Permission Granted (#075)

For years, I waited for someone to tell me I was allowed.I wanted that reassurance when I brought my marketing background into wildlife conservation. I wanted it from the healers and mystics I admired, some of whom had been doing this work for 20 or 30 years. I even hired coaches partly just to hear them say, “Yeah, of course, go ahead.” Now that I’m writing a book, I’ve caught myself looking at the authors I love and wondering if I’m allowed to call myself one of them.But no one else could ever give me that permission. It was always up to me.In this solo episode, I talk about what helped me finally claim it, including a permission slip I wrote during an Elizabeth Gilbert workshop. It’s signed by the highest authority of the land, and on it I gave myself permission to travel alone, to never return a phone call I didn’t want to, and even to stop being a coach. I still use this exercise with my clients, and I’ll walk you through how to write your own.If you already know what you want and you’re still waiting for someone to say yes, this episode is for you. You don’t need anyone’s permission but your own.How to Get in Touch:Inner Authority Gameplan: https://www.amandaparker.co/gameplan Website: https://www.amandaparker.co/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amandaparker.co/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amandamparker/Substack: https://substack.com/@theamandaparker Ready to go deeper on your path?Get this episode's full Show Notes with key takeaways, quotes, and resourcesStart with the Inner Authority Gameplan — a £9 guided experience to cut through the noise and hear your own inner voiceSubscribe to Amanda's Saturday Email for insights and essays on inner authority, intuition, and the art of trusting yourself

I locked myself away for four days to find out if I could actually write a book.The first morning, I did everything but write. I needed coffee. Then a walk. Then a pen, then a new notebook. And then, finally, I could sit down and write for hours. By the end of my mini retreat I had completed 70,000 words, and something I hadn’t expected: proof that I could trust myself to show up.That’s the kind of belief nobody can hand you. Someone can call and tell you they believe in you, that you’re going to do this, that it’s amazing. And part of you still won’t buy it. In this solo episode, I share why the only way to really believe in yourself is to take action towards what you want, no matter how small the first step may seem.I’m in the middle of writing my first book (I’m keeping the details of it close for now), and this episode is an honest look at what it has really taken. Months of reading about writing and circling the idea before I wrote a word. Weeks of flow, followed by weeks when I couldn’t face my desk. And underneath it all, the old stories. Who am I to write this? Is it good enough? Am I good enough?Here’s what I’ve come to see. Anything worth creating asks you to become the next version of yourself, and the stories you hold about yourself are probably out of date. The only way to update them is to take the first step. I also talk about why moving slowly isn’t the same as being stuck, what seeds growing through winter can teach us about patience, and Steven Pressfield’s advice to put yourself in the places where your dream already feels possible.If there’s a creation living in your heart that you haven’t brought into the world yet, this one is for you.How to Get in Touch:Inner Authority Gameplan: https://www.amandaparker.co/gameplan Website: https://www.amandaparker.co/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amandaparker.co/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amandamparker/Substack: https://substack.com/@theamandaparker Ready to go deeper on your path?Get this episode's full Show Notes with key takeaways, quotes, and resourcesStart with the Inner Authority Gameplan — a £9 guided experience to cut through the noise and hear your own inner voiceSubscribe to Amanda's Saturday Email for insights and essays on inner authority, intuition, and the art of trusting yourself

