When I wanted to train for a half marathon, I asked someone on Dave’s team at work if he could coach me. The only thing I knew about him was that he was a marathon runner. Ken taught me everything I know about running long distance.
When I wanted to write that first book, my mom came to town many, many weekends and helped with the boys so I could write. She would show up in our upstairs bedroom with snacks at almost the exact moment I was ready to throw the computer against the wall.
When this company I’ve built started to scale so big and so fast that I didn’t think I could properly run it alone anymore, I swallowed a massive amount of ego and asked my husband for help. Do you know how much pride I had being a female founder and CEO with a high school education? A lot. Do you know how interested I was in admitting to him, to myself, or to you that I couldn’t continue to lead the company and lead this tribe simultaneously? Not interested at all. But the thing is, I’ve learned over the last decade how easy it is to burn out—or worse—give up on your dream because you’re trying to do too many things at once. So I’ve learned. And I ask for help.
I have help, you guys. I have so much dang help, and I’m always looking for ways to free up more of my time so I can focus on my values.
People ask me all the time how I “do it all,” and I am happy to shout it from the rooftops. I don’t!
We have a full-time nanny, and we’ve had one since our oldest was three months old. Because of moves or additional kids added to our family, we’ve had three separate nannies (though not all at once) in our history as a family. These women—Martha, Jojo, and now Angie—have loved my children well and made it possible for me to pursue my career while Dave pursued his. They came in early and stayed late. They allowed us to have weekly date nights and, occasionally, they stayed the night so we could get away. We have never had family nearby who could help with our children, and these women were our surrogate family. I can’t imagine how we would have managed without them.
Three years ago we hired a housekeeper. Full-time. We talked about and planned for years to get to the place financially where we could afford a full-time housekeeper, and it’s the greatest luxury in our life! The more kids we had, the less we wanted to spend our nights and weekends doing laundry and mopping floors. We also craved help with dinners and grocery shopping and someone who would take our minivan or our mini schnauzer to get washed.
I have an assistant at work as well as a team of people at the Hollis Company who support me in my business endeavors. I use stylists to pick out flattering outfits for me when I go to fancy red-carpet events or on TV shows. I use hair and makeup people when I’m going to be on television, and a few times I’ve had a woman come to my home and give me a spray tan in my bathroom. She had a pop-up tent; I thought it was magical!
If this much help seems excessive, I’d challenge you to weigh it against the level of content we’ve been able to push out into the world over the last five years. I wouldn’t have been able to do a tenth of this work if I hadn’t had help. If this much help seems unnecessary, well dang, sis, you don’t have to go full tilt like I do, but please teach yourself to raise your hand and admit where you’re struggling!
You don’t need to be in a specific financial place to get help: you can trade with a friend or simply ask your partner for more support. You do need to be in a specific emotional place to get help; you do need to realize that while you are blazing a new trail for yourself, you aren’t required to walk down it alone.
The point in all of this long and crazy rant is that if you struggle with admitting that you need help, you have to take a good hard look at what is required to get you to the next level. If there’s a time commitment involved and you already feel like you don’t have enough time, you might need to ask for help. If there’s a level of knowledge involved that you don’t already have, you might need to find a teacher. If there’s a promotional level involved, you might need to ask your existing customers if they’d be willing to help you get it out in the world.
I heard once that most people who choke to death on food do it in close proximity to someone who could have saved them. It’s a horrible reality. What happens is that they’re sitting at a table eating with a group, and when they begin to choke they feel embarrassed that they’re struggling. Inevitably they stand up from the table, and when their friends ask if they’re okay or need help, they wave them away like everything’s fine. They go to another room so their struggle won’t be a bother to anyone. It’s not until they’re alone and really fighting for breath that they realize they need assistance, but by then it’s too late.
Friends, your struggles don’t mean that you’re weak; they mean you’re human. Your inexperience doesn’t mean you won’t succeed; it just means you haven’t yet. Stop pretending. Stop faking it. Stop suffering in silence. Stop setting yourself up as a martyr. Stop taking it all on alone and then feeling bitter about it. Stop wasting your time on activities you hate as penance for the time you want for yourself.
You cannot do enough loads of laundry to make your husband support your dream. You cannot volunteer enough hours at church to make your sister understand your goals. You cannot earn your way to autonomy over your own life—it’s a human right you were granted when you became an adult. If you need to, when you need to, raise your hand and ask for help, regardless of what anyone else thinks about it.
There are a hundred ways to learn to swim and one very easy way to drown, and that is by being unwilling to admit you’re drowning in the first place.
BEHAVIOR 5:
BUILD FOUNDATIONS FOR SUCCESS
I spent years talking to women about how to reach for growth without realizing that many of them didn’t have a strong foundation to keep up with their goals even if they were motivated. The truth is, it doesn’t matter if you’re motivated to achieve a goal if your day-to-day life is going to sabotage you before you get very far. This lack of foundation wasn’t even something I put a name to until I started to dig into the reasons women would list for why they were having so much trouble. The things we need in place before we can pursue our dreams are not what we often think of in relation to success. Typically, we just think of them as parts of life. But if we don’t have these foundational elements squared away on the front end, reaching for anything else can feel like too much of a long shot.
We have to do the necessary initial work if we’re going to move forward in other ways. We need to set ourselves up to win.
Think about it this way. You’re like a vase. I heard this one time, and I thought this was the greatest analogy ever. Imagine that you are a glass vase and you’re standing up tall, and someone is pouring water into you. That water is everything you could possibly need to survive. So you, as the glass vase, are filled with life and energy and nutrients and love and joy—all the good things.
But we women often don’t think about ourselves as much as we worry about everyone else, so we try and lean over. We tip our vases forward and backward and side to side so that the good things we’re receiving will spill out to those around us. We give some to our children, or our coworkers, or our parents, or our friends. We keep tipping ourselves over. We tip it a little bit here, we spill a little bit there, and eventually . . . the vase falls over and breaks into a thousand pieces. We spend so much effort trying to take care of others that we destroy ourselves in the process.
But here’s the incredible thing. If you’re a vase and you just stand up tall and proud on a firm foundation, if you just take in all the things that are being poured into you, what will eventually happen to the water in the vase? It will overflow and spill out to everyone around you.