You Can't Even Pick What You Want for Lunch. Let's Talk About That feat. Jillian Reilly

Here's the thing nobody tells you: the way you order at a restaurant says A LOT about how you move through life.

Are you the person who waits to hear what everyone else is getting before you decide? Do you need everyone's opinion before you can choose? Are you picking what you want, and it feels weirdly vulnerable?

Yeah. We need to talk.

In this episode, I sit down with Jillian Reilly, author of Ten Permissions: How to Stop Waiting and Start Living, to talk about why so many of us can't make the smallest choices for ourselves, and what that says about the bigger life we're (not) living.

We dig into:

• Why approval-seeking starts at lunch and ends with your whole identity
• The terror of wanting something no one else validates
• How to build choice-making muscles before you blow up your life
• Why pleasure isn't selfish (and might be the most strategic thing you can practice)
• What happens when the old rules stop working, and there's no new manual

This conversation is for the overthinkers, the people-pleasers, the ones who've spent decades being "good" and are now sitting in the rubble of what that actually got them.



About Jillian Reilly

Jillian Reilly is a founder, author, and keynote speaker. Having spent her 30-year career working in social, organisational, and individual change across Africa, Asia, and Central Europe, Jillian’s focus is on helping people unlock their ability to navigate change and accelerate growth and learning. Jillian’s book, The Ten Permissions, guides readers in permitting themselves to update how they operate in the 21st century and design lives that fully leverage the possibilities of this disruptive world. Jillian is a TEDX speaker and podcast host who has been published on international affairs in the Washington Post, Newsweek and the LA Times. 

Find Jillian

• Website: tenpermissions.com

Chapters

• 0:00 Old Manuals In A Shifting World
• 2:00 Meet The Host And Today’s Lens
• 5:20 Stability Lost And Expectations Reset
• 9:45 The Great Unraveling Explained
• 15:20 Why Permission Matters More Than Advice
• 21:30 Fear, Approval, And Agency
• 27:10 Tiny Choices Build Big Muscles
• 33:20 From If-Then To What-If
• 38:30 Parenting, Metrics, And Outdated Playbooks
• 44:20 Stuckness, Meaning, And Desire
• 50:30 Experiments And Low-Consequence Bets

Transcript

Jennifer Walter: 0:00

Uh I to I'm here with Jill today and we just had a quick conversation or like how we didn't think the world would be in this place when we agree to talk. Which is kind of like again the perfect example for where like the world we're in where we think structures, like the structures that have been established no longer hold. I mean, what is international law who cares? Like careers, identities, everything seems to dissolve um faster than I don't know, we can say one to day. Um and we also see that the burden of a lot of things, like we just did we destroyed actively or not so actively the villages. So all the burdens seem to shift towards the individual, and we're expected to adapt, stay flexible, make sense of constant change, of course, look pretty um and attractive to um sexual partners. And we're like, what the hell is going on? We're trying to navigate this. There's a different way to think about mental health, and it starts with slowing down. Sometimes the longest way around is the shortest way home, and that's exactly where we're taking the scenic route. Hi, I'm Jennifer Walter, host of the Scenic Rad Podcast. Think of me as your sociologist, sister in arms, and rebel with many causes. Together, we're blending critical thinking with compassion, mental health with a dash of rebellion, and personal healing with collective change. We're trading perfectionism for possibility and toxic positivity for messy growth. Each week, we're exploring the path to better mental health and social transformation. And yes, by the way, pretty crystals are totally optional. You ready to take the scenic route? Let's walk this path together. All we get is like the old instruction, like the old manual, like our boomer parents gave us. Old ideas of success and safety and adulthoods, and I'd say this is where your book comes in, right? I think like this, we're we're smack down.

Jillian Reilly: 2:04

Like I couldn't even imagine when I started to write it, like, which was actually in the middle of COVID. And I think now, like I remember kind of quaintly feeling like, and I think others did too. Oh, maybe this is an aberration, you know, maybe this is a challenging blip on uh an otherwise still still relatively stable timeline, and now it's like, yeah, no. Um I was thinking stable. She knew stable. I think she I think my as you say, I think my father knew Stable back in the day, but uh I don't I don't know who she is anymore. Yeah.

Jennifer Walter: 2:45

I think my my father did too. Like he had his he hold his job for at the same company for 35 years or so. Like I think.

