You Don't Need to Speak to a Manager | PERMISSION with Shari Biery
Some women can organize a family vacation, negotiate a salary, advocate for everyone else's needs, and somehow still freeze when someone asks, "What do you want?"
Not because they don't have an answer.
Because somewhere along the way, wanting something for themselves started feeling like it required approval.
This week's conversation isn't really about confidence. It's about authority. The quiet ways women outsource it. The invisible permission slips we've been handing to bosses, partners, parents, calendars, guilt, and imaginary committees that never seem to adjourn.
Shari Biery knows this terrain well. After spending two decades supporting her husband's military career, moving ten times, reinventing herself again and again, and finally hearing the words, "Now it's your turn," she realized nobody else could authorize the life she wanted to build. That signature had always belonged to her.
Together, she and Kirsten unpack the strange way midlife invites women home to themselves. Not through becoming someone new, but by finally trusting the woman who's been waiting underneath decades of over-functioning.
FERAL SNACKS
"Clarity gives you the direction. Permission is what actually moves you forward."
"The only person that can really sign that permission slip is ourselves."
"We've gotten our permission slips a lot from the outside. And now the question shifts from 'What does everyone else need from me?' to 'What do I want?'"
"No one is coming to give you permission. It's your turn to choose yourself."
"We need to stop treating ourselves like side characters."
IN THIS EPISODE
• Why so many women wait until burnout before they believe they're "allowed" to rest
• The sneaky ways we outsource decisions we were always capable of making
• What military life taught Shari about identity, reinvention, and finally choosing herself
• Why midlife feels less like reinvention and more like coming home
• How wellness culture can accidentally pull us farther away from our own body wisdom
• The hidden cost of always being the dependable one
• Why coaching assumes the answers are already inside you
• The difference between functioning well and actually feeling alive
ABOUT SHARI BIERY
Shari Biery is a Purpose & Well-Being Coach for Midlife Women, keynote speaker, and author of It's Your Turn. A National Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach, she helps women reconnect with themselves after years of putting everyone else first. Through her signature C.A.L.M. Method™, she teaches practical, sustainable ways to manage stress, restore energy, reconnect with body wisdom, and build lives that finally feel like their own.
Website:
https://www.sharibiery.com [https://www.sharibiery.com/]
LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/shari-biery [https://www.linkedin.com/in/shari-biery]
ABOUT THE FERAL ERA
The Feral Era for Women Over 40 with Kirsten Bombdiggity is a weekly live show for successful women who are tired of feeling invisible in their own daggum lives.
Because mindset is useless if our nervous systems are fried.
Live every Wednesday at 1pm ET, Kirsten sits down with one featured guest for a fast, fun, ferociously unfiltered conversation about people-pleasing, burnout, masking, imposter syndrome, aging bodies, ambition, relationships, identity shifts, and launching our individual comeback tours.
If this episode made you recognize yourself, send it to another woman who's spent a little too much of her life waiting until everyone else was okay before letting herself be okay. Follow the show, subscribe wherever you listen, and come back next week for another conversation that might just hand you another piece of yourself.