want to do, what feels right, what your gut is telling you — and you’re looking for someone to ratify it. To tell you it’s okay. To give you the external authorization to proceed with the thing you already know you need to do.
The problem isn’t that you’re seeking input. The problem is that you’ve made your sense of permission contingent on someone else’s agreement. Which means that if they hesitate, if they offer an alternative, if they seem uncertain — you take that as a reason to doubt your own knowing. Even when their uncertainty has nothing to do with your situation. Even when their hesitation comes from their own fears, their own limitations, their own entirely different life experience.
Here’s the tell I share with every woman I work with: Notice what happens after you get the input.
Do you weigh it thoughtfully and return to your own answer — sometimes adjusting based on something genuinely useful, sometimes not? That’s gathering counsel. That’s healthy.
Or do you feel yourself pulled in a new direction the moment someone offers a different opinion — not because their reasoning is compelling, but because their certainty feels greater than yours? Do you leave the conversation less sure of yourself than when you entered it, even if nothing they said was particularly convincing? That’s asking for permission. And that’s where self-trust slowly, almost invisibly, gets eroded.
The goal isn’t to stop listening to others. It’s to listen from a grounded place — one where you can receive input without losing your own signal in the process.
The Moment I Finally Understood
Looking back at a pivotal night in Las Vegas, when I was eighteen years old and a man asked if I’d like to see his bar — I knew. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. Something in me screamed no.
But I had spent years learning that being afraid to make someone angry was more important than listening to myself. That keeping the peace mattered more than honoring my own discomfort. That a woman who makes a scene, who refuses, who trusts her instincts over someone else’s invitation — that woman is difficult. Rude. Too much.
So I went anyway. And what happened that night changed the course of my life in ways I’m still, decades later, untangling.
I’m not sharing that to be dramatic. I’m sharing it because I think a lot of women have their own version of that moment — not necessarily that extreme, but the same underlying pattern. The instinct that was clear. The choice to override it, because someone else’s comfort felt more pressing than your own safety. The cost that came later, sometimes small, sometimes enormous.
We are taught, in ways both explicit and invisible, to distrust our own knowing. To assume that our instincts are overreactions. That our hesitation is anxiety rather than information. That the polite, agreeable, accommodating response is always the right one — and that a woman who acts on her own authority, without checking first, is somehow out of line.
And then we wonder why self-trust feels so hard to access. It’s not a mystery. It’s a consequence.
And then, not even three years after that night in Las Vegas, I’m standing in the magician’s driveway in La Mirada — still young, still ashamed, still carrying the weight of every choice that had led me there — and something is different.
I had made my decision. He didn’t agree with it. He challenged it, openly and unkindly, with the kind of contempt designed to make a person feel small. And for the first time, I didn’t move. I didn’t soften the edges to make it easier for him to accept. I didn’t wait for his understanding, his blessing, his permission.
I looked him in the eye, held it, and I drove away.
That’s what self-trust actually feels like, I’ve come to understand. Not the absence of doubt, nor that you’ve made a perfect decision with a guaranteed outcome. Just the willingness to stay with yourself even when they don’t. To remain in your own corner even when the room isn’t.
Why Women Get Stuck — And What Actually Moves Them
In my coaching work, I’ve stopped being surprised by this: the women who come to me are rarely stuck because they lack clarity. They often know what they want. They can usually articulate it with precision. They’ve thought it through from every angle, gathered every opinion, run every scenario.
What they can’t do is let themselves keep the decision once they’ve made it.
They make it, then they float it. They float it, then they second-guess it. They second-guess it, then they research it more. They research it more, then they ask someone else. And the cycle continues, not because more information is genuinely needed, but because the act of deciding — the act of claiming authority over their own life — feels like something that requires more justification than they’ve been able to generate.
What they’re actually waiting for, though they rarely name it this way, is permission. Permission from a partner, a parent, a friend, a mentor. Permission from God, the culture, from the timeline, from the version of themselves they think they’re supposed to be by now. Permission to want what they want. To choose what they choose. To trust that their knowing is enough.
And here’s what I’ve had to learn to say clearly: That permission is not coming from the outside. It never was. The waiting is the problem, not the solution. Because every day spent waiting for someone else to authorize your life is a day you’ve handed the pen to someone who isn’t writing your story.
The work I do with women is not about convincing them of anything they don’t already sense. It’s about helping them return to the part of themselves that already knows — and building the habit, decision by decision, of honoring that knowing. Even when it’s uncomfortable. Even when someone disagrees. Even when the outcome is uncertain, which it always is.
Because self-trust doesn’t require certainty. It only requires consistency. The willingness to show up for yourself, again and again, until the evidence accumulates into something you can stand on.
What This Looks Like in Practice
I want to be practical here, because this work is not abstract. It shows up in the texture of ordinary days.
It shows up in the moment before you send a text asking your friend what she thinks about the decision you’ve already made. It shows up in the meeting where you have a clear point of view and you wait to see which way the room is leaning before you share it. It shows up in the way you preface your own opinions with “I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong, but…” — not because you think you’re wrong, but because you’ve learned to apologize for the audacity of having a perspective.
It shows up in the way you make a plan, feel good about it, tell someone else about it, and then spend the next three days wondering if you should reconsider because they seemed less enthusiastic than you hoped.
And it shows up in the driveway moments, too — the ones where you’ve finally made the hard decision, the right decision, and someone looks at you and tells you you’re wrong. And you have to decide, in that moment, whether their certainty outweighs your own.
The practice is not complicated. But it is daily, and it is cumulative. It looks like this: Make a decision. Don’t announce it immediately. Don’t explain it. Don’t ask for feedback. Just hold it for a moment — let it be yours, fully, before you offer it up to anyone else’s opinion. Notice what it feels like to stand in your own choice without immediately looking around for reassurance.
Then, when you do share it — because sometimes you will, and sometimes you should — notice whether you’re sharing from a grounded place or whether you’re floating it for approval. Notice whether you can receive a different opinion without losing your own signal. Notice whether you come back to yourself, or whether you drift.
That noticing is the beginning. And from that beginning, everything else becomes possible.
If This Resonates
If you’ve been nodding along, I’d love for you to stay.
On this blog, I write about self-trust, identity, and the deep, significant work of coming back to yourself — especially in the second half of life, when the old roles fall away and you’re finally free to ask who you really are underneath all of them.
And if you’re ready to do this work with real support, the Second Wind Path is a year-round coaching program built around four quarters: Focus, Reflect, Energize, and Evolve. They spell FREE — and that’s entirely on purpose, because freedom is the point. Not a life without difficulty, but a life where you’re finally making choices from your own center rather than waiting for someone else to authorize them. Each round of the program goes deeper than the last, and right now, in Q2, we’re squarely in Reflect — which is exactly what this piece has been about.
If you’ve read this far and felt something shift, that’s worth paying attention to. Subscribe to my newsletter. Reach out directly or reply to any of my emails. I read every one, and I’d love to talk about where you are and what you’re ready for.
You don’t need permission to trust yourself. But you do have to decide to.