Jillian Reilly: 2:54

Mine too. Mine too. I though I tell a story about him that's um got cut out of the book that was quite interesting, which was that he lost his job um in his 50s because it was the start of sort of the computerization of of the workplace. And I remembered coming home and him sort of sitting there going, yeah, they they wanted me to use this mouse. It's called a mouth. And I can still picture him kind of just like WTF, like mouse, what is this? And you know, I it was he he didn't want to learn, he didn't want to adapt. He this isn't me, you know. I've had a secretary my whole life, and I have people who do this for me, and so you know, there is that that comes up in mind, which is we have always been dealing with the new, um, but I do think this is a different frequency and depth of new acceleration it feels like for sure. It's existential. I mean, it's not can I use new technology? It's as you wonderfully described there in that brief intro, it it's like so many facets of our lives, from our identities to our our you know, sets of expectations for you know what our days will look like, what what our years will look like. It's it's like trying to make sense of so much. And and in the book I talk about the great unraveling. And again, at that point, I had not included international law in my own understanding of that, but here we are, of course, of course, like what why we're keeping it fresh and interesting. Why wouldn't that be included? And as you rightly said, I think, and as I'm talking about, the pressure on the individual is huge. Um, and I think we're buckling under it for a thousand reasons, and understandably we can't do this on our own. So, yeah, yeah. It's I'm hoping uh my book is one timely contribution to a broader discussion about how we figure out how we're gonna make this this work for us.

Jennifer Walter: 5:11

Yes, and like we we are all for like if if if you're not new here on the CD crowd, like we're all for taking into account what's going on, uh not being aware of what's going on politically is a privilege. So we are and at a same time, our lives, and that's our privilege, uh as both of us talking, are not we're not on pause, right? So your c your book is called Ten Permissions, and I think before we talk go into like the permissions, what can you elaborate more on what you like what brought you to kind of like the understanding of why we need new permissions?

Jillian Reilly: 5:52

Yeah, so my background was in um international development, uh aid work, kind of a phrase that some people will recognize. I left the United States and went to South Africa in 1993 as it stood on the cusp of its first democratic elections, which brought Nelson Mandela into power. I had a vague interest in social change. Um, at the time, I was also gonna go into international law. I thought that's what I was gonna do. Um, and a deep curiosity about the world. Um, so I got myself to South Africa to be president for those elections, and that kicked off a career in what I now sort of summarize as kind of being present as individuals, communities, organizations try to navigate really profound change. Um and at a really young age, I mean I was 23, started to learn a lot about um why people do and do not embrace change, even when there are significant threats. Um my own limitations in sort of helping people to respond effectively to change, to make the changes they want to or have to. I ended up working all across Africa, Asia, Southeastern Europe, and just got the most incredible education from uh people from so many different walks of life about what it takes to make what I kind of describe as novel choices. So doing things you haven't done before, um, make choices you've never made before, behaving in ways that are unfamiliar, um, which is what's required when you're going through profound change, and which is really, really hard.

Jennifer Walter: 7:45

Well, yeah, on and also if you also desire change, right? Because nothing's going to change on doing that.

Jillian Reilly: 7:52

So, again, whether it's want-to or have to, the reality is I need to alter my behavior, my choices in some way. And so the theme of permission and self-permission comes in there because one of the things that I realized was I could give people many things from training to funding to this to that. I couldn't give them permission. So I couldn't be the one to say, it's okay, Jennifer. You know, you're allowed to um, you know, pick something from as familiar to us as say, leave your husband, quit your job, have a difficult conversation with your boss, to the things that I was confronting there in the midst of, for instance, an HIV AIDS epidemic, where we were telling people, no, you need to start using condoms. And it was like, on the surface, that's a really easy choice in the face of an epidemic, isn't it? But actually, it goes against so many things that have shaped relationships and identities up until then that to really allow yourself to do something that feels risky is hard. But it comes down to you almost negotiating with yourself and beginning to practice what it feels like to do that. So, yeah, the theme has kind of deep roots in my own work in human behavior change. And as the longer that I worked in that field, the more I became interested in kind of the individual's relationship with him or herself, um, the ways in which we self-limit and self-allow, the ways in which we are our own green light and our own red light, because especially as adults, you know, that is a profound effect on our ability and desire to embrace the new and the unfamiliar, and kind of, and the the thesis of the book obviously is that a time of rapid change, which is what we're in. If you are not engaging consciously with these kinds of themes in your own life, then you might find yourself being really slow, hesitant to adapt, afraid, which you might be anyway. But this is about kind of getting a little bit more explicit and intentional about driving your own growth and change process. Let me stop there.

