How to Become a Lived Authority Without Anyone's Permission

This show is powered by Others Over Self. Hit that subscribe button to keep training your brain. Lived authority is what happens when you stop handing out judgment about your own life to people who haven't lived a day of it. That's a narrower, heavier claim than just believing in yourself. It's about who holds the pen, not how capable you feel when you're holding it. From others over self, it's Hardcore and at Ease, a show about people who are keeping their edge without going over the edge. I'm host Shelley Rude. Maybe you've done this to yourself. You've waited on a form, a. A degree that was very expensive, thinking that it'll finally click everything into place. Well, I've watched capable people chase that approval, get it, and find out that it was only a step, sometimes a very disappointing one. Today's episode gives us a different lens on where real authority comes from, and it comes down to just one question: who gets to author your life? This is Hardcore and At Ease. Hey there, friends! It is so good to be back with you again this week. I'm slowly tiptoeing back into my work after having a long holiday weekend over Labor Day, and I hope that you are able to do the same. Sometimes it's just a little bit difficult to get back into the hustle and bustle after some much-needed time off. Before I get into today's teaching, I do want to honor one of my listeners. This morning, I was able to see the sunrise come up over Lake St. Clair, and I was thinking about her because she lives in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and she told me that this show helped her a lot to hold on during this rough summer. She was surrounded by some unstable and difficult people who weren't able to see past their own noise to think about the bigger picture. That's a really tough situation. Yeah. So if that was you also, maybe some difficult people chanced across your path this summer, I want you to hear this as well. You are the steady one in that room. Sometimes nobody else can see it, but I see it. And knowing that someone like you is out there, it reminds me that we're not alone in our quest to be hardcore and at ease. So for those of you up there in the UP, keep doing the great work that you're doing. Now let's get into today's teaching. Setting the stage today is Malcolm Gladwell's book, Outliers. In his book, he wrote about a learning model called the 10,000-hour rule. It was built off psychology research on elite violinists. I did pick up the violin when I was very young. I was an award-winning flute player, a flautist, and I thought I would be good at the violin. Turns out I'm not. So I apologize to my parents many, many years later, but I did have a run at it. When practicing the violin, there's rosin dust all over the floor. You've got the same 4 measures that have to be repeated nonstop until you can finally make sense of them, and you've got a metronome, tick-tock, tick-tock, helping to keep the beat for you. What I learned in my recent research is that I quite simply didn't do it enough. 3 to 5 hours a day. 3 to 5 hours a day for roughly 10 years. That apparently is what makes an expert. So if you've logged that number, 3 to 5 hours a day for 10 years, that marks you as an expert. That idea speaks to the truth about hours being put into something, repetition of good practice being put into something. 3 to 5 hours a day for 10 years. Is there something in your life that you've been putting those hours in on? Think about that question as we continue through our lesson today. That time measurement, it measures mastery of a skill, but it's not designed to measure something else. It's not designed to measure your own judgment about your own life. There is no stopwatch for that. The experiences that you have lived through and the life that has happened to you isn't necessarily measured in 3 to 5 hour increments, at least not intentionally. And that's where our conversation focuses today, naming the thing that most of us learned that we weren't allowed to claim on our own. You see, there's a question here that's not being asked, Who's counting and tracking those hours? Who's adding them all up? And at the end, what does it mean? You see, that's one type of proof. You have this approving authority that tracks your hours and stamps off your approval, that grades your test and gives you the score. But there's another type of proof, one that doesn't have anything to do with hours that are logged. And this type of proof shows up everywhere once you start looking for it. These approving authorities, they can come in 3 common packages. You can have a degree, you can have a certification, and you can have a license on all different types of things in life. Degrees, certifications, and licenses— 3 different price tags for the same promise. They promise somebody a method of proof that you're allowed to do the work. You see a certification or an approving authority takes the risk of your word and says, well, we don't know about all the experience, but what we do know is they did this one thing, or they completed this one series of things. Now, there are plenty of