Amanda left a room full of women she admires and called her husband in a rage.It made no sense. She'd chosen to be there. She'd paid for the ticket. Every woman who had stood on that stage that day was doing something she genuinely admired. And she spent the whole afternoon getting angrier and angrier, until she ended up outside a hotel in Shoreditch on the phone, shaking.It took her a while to understand what the anger was actually about. It wasn't the speakers. It was sitting in the audience as a consumer when she knew she could be the one sharing her own wisdom.Then came the dinner. A private dining room, best-selling authors, founders running million-dollar businesses, a wellness influencer with a million followers sitting across from her. The only empty seat was next to her mentor. And Amanda's first thought was that she wasn't supposed to be in that room at all. Her second thought was the one that changed the night: how many times in her life has she felt exactly this?This episode is about the gap between who you've actually become and the story you're still telling about yourself. Amanda traces the whole thread back, from picking up a book about angels and stumbling onto the mentor she almost didn't sign with, to the mastermind calls she nearly skipped week after week, to the strangers on Instagram who slowly became friends. She's honest about the resistance, the money stories, the fear of looking stupid, and the lifelong habit of wanting to appear more accomplished than she felt.If you've ever walked into a space and quietly decided you didn't belong there, this one is for you. Because the invitation isn't to wait until you're ready. It's to go looking for those rooms on purpose, sit down at the table, and let yourself be exactly where you are.How to Get in Touch:Inner Authority Gameplan: https://www.amandaparker.co/gameplan Website: https://www.amandaparker.co/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amandaparker.co/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amandamparker/Substack: https://substack.com/@theamandaparker Ready to go deeper on your path?Get this episode's full Show Notes with key takeaways, quotes, and resourcesStart with the Inner Authority Gameplan — a £9 guided experience to cut through the noise and hear your own inner voiceSubscribe to Amanda's Saturday Email for insights and essays on inner authority, intuition, and the art of trusting yourself

Someone I admired once told me I was going to win a lot of awards. She meant it as a gift. And for years afterward, every award season that passed without my name in it, some part of me quietly registered it as a shortfall. Even though winning awards had never been my dream to begin with. It was hers, transposed onto me.This is what happens when other people dream big things for us. On the surface it feels like love. Underneath, it can start to shape a life we never actually chose.In this solo episode, I draw on Charles Dickens' Great Expectations (by way of an Eddie Izzard one-man show in London) to look at what it does to us when we live inside someone else's vision of who we're supposed to become. I share the story behind that award prediction, and another moment years later when a coach told me to triple my prices and left me paralyzed for six months. Well-meant advice. Real cost.I also turn the mirror the other way. How easily we do this to the people we love. Projecting our own unfulfilled dreams onto our children, our partners, our clients, our friends. Meaning well, and creating a weight they never asked to carry.The invitation is to come back to your own center. To trust that you are naturally creative, resourceful, and whole. And that the dreams you actually have today, right now, are already enough.How to Get in Touch:Inner Authority Gameplan: https://www.amandaparker.co/gameplanWebsite: https://www.amandaparker.co/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amandaparker.co/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amandamparker/Substack: https://substack.com/@theamandaparkerReady to go deeper on your path?Get this episode's full Show Notes with key takeaways, quotes, and resourcesStart with the Inner Authority Gameplan — a £9 guided experience to cut through the noise and hear your own inner voiceSubscribe to Amanda's Saturday Email for insights and essays on inner authority, intuition, and the art of trusting yourself

What if the thing you've been chasing your whole life — the promotion, the book deal, the perfectly executed healing journey — was never going to make you feel enough? Dr. Mandy Lehto spent most of her forties crashed out in burnout, forced into a reckoning with everything she'd been trying to outrun. In this profound and often funny conversation, she shares what she found on the other side: not a 10-step plan, but a completely different relationship with worth, rest, and what it means to be whole.Mandy defines enoughness as the felt sense of our worth — something that comes and goes like weather — and exposes the "insidious" pursuit of more that keeps high achievers on a hedonic treadmill she calls "nexting." She's disarmingly honest about her own attempts to win at healing: flying 12 hours to sit with an elite coach in Arizona, executing nutrition plans with A-star perfection, collecting retreats and modalities — only to be told, "Nobody is coming to save you, Mandy."The conversation deepens into the territory most of us avoid: why rest feels like falling behind, why high achievers can endure enormous productive discomfort but crumble in the unproductive kind, and how sitting with her dying mother stripped purpose down to something as small — and as big as the universe — as kindness and compassion.Whether you're a healer, a coach, or a recovering overachiever, this episode will hold up a mirror. And it just might give you permission to stop running.How to Get in Touch:Website: https://mandylehto.com/Podcast: https://mandylehto.com/enough-the-podcast/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mandylehto/Ready to go deeper on your path?Get this episode's full Show Notes with key takeaways, quotes, and resourcesStart with the Inner Authority Gameplan — a £9 guided experience to cut through the noise and hear your own inner voiceSubscribe to Amanda's Saturday Email for insights and essays on inner authority, intuition, and the art of trusting yourself