Jennifer Walter: 10:21

Yeah. Yeah, no, and and I feel like especially when when everything is at the pace it's at at the right now, like we don't have time to be very conscious with everything. So what happens is our very old like our ingrained mindsets and how we see the world, they kind of kick in and we operate to according to rules, playbooks, manuals, whatever, that are that we think are our own, but they're just they feel like their own because they've been with us for decades that aren't necessarily our own, and and are and or are also outdated and not really helpful right now. Yeah.

Jillian Reilly: 11:14

So so true. So I mean that's the the paradox that I think we face as humans is that in the face of profound change, we actually revert and double down to an on the most known and familiar, the most ingrained survival mechanisms and coping mechanisms. So, you know, I don't, as I look around at the world right now, I don't think that the rise of conservativism, nationalism is all that surprising because that's the reaction to the sense of extreme flux. Yeah. You know, that's the let's let's be nostalgic for a time when things felt more familiar and fixed because that we know, and we know how to make it in that world, or we we had power in that world, and so it's appealing to us. Whereas this more complex current reality, we don't want to deal with. So we we actually double down on the things that we think have helped us in the past, and and I think we all have um parallels to that in our own lives or ways. I mean, I see it right now in a completely different context, for instance, with parents who, because I've got two teenage sons, in the face of raising children to head out into a world where, as you said, the old manual is now completely irrelevant. The vast majority of parents are doubling down on sort of old school academic metrics of success. Like, maybe I can army you up with seven decisions or six A's. Like that maybe I can try and do that. So they they try and build a safety net with what they know, understandably. And I think you know, none of us of God, yeah.

Jennifer Walter: 13:02

You want your best, the best for your kid, like nor usually, and we you don't know what you don't know, so we have no idea what kind of professions we'll have in 10 years or we don't.

Jillian Reilly: 13:15

We do know, however, that um placing an unnecessarily heavy emphasis on perceived um metrics of capability in a world where those capabilities actually don't translate into real-world success is probably not worth you know as much effort as we might put it. But as you say, we don't have an alternative. So, well, uh fine, I'll go back to what I know, and and I think all of us are finding our way through all this um with greater or lesser degrees of confidence and courage to yeah, an effort. An effort, really, right?

Jennifer Walter: 14:01

Like we always think, yes, we're doing like some of us are doing really well, and like collectively, if you look at like world poverty, like we it has improved in the last decades, like objectively, we are doing better, but it's always kind of like at what cost, and couldn't have it just been easier.

Jillian Reilly: 14:24

Yeah, no, I I think that's so you know, one of the things when people talk to me about this book and what I would want it to achieve is that I I do feel like fear has become such a currency, as you say, despite the fact that in a much bigger with through a much bigger lens, there is progress. I think we fear a lot of what is occurring to us right now, again, understandably, that that fear can make us sort of shrink, limit our sense of possibility, limit our sense of what we're capable of in this environment. Um, and I think that hardness, that sense of, oh, you know, A plus B doesn't equal C anymore. I I don't know how I can't refer to any easy formulas that I absolutely know are going to deliver the way that again, maybe my parents did or whatever. So it feels like I'm figuring things out all the time, which I think we are, and which I think we have to sort of get used to and accept a little bit more. But that's that's um going to be our reality, that we can't necessarily buy safety and security through what we perceive as guaranteed choices.

Jennifer Walter: 15:44

You know, I I kind of describe this as a world with guaranteed outcomes, kind of like, oh, if I do this, X, like if we do X, Y will be guaranteed, a guaranteed outcomes.

Jillian Reilly: 15:56

So I describe it as no longer an if-then world, it's a what-if world. Like there are no ifs. Yeah, oh, I like this. Okay, I've got the which is why one of my permissions is experiment. Like I have to accept the fact that I might have to try more things, and they might not work out in the way that in my mind's eye I anticipate them, but that's okay because they will still be full of learning, full of opportunity for me to keep growing. So it really is a very, very different operating model required. If, as you say, you're going to feel a little bit less threatened and a little bit more like, okay, like, okay, it's not all straightforward, but I don't feel, you know, um anxious, threatened, you know, too overwhelmed by it. I feel like I can kind of you know respond as needed.

Jennifer Walter: 16:55

Yeah. Yeah, you're kind of like fluid enough or and soft enough to to react, right? Because when you're like all locked in and rigid, you're not like easy on your feet and you're not easy to react.

unknown: 17:09

Right.