bodies issuing this proof. Some of them are great and some of them are not. What we are witnessing with the rise of the internet, the increase of intellectualism, the improvement of overall global literacy, It's a wonderful thing. And what we're also seeing are more degrees, more certifications, more approving authorities, and something is getting lost as we chase after someone else's authority. As an example, I saw this up close when I left broadcast television many years ago. I walked into the fitness industry. I wanted to go back to a passion. Now, going into that industry, I paid close to $1,000 for my National Academy of Sports Medicine Certification as a personal trainer, NASM, N-A-S-M. Why did I need that certification? Because I wanted to work for a gym, and the gym wouldn't hire me without a certification. I asked, which one do I need? And he recommended to me the NASM cert. It was one of the best on the market, also one of the priciest. So I paid my money, I did my studying, and I was glad to walk into that low dollar an hour wage job. And fairly quickly, I learned that the majority of the trainers around me didn't have that expensive certification. What they did have was about the same paycheck as what I was getting, not very much. So here they had a lower certification that didn't cost them as much money, and they were making the same income as me, a trainer with a higher certification, and therefore Supposedly higher education in the same field. That rubbed me the wrong way, and it was a really good exercise in learned knowledge. You see, once you're out on the training floor, you get to know the other trainers. You know who is full of BS and who knows their stuff when it comes to how long somebody should be doing an exercise, the frequency of it. Is this a balance issue or do they have a torn rotator cuff? When it came to the execution of the skill, those pieces of papers hanging in our lockers didn't matter. We all got hired at the same training rate. We all got put in front of the same clients. And the success that came to us from a paycheck standpoint, it didn't matter what someone else said we were capable of. It was up to us as good personal trainers. Yes. And also— Our sales skills. You see, you gain clients when you're able to teach, when you're able to read how people move and translate what's happening in their body into their own personal transformation that they can feel. So was that first external certification a necessary step? Sure. But the one that really did make or break a training career depended on us on the floor, what we did. With our lived experience. So that's the professional version of what we're talking about today. And I also want to lean into a personal version of this. As many of you know, I went down the path of becoming a military chaplain many years ago. And to become a military chaplain, you need something called an ecclesiastical endorsement. There is a list of recognized religious bodies that has to formally vouch for you as an individual that you belong to them, you're one of theirs, and they say that you are fit to fill that role. This endorsement comes in the form of a piece of paper that's signed off by one of these entities. Without that ecclesiastical endorsement, you don't get a uniform, you don't get orders, you don't get to go into becoming a chaplain. Becoming a military chaplain is one of the most difficult and rigorous processes I've ever been through, and so I sat down with this list of over 200 ecclesiastical endorsers and tried to find my own faith, and you know what? It wasn't a very clear match. There's more than 10 Christian denominations listed, and there wasn't really a box for what I truly believed in because I didn't know what all the 200+ even stood for. So before I could click my ecclesiastical endorsement and have somebody sign off on it, I had to research what every single one of those religions was, what they believed, and if I happened to come across one or two that I thought might be in alignment with my own beliefs, then I had to go to them directly and ask them to bring me under their wing, to sign off on me. Well, that process was very confusing and very long, so I started talking to the other chaplains, asking them directly, who endorsed you? Who vouched for you? And a chaplain here in the state of Michigan told me about the World Council of Independent Christian Churches, WCICC, and through that organization, I was able somewhat painlessly to get an ecclesiastical endorsement. He shared my observation of just how difficult it was to do God's work in the military environment. Now, I share this story with you now because piece by piece and conversation by conversation, I had to build my own path to find an endorser who shared my beliefs. I tried one or two other Christian denominations, and as I went through their ecclesiastical endorsement process, I kept hitting brick walls. One of them said that you had to be in one of their home churches for no less than 5 years before they would consider endorsing you. 5 years! I was an active member of the military. I hadn't lived anywhere in 5 years, let alone belonged to the same church. It