The permission you were never given
And what happens when you finally take it
A writer I follow, Dan Haylett, calls it the Permission Paradox.
His argument: successful people arrive at retirement and find they can’t authorize their own enjoyment.
The job title is gone.
The paycheck stopped.
The external signals that once said “you’ve earned this” have been unplugged — and without it, spending can feel reckless.
Indulgent.
Like something that needs to be justified.
He’s right.
But in working with women for 30+ years, I’ve noticed something he doesn’t quite name.
For many of the women I work with, the problem isn’t that they lost permission somewhere along the way.
It’s that they were never given it.
For a lot of women in their 60s and 70s, the earliest lessons were clear: be careful, be modest, don’t be extravagant. Save for a rainy day. Think of others first.
Those messages came from parents.
They came from careers where women learned to ask rather than decide.
From marriages and partnerships where one person handled the finances and the other deferred.
None of that was malicious.
But layer after layer, year after year, the message sunk in for many women: someone else will take care of this.
This is how we develop our own money scripts.
And now here she is.
Capable. Accomplished. Four million dollars in savings. A paid-off home. More financial security than she imagined in her 40s and 50s.
Still waiting for someone to say go ahead.
I’ve written recently about what sometimes breaks this pattern: a diagnosis. A loss. A relationship that ends.
Painful events that force a woman to step into the driver’s seat — not because she’s ready, but because there’s suddenly no one else to take the wheel.
But it shouldn’t take a crisis to sit in the driver’s seat of your own life.
That seat has always been yours.
Thomas Keating puts it simply:
The chief act of the will isn’t effort. It’s consent.
That’s what’s actually missing — not a new investment strategy, not a different balance sheet.
Consent to your own life.
No one is coming with a permission slip — not a parent, not a partner, not a doctor’s report.
If you’ve been going through the motions — spending less than makes sense, deferring decisions that are yours to make, waiting for some signal that hasn’t come — take an honest look at that.
Not to assign blame. The people who shaped your relationship with money were doing their best.
But you are responsible for what you do next.
Here’s where to start:
Take some quiet time. Away from your phone and anyone else’s agenda. Sit with a blank piece of paper. Think about financial decisions you’ve pulled back from — not because the money wasn’t there, but because it didn’t feel like your call.
Name one thing. Just one. A choice you’ve been deferring. Write it down. Naming it turns a feeling into something real.
Bring it to a conversation. Share it with someone you trust — your advisor, a close friend. A conversation is how it becomes a plan.
The driver’s seat has always been yours.
You just need to take the wheel.
Until next time,
— Russ