Jennifer Walter: 17:10

Um it's really in what I think is really interesting, and this is gonna be really crucial for us as well, for for anyone listening. We're like we've been now talking at kind of like a very like meta-level of societies and then kind of like change, but uh I think your book is really very much kind of like uh in in it within that broader social context, and I really like that. And it's uh really also looking at uh something that I have in in my sessions that with my clients comes up a lot of this this sentiment and not necessarily not fear or paralysis, like those are the extremes, but uh the step before that kind of oh I kind of feel stuck this stuckness of like okay, how I'm just like uh my life is objectively like uh good. Like I'm fortunate enough, I have a job, I have a house, I've like, but I still feel kind of stuck. And I feel your book is br is kind of like offering an an insight into that, uh how uh how you're seeing that.

Jillian Reilly: 18:20

Yeah, well, I think because I think one of the things that's happened over the last kind of 30 years is that the social compact that we bought into unthinkingly of you know, work hard, get financially remunerated for that, buy yourself, accumulative wealth and stability in exchange for loyalty and hard work, and then you'll get rewarded at the end with retirement and whatever. Like that has come really properly on stuck, and within that, I think comes questions about what is this about? Like, and it was one of the reasons that I had to make be willful the first permission because I think we are being allowed to and required to come to grips with what we want. Now, that was something that I don't think if we're gonna keep referring to our boomer parents, like I don't think my parents on the front end in their lives really thought too hard about that. Like they bought the story, it worked, the formula worked, like cool, yeah. I get to have more stuff, I get to have more status, this is wonderful, I'm happy. Now it turns out my parents weren't, and they were one of the reasons that I have written this book was because you know I watched them ascend through the world in the way that they were supposed to, and they were profoundly sort of unhappy inside. Um, I think the work of the last 30 years has brought A lot of that stuff to the surface of people kind of saying, you know, am I willing to exchange personal satisfaction for financial stability? Is financial stability enough? Is going and being an I mean it when I know fundamentally that it can be gone tomorrow because the compact that said I'm safe if I'm a good employee is gone. Like, you know, the the the illusion of a meritocracy, the illusion of so many things has made us have to and get to ask questions about, you know, what does good look like for me? Um, what am I willing to sacrifice in the name of professional success? How much does that matter to me, etc., etc., etc. So I think a lot of important questions are bubbling around for people beneath the surface as part of the cultural conversation. COVID really brought some of that up because you know, here we found quiet quitting. We found people kind of going, wait a second, I'd much rather be at home and have more autonomy and flexibility. And guess what? I'll take a pay cut for that. Like this stuff is is bubbling. And I think it it leads to the pressure to kind of know for yourself, like, oh, where do I stand on all this? What do I want? So, yeah, for me, that stuckness is is almost wrapped up in questions of you know, meaning and desire and things that you know weren't even part of the cultural conversation two generations ago. Um the fact that I don't think we're raising kids to truly engage with those conversations when they become adults because we still feed them the same stuff at a young age in terms of just get good grades and you know stand out in your class and you're gonna be just fine. Um, I think you then move into the world of work, and there's this right now a real kind of wait a second, um now I'm now I'm confused. Now I'm not sure. So yeah, um that unraveling, I think, has brought things up. And and with the 10 permissions, what I wanted to do was get people to think through for themselves, you know, some of these things so that they start to engage with self in a way that might bring a little bit more of a sense of clarity and control back into self as they try and make sense of so much around them.

Jennifer Walter: 22:46

What's the the the thing that's for a lot of people is not helpful that if you start the work of engaging with yourself or engaging more with yourself, people often mistake this process as to be pleasant. And it's anything but right? So in your experience, like what do you what's usually the first fear that comes up when when we consider giving like when we consider change, when we consider giving ourselves more permission? Rejection.

Jillian Reilly: 23:20

Rejection and failure, I think, are the two I you know it's judgment by the world. It's you know, they will they will not like me, they will deem me weird, or on the outside of whatever kind of they view as acceptable, or they will view me as incompetent. So, you know, I think for me, just surfacing that awareness within yourself of like pausing for a moment and saying, okay, you know, and I talk about it in the book, you know, uh, what am I afraid of here? What is at stake here? And if it comes down to the judgment of, and the the irony being so often it's literally strangers, people who have no skin in your game whatsoever, and yet you make you outsource your agency to them because somehow believing they approve of you is gives you comfort. Um, just surfacing that internal dialogue starts to create little openings in a what am I allowed kind of conversation with yourself, when it's you know, what what's gonna happen here? If and I experienced this, you know, firsthand at a young age when I really stepped out of my story, which was very much a middle-class American go to university, get a good job, and instead I went to South Africa, and then my parents were just like, kind of what did we do wrong here? Like, wait a second, this was not part of the equation.