was really discouraging to feel like this was my calling, and yet brick walls were all over the place. You see, the system that was supposed to make endorsement simple actually made it difficult. What was the Department of Defense at the time, it had a list of over 200— 211 religious organizations. And since then, just this past summer, it's been cut down to only 31. That's right, it went from 211 established religions down to only 31. Now, there's all kinds of reasons behind that shift, but what I want you to take away from this is the understanding that even official gatekeepers oftentimes can't agree on the shape of their own gate. I want you to notice what happened there. The system didn't validate me. I walked my own path, and I walked it anyway with people telling me no. And somewhere in the process, I stopped waiting for the list to catch up to me. Deep in my heart, I knew what I was called to do, and I understood the difference between being granted authority and claiming my own authority. Now, I am still a chaplain that is certified by the World Council of Independent Christian Churches, and I serve the military not in a military capacity but as a civilian. I do consider this endorsement one of the best blessings in my life. And the endorsing authority has very little to do with the work that I do on a daily basis. This is the difference between being granted authority and claiming your own authority. So let's get into what claiming it looks like. The question of the day: What does it mean to be a lived authority? It means that you recognize your own accumulated experience As legitimate authority for directing your own life without needing someone else to keep certifying it. Your life so far already counts as evidence. The only decision left is whether you're the one who gets to read that evidence or whether you keep handing it to somebody else to interpret for you. Today you're going to hear a series of stories that explain this because there's a deeper shift underneath every story. Most of us are running an old operating system. And the old operating system sounds like this: if I can, I should, and if I can't, something is wrong with me. Under that system, if I can, I should, and if I can't, something is wrong with me. Under that system, your right to act gets measured by somebody else's sign-off. Lived authority, however, runs on a different line entirely. It says, I can. I know I can. I get to decide where my capability goes, and I cultivate it accordingly. Lived Authority deserves a hard line to be drawn here because this can very easily blur into something you've already heard 100 times. This is not a lesson in confidence. Confidence is a symptom of what happens when we embrace Lived Authority. It's a very good thing. But confidence is believing that you can do the thing. With lived authority, you already know you can do the thing. You've been doing it for years. That part was never in question. Lived experience is what makes people want to hear from you. Lived authority is what happens when you stop handing out judgment about your own life, To people who haven't lived a day of it. That's a narrower, heavier claim than just believing in yourself. It's about who holds the pen, not how capable you feel when you're holding it. Now, when we claim lived authority, we aren't claiming a blank check either. To stand as the lived authority on something, 2 things have to be true at the same time. You have to be qualified. And you have to be fit. You have to be qualified, meaning that you lived it. You didn't just read it or watch some YouTube videos on it. You lived it. And you have to be fit, meaning that you're the right person in the right moment for the room in front of you. That's the same word that the endorsement board used for me— fit for the role. They tried to verify both of those in paperwork and a list of 211 categories. Are you qualified? Are you fit? Can you verify both of these things in yourself instead of asking a third party to do it for you? You see, qualified comes from what you lived through and you worked to understand. Fit comes from paying attention to whether this is your moment to speak or maybe somebody else's. We tried to build an entire conference around this idea last year, and we called it Qualified and Fit. It made sense to us because we knew the strategy behind it. While we were building out the conference, we had an event planning committee, an advisory board, and I can still picture pitching this name, Qualified and Fit, in our planning meetings, and people were nodding politely and then asking me again what it meant, and then I'd have to explain it to them, and it kind of fell apart a little bit every time we said it out loud to somebody new. Qualified and Fit. 2 words that stacked next to each other, and they were doing really good work, right? Qualified does one job, fit does another, but nobody can hold both of them at the same time, and that's where this idea of lived authority came into play. You see, lived authority does the same job in language that finally moves as one thing instead of 2. It isn't a different idea from what I was reaching for back in that conference. It's