During a recent assignment I gave my advanced design students, I instructed them to take a tired and dull existing brand identity and help move it into a new marketplace.

In a nutshell, they were to be innovative and bold as I gave them acres of space to stretch their creative legs. Things kicked off very lively and looked promising early. However, as the week went on, I began to see the fun and vibrant early designs quickly plateau and actually start to drift back to the safe, dull aesthetics of the existing brand.

Concerned, I asked a few students what the reasoning was for their return to the safe arms of the existing brand look. To my surprise, I heard responses like: “well, this company never does this” and “I’ve never seen this brand be this creative, so I went with a safer solution”. When I addressed my concerns with the group as a whole, I was again surprised to find that despite my encouragement to break norms and run the existing brand look over with a cement truck, some actually dug their heels further in the sand and resisted my pleas. My students seemed to have subconsciously signed an agreement with this brand that was keeping them in line. Worse, it was stopping them from doing anything different, let alone anything great.

There is always a reason, isn’t there. There is always a rule here or a policy there, that gets in our way. I realize that many serve a good purpose, keep our world relatively safe and ensure my coffee beans are packed with love and kindness. What I’m taking about are the unseen obligations, rules and agreements that we hold in our minds and hearts that stop us from doing something great or innovative.

These hidden agreements come in a variety of flavors and are tied to a range of origins. We inherit them from family members, bosses, supervisors, coaches, teachers and society in general. They say things like: I will promise to play by the rules, do what’s asked and not rock the boat, unless rocking this ship is what’s asked. Others say: get a platinum credit card, raise my fico score, diversify my portfolio, etc. Organizations sign them with their board members, angry customers or simply the legacy of “what we’ve always done”. There really is no end to these agreements that bind us.

While getting to the bottom of these unconscious agreements is worth digging into, that is for a bigger series of articles left to someone better suited to deal with this. However, what we simply can do right now is give ourselves permission to do things a little differently. Permission to try a new path in life. Permission to take a new approach to our projects or to look at our organization with kids eyes, instead of that suspicious, sideways squint. For the last dozen weeks left in the year, give yourself and/or your organization permission to be different. Permission to throw out whatever agreement you signed with the past. You may end up a bit more interesting or may find your organization a bit less stale.

As for my design class, I was determined to liberate my students creativity. I explained to them that they weren’t hired to do whats been done before, they were hired to do something new. I reminded them they had the brands permission as well as my permission to throw the safety net out the window and be bold and do the unexpected. I then proceeded to write the word permission on the whiteboard to remind them. Initially resistant, I began to see that many were catching my drift. It actually seemed to set many of them free as their creativity caught a second wind and I began to see some more creative results again. Sure, this is one small design project but I can only hope they can carry this lesson into the biggest design project of all—the design of the rest of their lives.

If you need someone to do this for you, let me put you on notice. However, you don’t need me. Don’t wait for anyone else to do it, give yourself permission, today.