Jennifer Walter: 25:11

That was not an image.

Jillian Reilly: 25:12

No, the manual said nothing about heading halfway around the world, and and it was something, you know, I'm so grateful I learned relatively early on, which is you know, approval is desirable, but it's not required. So if you don't need something material from another person for them to say, yes, you can do this, if all you want is their nod and a pat on the back, we all want it, of course we do.

Jennifer Walter: 25:43

However, that's very human in us, right? Like we we are creatures, we don't want to be abandoned, dying alone on the streets, so none of us does, but what you do when you kind of move a little into that space, and I jumped into it, most people won't, but you know, how many people do you know who and I talk about this, you know, 50-year-olds who are still approval seeking from parents who frankly just want to see their kids happy.

Jillian Reilly: 26:13

But you know, if they don't understand your motives, if they can't get on board with your vision, that's okay, right? Not everybody's gonna see the world through your lens, not everybody, and if they don't have additional information, data, experience that would materially affect your decision, then it's an opinion, and the world is full of them, and we are able to hold a wide variety of them and still carry on. And I think you know, a lot of the practice for me of this is starting very small with very small choices that are what I describe as low consequence, high pleasure. So, you know, you know people as well as I do who can't pick something off the menu without looking around and having everybody else say what they're having or getting somebody to tell them what they should have. Like exercising will and agency in super tiny ways, if you're not used to doing that, is actually like huge. It it it it's such a turnkey to huh. I I feel something, I want something, I act on it. It's not earth-shattering, but it's just a practice of getting in touch with that inner desire, acting on it, realizing that other people might say, Oh, why do you like a Hawaiian pizza? I don't know, I do. Okay, cool.

Jennifer Walter: 27:46

I'm I'm glad I don't care if the Michelin stars like people are like being snobby about it.

Jillian Reilly: 27:54

So, yeah, I think for a lot of us our identities feel very carefully constructed by you know a set of external systems, and we all have that. So, as you you know mentioned when we first started talking, this is not about blowing this up. And I say in the book, I do not want you to blow up your life. That is not, you know, run out and say, I give myself permission.

Jennifer Walter: 28:16

Eat some here's the here's the match and like the gasoline. Although, I mean, if you know me, I do like the gasoline.

Jillian Reilly: 28:32

You and what you haven't done by lighting that match is build up a kind of muscle that's gonna help you keep going now. So everybody loves a dramatic decision and everybody focuses on those. But what they haven't done is build up a capability to move forward from that point. So, you know, you what you what this is actually about for me is building up a capability, not just making a series of dramatic choices.

Jennifer Walter: 29:02

Yes, yes, that's such a good point, right? We have people who, as you said, have a really hard time ordering the kind of dish they want, and then they're sitting there thinking, oh, why do I not leave my job tomorrow because I'm I'm unhappy with it? And we're like, well, if you can't even do that, doing that requires so much more than and of course your body's gonna be like, no, mm mm on safe, not gonna go there, not gonna do that. Bye-bye. Of course not.

Jillian Reilly: 29:38

You have no lived experience of doing that in the smallest, least consequential ways. And yet Yeah, you just have to do regionals first, and then at some point you go to totally, and I often use a kind of sort of fitness references or whatever, with like, you know, it's the equivalent of going to the starting line of a marathon when you haven't even, you know, walked, done 1K. It's like we so you know, it's the difference between believing that you know we have to make a series of big choices when versus we have to build choice-making muscles. And from a very young age, and this is the permissions paradigm that I talk about in the book, we believe that to make choices that we want, we have to seek permission for them. So we are very deeply conditioned with this, you know, I succeed through making a series of familiar and acceptable decisions. But when I start to want to have to make or have to make unique decisions, decisions that nobody else in my family has made, or ones that I've never made, or at least ones that I'm not used to making confidently, then all of a sudden I feel very unsettled. I feel very threatened. So it's building up a tolerance and a capability to kind of tune into your own direction, not drowning out, you know, the voices and opinions of many others if they have relevant inputs to whatever it is that you want to do or need to decide about. But um, yeah, exactly as you said, you know, I have people who are talking about purpose, and they don't even think about how you know they want to spend their Saturday afternoon. It's like, let's let's look at days, not years. Let's look at pleasurable things, not you know, major life decisions. Let's get into the guts of how we're living our lives before we start to kind of redesign our lives.