the the same 2 ideas beautifully sitting inside of words that hold them together. Now, this distinction matters for how you feel day to day, not just for how your career feels or how your performance is doing. You see, every time you wait on permission that might not ever be granted, there's a part of you that registers that your own read, your own take on your own experience, Wasn't good enough to act on. We question the choices that we make. We develop moral injuries based off of experiences that could have gone differently. And this registers as evidence. Evidence. And then the next decision, it waits just a little bit longer for us to make that stamp of approval on it. So think about an actual waiting room with fluorescent lights and a clock that's moving way slower than it should. I was Just in the ER with my 6-year-old last week. He had to get stitches in his forehead because he got hit with a baseball bat. And I know we were only there for a few hours, but gosh, it felt like we were there for days. And you're just waiting and waiting while somebody else decides whether or not it's our turn. That's what it feels like to keep outsourcing your judgment, except there's no number system, there's no receptionist. There's no doctor or person that you're waiting on to come in and make things better. When we're relying on someone else's authority, we're living passively and accepting that things are just happening and happening and happening to us. Authoring your story doesn't mean that you're right every time. That's the trade-off. If you're brave enough to pick up the pen, It means that you metabolize what happens to you as material that you get to interpret instead of a verdict that somebody else is handing down about who you are. Now, I don't know about you, but I have a lot of voices in my head, and they're not all nice. And if I choose not to author my own story, then those voices offer it for me. Yes, I am very passionate about what this means because we're talking about inner peace. And you can have inner peace while life is happening to you because peace doesn't exist on the other side of the wilderness. It's in who is narrating the wilderness while you're still standing inside of it. So notice the verb change that we're doing here. Under the old system, you wait to be chosen. Things happen to you. Under lived authority, you choose. This isn't a mood. This is a daily practice, and it shows up in small moments long before it ever shows up in a business deal or even in a military uniform. Here's what the old system looks like in practice so that you can catch it in yourself if it happens this week: asking permission out of habit on something that you already have full standing to decide. Waiting for a title to confirm something that you already know is right. Taking on a role because everyone else keeps telling you that you're the right person for it without even deciding for yourself that you are the right person for it. Treating the next certification as the one that will finally make you feel legitimate when maybe the last 3 didn't already. Do you find yourself bracing for a fight that hasn't even started because some part of you is still waiting to be challenged and disqualified? Do you open your conversations with disclaimers saying, I know I'm not? Well, if you recognized yourself in even one of those, here's the reframe that I want you to sit with. You have been the author of your life this whole time, whether or not you signed the byline. Every hard year, every version of yourself that you had to build without the manual, every room that you walked into without an invitation, you were already writing it. The pen wasn't missing. What was missing was the fact that maybe you didn't pick up that pen. Maybe you didn't pick it up on purpose. Instead, we're just handing it off. To the last person who questioned whether or not you belonged there. Oftentimes I feel like I'm handing my pen to the voices inside of my head, and I'm working on doing a better job of taking that pen back and authoring my own experience as it's happening. So now that you know what's happening underneath, I want you to get into a moment with me where it becomes visible To everyone else, this is what it looks like when we cross over into lived authority. A little bit over a year ago, I put this podcast on the air. It's been just over a year. I have one microphone. I don't have a production team. I don't have permission from anyone to do this. I am just doing it. And here I am a year later, and I was just featured in a mini book from Category Pirates. That book is called Podcast Category Design. I was featured as an example of what happens when someone goes and does the thing. Right now, I'm in final conversations with a major organization that wants to bring me on to write, host, and produce their own internal podcast. I'm not telling you this to be bold and brazen about myself. I'm telling you this because the same Crossing over into lived authority, you're seeing it happen in me right now. You're going to have your own version of what this looks like for you because you've been able to see it happening in me. I am not a lived