Jillian Reilly

Permission to Stretch

Jillian Reilly is a founder, writer, public speaker, and consultant who spent her 30-year career working in social, organizational, and individual change across Africa, Asia, and Central Europe. Jill has been published on international affairs in the Washington Post, Newsweek, and the LA Times. Her book Shame: Confessions of an Aid Worker in Africa, chronicles her career in the field of international development. Her TEDx talk, “Vain Aid,” discusses her journey in the international aid industry and the lessons she’s learned about change making along the way. She was the co-host of Courageous Conversations, a podcast series that interviewed African activists and explores what it takes to create change throughout their

Her upcoming book, The Ten Permissions, Redefining the Rules of Adulting in the 21st Century, offers a new approach to navigating adult life amidst the constant change and disruption of today’s world.

A bit about her workshop

To change requires self permission. To live amidst non-stop change requires embedding permission into your personal operating system. 

This is a workshop about beginning to embed permission into your adult life and the choices you make in an ever changing world – to maintain a conscious and intentional conversation about what you want and what’s allowed in a world where there’s no longer one way to do things and certainly no right way. 

Here’s how I want you to see that permission- as a series of small stretches into the new, the unfamiliar, the never-done-before. To authorise yourself to move beyond self imposed boundaries – to stretch out. 

The role of permission is essentially to stretch out – to feel like you’re allowed to take up more space, to create a path that’s wider and potentially more wandering, to move into spaces -geographic, physical, relational – that once seemed out of bounds. To reject the narrow confines of what’s always been and s-t-r-e-t-c-h into the unfamiliar – one permission at a time.