Jennifer Walter: 31:54

Yeah, it's that's I always also tell my clients like when they're do wanting to change, and I think it's also like one of your 10 permissions, you have to think so incredibly small. You think of something you want to change, and then you that probably is still a hundred times too big. You have to go even smaller, it has to be so teeny, teeny, teeny, tiny that you're like, this is ridiculous, or this will not do anything, or but then you go do that, do that, yeah. And then you see how it feels.

Jillian Reilly: 32:29

Like, why is that why have we why has it taken so long for us to get to this place? Because it's it makes so much sense, and in so many realms of our lived experience, we know it, right? You've got to start with just tiny things that begin to then and yet with so much of human growth and change. And and this is one of the things that sort of drove me out of the aid world. It was this before and after sort of mindset. It was big, it was flashy, and it was you know profound. And it's like, gosh, what if we what if we just started with very small conversations, experiments, activities that just increase our sense of possibility and capability, expand out a little bit to oh, okay, huh. Maybe I could do this differently, maybe I could, you know. But so often we wait to engage this until we feel desperate, unhappy, we want the new, we're craving something. So, again, it's one of the reasons that for me approaching it as a practice versus a problem-solving exercise is really critical because once you're in a mode where you want to solve a problem, then you're looking for fixes, then you're looking for the silver bullet that's gonna make everything feel better. Whereas when you of course you want to be efficient. Absolutely. Whereas when you are just kind of saying, Listen, I I need to work on being alive and attuned to how I'm directing myself through my life more routinely than when I feel like things are going wrong. Um, you know, it it's a very different conversation with yourself. You've lowered the stakes, you feel more at ease, you're you're more willing to try things. It's you know, it's um yeah, it's a very different uh experience.

Jennifer Walter: 34:33

Yeah. Yes, and at the same time, it's really hard because having the room to experiment without uh even the perceived consequences is really not something that's given freely and equ and equally in in our capitalistic or post-capitalistic society as well. Um nonetheless, I I truly agree. Like we're we're done looking for silver bullets. And in hindsight, maybe something will be your silver bullet, but uh you won't know until um uh moments years later. And previously in the conversation, you you mentioned, and I really love this um the sentiment of experimenting, right? Experimenting small bets. Like, what does a good experiment to you look like in real life? You know, like if someone wants like, okay, um I want to do something actionable because a lot of the things we talked about are rather gloomy. So how does a good experiment or small bet look like to you?

Jillian Reilly: 35:44

Yeah, I mean I would I would first of all again, I I keep coming back to kind of starting off quite low consequence. So you know that for me is key. The there's more upside than downside to start with, right? So even if it all goes terrible, it's lots of learning, it's not lots of yeah.

Jennifer Walter: 36:11

Worst you really do not like the Gorgonzola pizza. But exactly. You order another one or you go on. Totally.

Jillian Reilly: 36:18

So I'm gonna come back to that, which is a series of sensorial experimental things that just are around pleasure. And I believe that pleasure is a really un because you talked about we've been pretty gloomy. I think experimenting with what you like, with what you want, with what makes you feel good is such an unexplored area of all of this, right? So food, music, entertainment, nature, leisure. Let's let's let's put it in a big box called leisure. And what I love about that is that it's an area that most adults are conditioned to ignore completely. Free time, stuff outside of work, hobbies that are non-monetized. And now, you know, they've got to be a side hustle, they've got to be a this, they've got to be a that. So, you know, maybe that's the next level up. But for the start, if all you want to do is start to hone a little bit of an experimental practice in your life, you can start, and again, with all of this, I would say start on weekends, not during the week. Because during the week is high consequence time, it's work, it's fan, you know, it's stuff where I'm I'm in roles that require me to be certain things, and when I start to mess with them, I get afraid. So our weekends are full of opportunities for us to, you know, start at the most basic, which is food, music, you know, the things that I mentioned, our leisure time, and being really, really intentional about saying, huh, you know, from never done, don't do it very often, um, not sure I'm gonna like it. Um, you know, all of these things might fail, might fall, might this, might that, but you're kind of stacking moments of, you know, I did it, I tried it, hey, I went there. Yeah, and within that comes this bodily experience that you're growing sensorially, emotionally, of things that aren't high risk per se, although you would probably seek to, you know, move along that scale a bit, but are certainly kind of depending upon where you sit in this, like, whoa, what is this gonna be like? Um, I think you are engineering encounters with the unfamiliar, right? You are finding opportunities. You know, one of my permissions is take it outside. So I would see, you know, all of these kind of link up with each other. Take it outside, feel your way, experiment. That's one little bubble for me of I am consciously putting myself into situations that are unfamiliar to me where you know I am going to see how it feels. On the next level, up from that might be more formal things that are related to more, you know, specific interests in your life, more specific sort of roles that you play, where you might experiment with joining a community, taking a class, starting a community, um, you know, things where you then are like, oh, I have slight more intent with them, and they might be more structured. They might be of longer duration. So for me, there's this cascading up towards okay, now I'm gonna look at my job. Now I'm gonna look at my relationships. Now I'm gonna look at, you know, where I live, how I live. And depending upon who you are, that could be months. You could spend a very long time with the outside of your life looking exactly as it is, but the inside where you are actively pursuing other things, being rich with the new. So, you know, I kind of say to people don't shift the architecture of your life too quickly. And you're gonna have to feel out for yourself what that time frame looks like. But use the space that you already have to start to play around with this.