authority on podcasting, or at least I wasn't a year ago, but you know what? Boom! Now I am. This is the crossing. One day you're just living as somebody with experience, and then the next day, In other people's eyes, you are the authority. It happens just like that. Nobody rings a bell. You don't feel any different on the inside. You still know everything that you don't know, but the phone starts ringing a little bit more. And if you're waiting to feel qualified before you pick it up, you can wait until that phone stops ringing and miss the call. Sometimes with lived authority, the only thing that changes is whether or not you pick up that pen and you write it for yourself. I watched this exact crossing happen to a couple more people in my inner circle. Christopher Lockhead, he's a 3-time publicly traded company CMO. Christopher Lockhead built his career the same self-taught way. He was a dyslexic child who failed out of school at the age of 18, and he went on to build and sell companies worth billions. He's the one that teaches category design to people like me. Nobody handed him that. Christopher Lockhead is the lived authority on category design, but there's a deeper lived authority that he recognized when I explained this concept to him. You see, a few years ago, Christopher lost his best friend to gun violence. There was a gang of 4 people who used an illegal, untraceable firearm to kill him. And when you talk to Christopher, he doesn't rush past these types of issues. He slows all the way down. He has said that loss puts him in a different place than most people when he talks about gun policy, when he talks about how California's justice system handles violent crime. He's not a lawyer. Nobody is certifying him to have that voice. Nobody could certify him to have that voice. The only way that he earned a seat at that table is by living through something that nobody would ever choose for themselves. The situation that happened with his best friend was a horrific kidnapping and murder. Christopher could have felt that experience and grieved it privately, and that would have been an acceptable ending. But he's not choosing to do that. He has become a lived authority on California law. As it relates to violent crime. It took years for the guilty parties to be jailed because of this, and he continues to speak out and advocate for the knowledge that he's learned. That is lived authority. Let's get into one more version of what this looks like, one that has nothing to do with business at all. This is Markham's story. I met Markham Rollins earlier this year. We were building our digital clones together. We each have a bot. And Markham disappeared just a couple weeks into the design of his bot. And he came back, and I learned that he disappeared because his son had been quietly passing from cancer. Now, Markham himself built and sold a 4th-generation family business. He retired in 2018, and now alongside his wife, he helps other people navigate what retirement does to a person's sense of self. On paper, that's what he does. He runs a business. Now he's retired and he coaches other retirees. But the lived authority shift that he told me has to do with his son, who's also named Markham. Markham died of colon cancer at the age of 41 after a 3-year fight. His son ran the New York City Marathon while he was sick, and he raised money for early detection. He finished it in just over 7 hours. Markham held his son's hand in hospice near the end. He lost his mother and father and his brother also, very close together in the years before that. You see, nobody has handed Markham a certificate in grief counseling. He's not a licensed therapist, but Markham has built a daily discipline Out of his lived experience, scripture, meditation, journaling before the sun comes up, he figured out how to live through these moments, and he started guiding other people through the exact void that he was standing in himself at one point. This isn't a career path that somebody designs on purpose. Life handed this path to him, and he's the one that chose to pick it up. So now you've heard 3 different versions of what lived authority can be. You've heard mine, you've heard Christopher's, and you've heard Marcum's. So let's be precise about what lived authority is and is not. If you are currently in an active certification process that exists for a good reason, like a medical board that's reviewing your case or a legal process, maybe there's a VA claims file that you're dealing with. The term lived authority is not trying to give you permission to skip any of these steps. Systems exist to protect people, including us. And so if you're in a genuinely acute place right now, if your body is stuck in fight or flight, if everything feels like it's too much, this is not the week to try to overhaul how you're seeing and viewing your own authority. That work can wait until you've got some ground underneath you. At its simplest layer, we're talking about the habit, the reflex to ask permission long after the permission stopped being required. Give yourself permission to notice the difference between 2 things this week: the gate and the habit. The gate of