Not Needing Approval to Do the Thing You are Already Supposed to Do

You know what needs to happen. That knowledge means you already have most of what you need. You are waiting for approval like the approval is separate from the knowing but it’s not. Knowing is approval. The fact that you know something needs to change means you already have the information you need to start changing it.

The person whose approval you want doesn’t have it to give because this isn’t their life. It’s your life. The approval has to come from you and it already does if you listen to yourself long enough without second-guessing. The knowledge that something needs to happen is the approval. It’s the internal yes that you are looking for external confirmation of.

You are stalling because starting is hard in ways that waiting isn’t. Starting requires commitment. Starting requires accepting that you might be wrong about what needs doing or right about what needs doing and it doesn’t work anyway. Starting requires doing the thing even though it might not fix anything. Waiting lets you imagine that the thing would fix everything if only you could start.

The waiting feels productive because you are thinking about it. You are planning it out and imagining scenarios and considering all the angles. But thinking about the thing and doing the thing are completely different and the thing doesn’t change by thinking about it long enough. Thinking is a different activity than doing and one of them actually changes anything.

Someone would probably support you if you did the thing. They might not approve but they would probably understand that you needed to do it. And if they don’t understand, that’s their thing to work through, not your thing to prevent by not doing what you know needs doing. Their lack of understanding doesn’t make your knowledge less true.

The approval already exists. It’s just hard to feel real because approval that comes from inside yourself always feels less official than approval that comes from outside. But official and real are different things and the real approval is the one you give yourself right now by deciding this matters enough to act on it.

What’s stopping you might be the fear that doing this thing will make you the kind of person who does this thing. Like once you do it you have to keep doing it or like doing it means something permanent about who you are. Maybe it does. Maybe doing this thing means you are someone who takes action on what they know instead of waiting for external validation. Maybe that’s actually fine. Maybe that’s better than the alternative.

The waiting could go on indefinitely because there’s always a reason to wait. One more conversation, one more piece of information, one more person’s opinion, but you could also just do the thing and find out what happens. You could give yourself the approval and see if the world ends or if actually things just change the way you knew they would.


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