Just Ask
I remember being 5 years old and really, really wanting to help with the Passover cleaning in a meaningful way. You see I am the youngest of 3 children by a 6 years and I always felt I was the afterthought. SO I beg my mother to let me clean out the bottom of the silver cabinet. She has the 4 beautiful silver candy dishes with glass inserts. I carefully take them out of the cabinet, dust each one off, then just as carefully try to put them back, when one of the glass pieces slips out of my hands and breaks. I am devastated, I run up to my room and go hide in the corner. I think that's when I decided I needed to be careful about asking, because even if you get what you want you could get into trouble. Now my mother was wonderful about it, but everytime I looked into the silver cabinet it was the first thing I saw, even hidden way in back.
I think that is the hardest thing for me. To ask for help, to admit I don't know how, or I can't do it on my own. To open myself up and make myself vulnerable. To admit not just to myself but to other people, that I am less than how I think I ought to be. To let people know that I'm scared and maybe don't know how to express what I need. But I'm the Coach! Shouldn't I have all, or at least most of the answers?
Apparently not. Tonight I took the advice of someone I didn't even know, part of a group of women entrepreneurs, who simply put out the proposition "how would describe what you do in a creative manner?" and I got stuck rambling off incoherently. Then she said the thing I feared most. DON'T DO IT ALONE. ASK.
So I did, and people responded and I am not any less of who I was before, I am more. More calm, more clear, more directed the only thing that is less, is my fear of what people will thing of me. I still am unsure, but I am not alone.
It's kind of neat, actually.