authority. Who and what is the gate of authority? And the habit. What is the habit that you're already doing? You might be telling yourself right now, Shelly, I have a lot of lived experience in a certain area, but I don't know that I can teach other people about it. That right there, I just want you to raise that flag this week because it sounds like you might be in the middle of figuring something out. So be gentle with yourself, and if you need someone to talk to, you can always reach out to a professional that can sit in it with you. But if something inside of you is saying, Shelly, I'm ready to go. I'm ready to step on the stage. Help me figure out my message. Help me bring this to the world. I have lived this experience, and I am ready to pick up that pen. All right, my friend, that is the place that we're talking about today. You see, a credential was never the thing that made your judgment valid. It's just the thing that lets other people act on your judgment without doing their own work to stand behind it. You're already holding the pen long before anybody signs off on your story. The question that we're talking about today is whether or not you knew it. I'm challenging you to discover your own lived authority. This week, I want you to name one place in your life where you're still waiting for someone else's stamp before you can move on. Forget about the medical board and the legal process. I'm not trying to get into the nitty-gritty things where certifications are required. I'm talking about informal. There's a promotion that you haven't asked for because you don't feel senior enough yet. There's a book that you haven't started because nobody's told you that you're a writer. I want you to name this opportunity and take one action this week, just one action that you would take if you believed that you alone had the authority to do it. What would it be? The feeling that you're going to get by embracing lived authority is the same feeling that I had when I was in the waiting room with my 6-year-old. Oh, finally, something eases, and you're able to just shed and release because you know that it's being handled. The waiting is over. You don't need something to come to you. You can step forward into something amazing. It looks like sending the pitch before the pitch is ready. I have a pitch myself tomorrow morning at 10 AM. I am not ready for it. I don't know that I'll ever be perfectly ready for it because I'm a perfectionist, but I am ready to talk to them about who I am and what I do, and I know that it's excellent. When you embrace lived authority, you'll be speaking up in the meeting without rehearsing your credentials first. I was sitting at Chick-fil-A the other day and my kids sat down and I grabbed their hands and we said a quick prayer before the meal. And a few minutes later, a man came over to me and he said, Mom, and I met eyes with him and he said, as a pastor, good job. And he walked away. And I don't know how I feel about that. I'm a little bit torn because it would have been enough for him to just say, Mom, good job. But because he threw in that phrase, as a pastor, that is a little bit cringe. I'll be honest with you, it kind of took away the compliment. It made it about him instead of it being about me. What if you took away your own credentials? What if you just spoke from your heart? Would you be a little less cringe on yourself? Call yourself what you already are out loud to one other person and see what they say. It's funny for me to use the term I'm an author. I have a newsletter. I write twice a week. I also published a journal that you can buy on Amazon, and guess what? It's 3 stars. Yeah, it's a 3-star review journal. It's terrible. But you know what? Because I've got it there, I can give myself permission to say I'm an author. I might not be a very good one. I'm working on it. But I'll take those 3 stars because I know that the next one will be a 5-star. Today's episode was all about embracing the term lived authority. Hopefully I've given you a name for something that you've probably been feeling for years without the words for it. I want to know, what are you the lived authority in? Share it with yourself. Be brave enough to share it with somebody at your dinner table. See what their reaction is to You know what my mother is the lived authority on? Brownies. Everybody loves my mother's brownies. She's not a professional baker. She never will be. She doesn't just casually make brownies when it comes up every now and then. This woman is the authority on brownies, and everybody knows it. Give yourself permission to pick up that pen and author your life, because life doesn't move in a straight line. You navigate it. You don't win it. And with every move, you're the one holding the pen, authoring each experience as it comes. That's lived authority, and it's already yours. I'm host Shelly Rood, and I'm so grateful that you spent time with me today. Next Tuesday, I'll be back with a guest bringing another piece of this wilderness for us to navigate together. Until then, stay hardcore. Be at ease. You're listening to Hardcore and at Ease. Keep the conversation going at join.othersoverself.com.