These things run deep for some of us – we are ingrained to feel like we have to take care of almost everything. It’s something I’ve had to learn how to overcome in my business, and it’s still something that I struggle with from time to time.

But if we can’t ask for – and receive! – help, we are setting ourselves up for a slew of stress and problems with our team.

We may struggle to see what to even ask for help with because we are so habituated to doing it all ourselves. (I don’t even know what someone can do for me?)

When we do know that we want help with something, we aren’t sure how to ask in an effective and clear way (A common scenario I see is that we think we asked for help with something but in reality, our team member wasn’t clear on what we asked for or thought we were just talking about stuff and didn’t realize you were asking for something at all.)

We hold back on asking for help with certain things because we think they won’t want to do it or we don’t want to bug them (I can’t tell you how many clients have said to me “Well I don’t like doing this thing so I can’t ask them to do it for me”…. yes, you can. that’s what they are there for.

And the biggest ‘ooof’ of all is when we have folks on our team who are asking to take things off our plate “I can help you with this. How about I take a look at that for you? Are you sure you still want to be the one doing this?” But we say no because deep down inside we feel like we have to be the one doing everything.

I can tell you, from the other side of the coin, that this is highly frustrating for the people you hire. They really want to help but they either a) aren’t clear on what you want help with or b) feel like they have tried to help out in various ways but that you aren’t ready to let go. And they end up feeling like they aren’t being helpful at all.

Asking for help from your team is a learned skill (I teach my clients the 4 A’s of asking) And receiving that help is an equally important skill to learn as well!