What if the very drive that makes you capable of achieving almost anything is also the thing keeping you from ever feeling like it's enough? In this deeply personal solo episode, Amanda opens her diary and lets you see the shadow side of being a high achiever — the part nobody brags about.She names something many driven people quietly live with: the moment you complete the big thing — the MBA, the certification, the 70th podcast episode — you don't get to rest in the joy of it. Instead, your mind is already three steps ahead, scanning for the next goal. The goalpost moves before you've even caught your breath. And underneath it all sits a quieter question: who is this achievement actually for, and will it finally be the thing that makes you feel like enough?But this isn't an episode about pushing harder. It's about the antidote. Amanda shares what she's actively learning — how to step off the treadmill, do less and go deeper, and find the kind of fulfilment that endless striving never delivers. From crossing "learn French" off her list to letting her nervous system finally settle by the second week of a holiday, she offers an honest, grounding look at what it takes to appreciate how far you've already come.If you're someone with big visions and a to-do list that never ends, this one is a gentle, permission-giving pause. Come sit with it.Ready to go deeper on your path?Get this episode's full Show Notes with key takeaways, quotes, and resourcesStart with the Inner Authority Gameplan — a £9 guided experience to cut through the noise and hear your own inner voiceSubscribe to Amanda's Saturday Email for insights and essays on inner authority, intuition, and the art of trusting yourself

What if the business you're building isn't just a way to make money — but the very vehicle through which you heal? In this episode, Amanda sits down with Jacob Peggs, the solopreneur behind Modern Maker, known for shipping businesses "like a mother flower" and his signature one offer, one post, one email a day method. But beneath the impressive track record is a far more tender story: a boy from Cyprus with divorced parents and a one-way ticket to America, who kept meeting his own wounds at every stage of success — and kept saying yes to healing anyway.Jacob shares, more openly than he ever has on a podcast, the four or five monumental inner events that shaped him: buying back his mother's childhood home when the family was about to lose it, a two-year court case against a relative who tried to take his company, a high blood pressure diagnosis at 26 from working 70-hour weeks, and the mentor's question — was this the dad he wanted to be? — that broke him open and changed everything. Each moment of outer crisis became, as Amanda names it, an initiation into the next level of who he was becoming.This conversation dissolves the false wall between business and inner work. Jacob explains why people come to him for money but stay for something much deeper, why you can scale from a 5k to a 50k month and your trauma will still come with you, and why the strategy is actually the easy part — believing you can be the person who executes it is the real work. He also breaks down, in refreshingly simple terms, what a funnel actually is, why you don't need to reinvent anything, and how building at the intersection of your interests makes you unmissable.Whether you're a healer who's scared to sell, a burnt-out agency owner behind a mask, or someone who's tried and flopped and wonders if that means something about you — this episode will feel like sitting on the floor with a friend who's a few steps ahead, handing you back your belief in yourself.How to Get in Touch:Website: https://jacobpegs.co/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@most_mojoInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thejacobpegsLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacob-pegs/Ready to go deeper on your path?Get this episode's full Show Notes with key takeaways, quotes, and resourcesStart with the Inner Authority Gameplan — a £9 guided experience to cut through the noise and hear your own inner voiceSubscribe to Amanda's Saturday Email for insights and essays on inner authority, intuition, and the art of trusting yourself

You can't think your way out of grief. It lives in the body — and no amount of rationalising, staying busy, or being "so strong" will move it through you. In this deeply tender conversation, Amanda sits down with Lou Hynes, The Grief Guide, to explore the part of grief we almost never talk about: what's actually happening in your nervous system when the worst has happened, and why "just feeling your feelings" is impossible when your body has gone into freeze.Lou knows this from the inside. In 2022, her husband Pete went from feeling a little unwell to dying of meningitis in a matter of hours — leaving Lou, at 40, to go from planning Christmas with her three children to planning his funeral. What followed was sixteen months of doing everything "right": functioning, coping, being told how strong she was — until one Mother's Day weekend her body simply stopped. She woke unable to move or hear, in what she'd later learn to name as a dorsal vagal collapse. That was the moment everything changed.This episode is a masterclass in grief literacy — for those who are grieving and for everyone who loves, works alongside, or wants to show up for someone who is. Lou and Amanda dismantle the invisible "hierarchy of grief" that ranks whose loss counts, unpick why our society goes silent exactly when connection is needed most, and offer genuinely practical language for supporting someone (hint: stop asking "how are you?" and start asking "how are you this morning?").And underneath it all runs a thread of real hope. Not the tidy kind that promises you'll get the old you back — because, as Lou says with striking honesty, you won't. But the kind that says grief can be alchemised: that the version of you on the other side can be more authentic, more purposeful, and more fully yourself than the one who came before. If you've ever carried a loss you weren't sure you were "allowed" to name, this one's for you.Ready to go deeper on your path?Get this episode's full Show Notes with key takeaways, quotes, and resourcesStart with the Inner Authority Gameplan — a £9 guided experience to cut through the noise and hear your own inner voiceSubscribe to Amanda's Saturday Email for insights and essays on inner authority, intuition, and the art of trusting yourself