Jennifer Walter: 40:55

Yeah, because uh if you're imagine if you're still not have not quite sure what you want, you might know what you do not want, we're usually pretty good at that. And we're building we're building a different architecture around that, what we don't want, how do we know we want it? Right? So we rather, in the name of being efficient people, we rather just go in and do the unpleasant part of really figuring out okay, what do we actually want, what or what brings us pleasure. I think this is a really nice sentiment.

Jillian Reilly: 41:30

It's such a good sentiment because how many of us are even connected to that feeling? You know, we we decided what we wanted based on you know what was on life's shelf, and we picked it off because somebody else told us.

Jennifer Walter: 41:45

Yeah, or what we also think would be, you know, sometimes we pick our goals because we feel like, okay, this is challenging enough, but it's still kind of like okay. We won't like we will achieve it, we won't let ourselves down, it's not audacious enough.

Jillian Reilly: 42:03

Yeah.

Jennifer Walter: 42:04

So we're kind of limit ourselves.

Jillian Reilly: 42:06

Totally. And and again, of course we do, because that's what we're raised to do. I mean, audacity is not a common quality that's encouraged in young children. And oh you know, what's very interesting for me to see is even then what happens Especially in girls. I think there's a total challenge to that, and then you know, I feel like now that I've got teenagers, kind of the extent to which you know, teen life has been corporatized and under surveillance, and you know, they're not allowed any form of generic teen acting out exploration, you know, everything has to kind of be fit for a CD because it's this oh, you know, the world's crazy. I've done your extracurriculars get your extracurriculars, do this, sign up for that, don't get drunk, don't show up there. It's like, for goodness sakes, how much room are we giving them just to be stupid in whatever form that takes? Um, so I think uh how in the world do you ever connect with your own audacity, whatever form that has, if you've just never gone there in any way? You've never raised your voice, you've never shared a strong opinion, you've never whatever. Um like held back. Yeah, which you know, I think the vast majority of us have sensed our way through sets of systems where we obviously wanted to stay here, just we weren't even we didn't even get close to going outside the line. So, you know, there's a there's a real and the the the thesis of the book is obviously in a world where you are no longer being rewarded for that head-down compliance, it it's not rewarding you with the security that it once did. We know categorily that categorically that for most people it doesn't deliver on satisfaction to any great extent, but also the degree of change that is occurring to us means that there's a readiness that's almost being required to engage with the unknown and unfamiliar, such that if you revert to that sort of, you know, let me just sort of pick a lane approach, you're probably gonna get knocked out of it at some point. And then what will you turn to to help you redirect and find your way forward? So, you know, it's kind of neither strategic nor desirable anymore. Um sorts of possibilities, but but if we're not consciously pursuing them and embracing them, then we're just gonna kind of experience this moment. Oh, just waste away, all the opportunities will waste away. We'll experience as only as loss and chaos, which yes, there is that for all of us, but within that is so much room, which is why you know in the book I talk about turning the unraveling into a renaissance. Like, there's space, there's room, there's options. So can we can we grab them? Can we embrace them? Um that is gonna require us to really consciously and intentionally do that.

Jennifer Walter: 45:40

Hmm, I love that. So, Jill, if people are like, okay, I want to be more intentional about this. Um we're obviously gonna obviously gonna link your book in the show notes. Um, let us know where people can find you, if they want to know more about it, what's what is kind of like what are your biggest platforms?

Jillian Reilly: 45:58

I will, and I will also say that one of the things that I'm one of my experiments, if I can say, is starting starting a community, starting, that's a little, don't even know what verb to use, but last year I was just like I became really, really conscious as I anticipated the book going out into the world that yes, this is an individual practice, it's me, myself, and I, you know, finding my way. But it's so much easier when there are other people around me intentionally doing the same.

