Giving Yourself Permission to Make Decisions

Do you wait for permission to do things in your administrative role?

If you have a good idea, or see that something needs to be done or needs to be improved, are you waiting to act on those things until you have permission from your lead agent?

See, here’s the thing about leaders. They don’t wait for permission.

Give yourself permission! Don’t wait! In The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Marie Kondo gives us permission to get rid of everything that doesn’t bring us joy. She says we don’t need all those appliance manuals we’ll never look at again. She gives us permission to throw away the vast majority of photographs and keepsakes from our childhood because they don’t serve us.

What is it as an admin that you are waiting for permission to do? Does the database need cleaning? Do you want to throw out a bunch of old contracts from 10 years ago, but your agent is nervous about letting them go? What old habits do you need to give yourself permission to let go of?

If you need permission to do something, then I’m giving it to you now. In your own mind, you can say, “Elizabeth gave me permission to do this, so it’s ok.”

As admin, our personalities are that of rule-followers. Even if WE are the ones making up the rules! But just because you said you were going to do something a certain way doesn’t mean you can’t change that.

For example, the sales agents on my team promised to make 40 contacts a week. To get those numbers they were cold-calling neighborhoods and making their numbers. At the end of the year we closed exactly 1 transaction from those cold-calling efforts. So in spite of everyone around us saying we had to make calls every week, I gave the sales team permission to stop making 40 contacts per week.

For several weeks thereafter, the agents thanked me for releasing them from that burden. My lead agent thanked me for making that “executive decision” which is what he calls any decision where either he or I put our foot down on an issue and stop listening to anyone else about it.

So instead of making 40 contacts a week, our agents are now laser focused on following up with leads quickly and carefully to make sure no one gets through the cracks. Now we’re running a marketing machine and no one feels like a robot by getting on an auto-dialer and repeating the same phrases ad nauseam.

The bottom line is, you have to trust yourself and your instincts to know you are capable of making good decisions on your own.

To ease your mind a bit, it’s helpful to recognize that there are few decisions that can’t be reversed or changed or fixed. There may be a little drama, but I bet that you will make way more successful decisions than you failed ones.

Just trust yourself. You’ve got this!