How many of us say things like, “I wish I were a writer” or “I wish I could wear that bikini?”

We, as a culture, spend a lot of time saying we wish we could do things but not doing them. Now, I realize there might be a few things that we can’t do, such as going to the moon or breathing underwater without supplies. But, most of the things we believe we can’t do are limitations we place on ourselves.

Those limitations might be the idea that we can’t do something, or they might be that we should be doing something different.

For example, my current company hired me to do risk assessments. Then my company asked me to start doing sales. When people asked me what I did, I would respond and say, “I do risk assessments. And sometimes sales.” I constantly struggled to get sales. Then one day, I finally accepted that this would be my role for a while, and everything changed. I said out loud that I do sales for a cybersecurity company, and I started getting sales. And I was darn good at it.

The issue was that I hadn’t given myself permission to take on this role. I thought I should be doing something different. I didn’t want to do sales, so that made it twice as hard. Once my mindset changed, however, everything clicked into place.

There are a lot of social media posts and memes telling people that the way they can have a bikini body is to put on a bikini. The thing is, it’s true. Instead of focusing on what other people think of us in a bikini, we could put the bikini on and go have fun.

I also recently accepted my role as a writer. I would write on and off, here and there. I would go long periods without writing, but then I would get the urge, and I’d write a blog post. Then I decided to gift myself the Elephant Journal Academy self-paced course and then the live course. I’d been wanting to do it for a long time—always talking about it but not doing it.

It got me thinking about what my writing is for and why I’m called to do it. I want to share with the world my experiences and educate people.

For whatever reason, after I started the live course, I decided I was a writer. Then NaNoWriMo came up. I’m not into fiction writing, but a friend of mine suggested I still use the idea to write my blog posts and articles. I wrote nearly every day, only missing five days out of the month. I wrote many articles for Elephant Journal and a couple of things for my blog. I have many things I haven’t even posted yet.

This is all to say that what we have to do is give ourselves permission to do something. So go and get that bikini or haircut you’ve been wanting. Ignore what other people think.

Quite often, they are either jealous because they haven’t given themselves permission or because they are afraid that others will expect it of them and they aren’t ready.