Giving Myself Permission

I could never have connected the dots from where I started to where I am today.”

Sheryl Sandberg, in Lean In

These words of reflection by Sheryl Sandberg really speak to me. I have talked about my own career in similar terms due to the unconventional path I’ve taken and the diverse experiences I’ve had. And now, as my perspectives on work and working continue to change, I’ve expanded the scope of my thinking beyond just describing my career to include how I describe my purpose.

In doing this, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I got to where I am today. I’ve come to realize that according to organizational behavior and psychology, I am what is called a positive deviant, which sounds kind of awful, but it’s not. The word deviant comes from two Latin words: de means “from” and via means “road,” so deviate means “off the beaten path.” Deviant, in this case, means not expected – unconventional, and deviance refers to departing from institutional expectations.

In behavioral terms, scholars define a positive deviant as someone who departs from the norms in honorable ways. Positive deviants are intrinsically motivated by feelings of enjoyment, interest, and challenge in their work. They tend to set high goals for themselves and are usually successful in finding ways to achieve them.

I think I’ve always been a positive deviant, without really knowing it. I was a positive deviant throughout most of my professional working career and now, with the completion of my doctorate degree, I’m a positive deviant in academia.

Something else I’ve learned along the way is that not all work cultures place a high value on positive deviance. Academia for instance can be an unwelcoming place for positive deviants due to long-standing, entrenched expectations for scholarship in the academic culture. And this has made it hard for me to fit the work that I’m passionate about—work that explores new ideas, and crosses disciplinary boundaries —into the expectations of the academy.

The irony of this is that more and more organizations are encountering increasingly complex challenges like sustainable growth, innovation, inclusion, design thinking and safe, equitable workplaces that require a positive deviant type of thinking – seeing multiple perspectives, across multiple disciplines and the ability to work in the messiness of real-world situations.

Being a positive deviant isn’t about being smarter, or better than others. It has more to do with intellectual curiosity and simply not being satisfied with the status quo. I like challenging myself to find new ways of viewing old ideas and then to shape and reshape those insights, making them accessible to others.

Knowing these things about myself helps me feel closer to understanding the real me. And as all the disparate pieces of my life come together, I am able to achieve greater alignment between what I do, and the person I was meant to be. There is something very profound about this.

So this is the long way of getting to the point of this blog — giving myself permission. I’m talking about permission to follow a path with an unclear destination and no guaranteed outcome (or income!). I am giving myself permission to keep developing the concepts I wrote about in my dissertation and to focus my energy on writing and getting my ideas out into the world.

I’ve come to learn that the ‘crooked path’ to finding the person I am meant to be has been traveled by many others who found themselves marginalized and treated as outsiders, misfits, or rebels. And, not surprisingly, these are the people I admire, and the stories I relate to the most. Rejection is part of a crooked path and I have learned that rejection can be turned into inspiration and lead to alternative avenues that wouldn’t have been pursued otherwise.

I am giving myself permission — not just permission to pursue my writing and publishing, but also permission to accept wherever this path leads, and ultimately, permission to just be me.