Jennifer Walter: 46:33

So yes, yes, that's why we're all on the scenic route. It's much we we share the burden.

Jillian Reilly: 46:40

Yes, and I love, I mean, it was one of the things that I loved about your podcast and the title and the shared burden and the shared joy of hey, here we are. I'm not out here on my own as some you know, Lone Ranger trying to figure things out. And when I start conversations about this with groups, the amount of um recognition among people with yeah, I I feel the same. I'm thank you for saying, yeah, but it's just it's so obviously right there, and it's just like can we just acknowledge that we're all figuring this out in our own ways, and maybe if we tried to do it together, or at least you know, in some sort of held space, we might yeah, it it might be an even more enriching and and expansive journey.

Jennifer Walter: 47:43

True. So, where can people find your you and your community?

Jillian Reilly: 47:48

Um, my website is probably the best sort of one-stop shop for finding all the things that I'm offering right now at 10permissions.com. I'm very active on LinkedIn, but the website has everything. I'm obviously now building out sort of different kinds of support. There'll be a workbook that's coming out, linked to the book, which tries cool, exciting take some of this conversation that we're having here around these kind of micro permissions and days, not years, and put some put some language to that. So um, yeah, the the book was a set of ideas, and now it's about making it a practice that helps people manage the overwhelm of the world as we know it.

Jennifer Walter: 48:36

Yeah. That's a beautiful like kind of like final word, and I have one kind of like one spontaneous thought that just came that just came and kind of like wanna leave us all with that. We we talked about pleasure, and I think this is really something so crucial because we many of us, we all do in if in so many different forms deny ourselves pleasure. We postpone it, we if we if we if we engage in it, we justify it, we moralize it away, we treat pleasure as something that's kind of like, oh, to be earned later after I've been productive all day, right? After being responsible, after approval, after whatever. And and yet there's this like interesting kind of like juxtaposition of we are so, so deeply drawn to people who visibly enjoy themselves, who eat with good doll, who walk their life having fun, having a good time, like who take up space with ease, who seem so alive and curious and pleasurable to be around. So maybe that attraction uh is telling us something, and maybe what we admire in those people is the very permission we kind of like we've been withholding from ourselves.

Jillian Reilly: 50:01

Oh yeah, that's just like so beautifully put. I mean, there's an aliveness, there's an aliveness, there's a vitality, and I think there's power in that.

Jennifer Walter: 50:12

You know, and they're just magnetic, like you you you're like, oh who is that? What is she doing? I'm obsessed.

Jillian Reilly: 50:21

Like the power and the energy, and I think part of this particular moment now is also, oh my gosh, you know, how can I how can I feel pleasure? How can I allow myself pleasure when I perceive the world as being as disordered and as it is, and yet to me, this is the moment to lean into that. Because if we don't find joy, pleasure, desire as our life source, as the very thing that reminds us of why we're here, what we want from this life, other than collecting our paychecks and feeding our faces. Like, if that is not an anchoring, you know, concern in this whole thing, then we'll just sit back and hope somebody else fixes it for us and we can get back to business as usual. Whereas I think we've got to allow ourselves to find joy and pleasure all the time and not feel guilty about it and not feel um, you know, that it's entitled because there are so many other people in the world who don't who who we perceive as not feeling that. And I think it's been one of the things of my life of being in you know so many different countries, so many different communities and cultures and people of all walks of life that regardless of what your circumstances are, people find pleasure in so many little things, and I think it's really important that we keep that. So what a great way to yeah in this permission to keep finding pleasure.

Jennifer Walter: 52:17

Yes, here's your permission for pleasure to pleasure. I love that Jill, thank you so much for being on the scenegraph with me.

Jillian Reilly: 52:26

I've loved every minute of it. Thank you for inviting me into your conversations and uh letting me join you on the scenegraph.

Jennifer Walter: 52:44

And just like that, we've reached the end of another journey together on the Scenicroot Podcast. Thank you for spending time with us. Curious for more stories or in search of the resources mentioned in today's episode? Visit us at scenigrootpodcast.com for everything you need. And if you're ready to embrace your scenic root, I've got something special for you. Step off the beaten path with my scenic root affirmation card deck. It's crafted for those moments when you're seeking courage, yearning to trust your inner boy, and eager to carve out a path authentically, unmistakably yours. Pick your scenic root affirmation today and let it support you. Excited about where your journey might lead? I certainly am. Remember, the scenic route is not just about a destination, but the experiences, learnings, and joy we discover along the way. Thank you for being here, and I look forward to seeing you on the scenic route again.