What if the reason all that personal growth work "isn't working" has nothing to do with the courses, the books, or the teachers — and everything to do with the step you keep skipping? In this solo episode, Amanda Parker gets refreshingly honest about the trap so many seekers fall into: collecting wisdom faster than we can live it. After years of coach training, psychic development, and shamanic study, Amanda realised she could be a quoted expert on topics she wasn't actually embodying — knowledge that lived in her head, not in her bones.That gap has a name: integration. And closing it, Amanda argues, is where real transformation happens. She shares why continuous learning can quietly become a form of procrastination, why the self-help backlash misses the point, and what changed when she gave herself permission to stop buying new books and start living what she already knew.You'll also hear the story of a gloriously collapsed layer cake (proof that reading the recipe is not the same as baking it), a practical 30-day experiment framework Amanda uses with her own clients, and a compassionate word for the neurodivergent brains among us who chase the dopamine of new — plus what's waiting on the other side of sticking with one thing long enough to develop quiet confidence.If you've got a stack of half-read self-help books and a backlog of exercises you've never done, this episode is your permission slip to pause, digest, and let yourself catch up to everything you've already learned.How to Get in Touch:Website: www.amandaparker.co/Instagram: www.instagram.com/amandaparker.co/LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/amandamparker/Substack: substack.com/@theamandaparkerReady to go deeper on your path?Get this episode's full Show Notes with key takeaways, quotes, and resourcesStart with the Inner Authority Gameplan — a £9 guided experience to cut through the noise and hear your own inner voiceSubscribe to Amanda's Saturday Email for insights and essays on inner authority, intuition, and the art of trusting yourself

If you're honest — do you actually like yourself, or are you waiting until after the promotion, the launch, the relationship? In this episode, Amanda turns the microphone on her own coach, Matt Chavlovich — the man who has seen her at her most stuck and most doubtful — and asks him everything. What unfolds is a conversation about the one thing hiding underneath every goal you've ever chased: can you soulfully say "I like me" — before the thing, not after?Matt's path here was anything but a straight line: a professional football career that taught him to listen to his intuition under the pressure of 15,000-seat stadiums, a decade in the corporate world where he realized he cared more about who his people were becoming than the targets they were hitting, and the courageous leaps — leaving a secure career, leaving a marriage that had run its course — that came from finally trusting his inner voice. He also shares something he's rarely spoken about: the spiritual faith he found not through religion or family, but through survival — sitting alone in a church at 13, offering up a pressure that was too big for him to hold.And because it's Matt, the conversation is full of the reframes he's famous for: why perfection is "a juvenile conversation," why you don't have a commitment problem (you're just committed to the wrong things), why decisions become easy the moment you know what you're trying to build, and how a 30-day experiment can introduce you to a version of yourself you haven't met yet. Amanda brings her own stories to the table too — launching free oracle readings in a spirit of play, closing a 14-year-old credit card that was quietly leaking her energy, and claiming her new moniker, The Untamed Oracle.If you've been waiting until "after the thing" to feel like you're enough — this episode is the door. Whether you walk through it, and how fast, is entirely up to you.How to Get in Touch: https://www.mattchavlovich.com/Ready to go deeper on your path?Get this episode's full Show Notes with key takeaways, quotes, and resourcesStart with the Inner Authority Gameplan — a £9 guided experience to cut through the noise and hear your own inner voiceSubscribe to Amanda's Saturday Email for insights and essays on inner authority, intuition, and the art of trusting yourself