رفتار چهارم: درخواست کمک کنید

BEHAVIOR 4:

ASK FOR HELP!

It’s the eleventh hour, girls. I was supposed to have given my publisher the edits on this book last week. I had to ask for an extension, and that extension says that this sucker is due today if I want to make my publication date. I want to stress how late in the game I am on this creative process, because then you’ll understand how insane it is for me to be adding this chapter right now.

Like, I’m starting a chapter brand new when I’m supposed to have this whole thing safely tucked into an email and off to a lovely gal in Tennessee so she can copyedit it.

Instead, I’m going rogue. And I’m doing it because it occurred to me this morning, like a lightbulb going off, that I completely forgot to include an incredibly vital behavior that you absolutely must adopt into your life. For days I’ve been wandering around thinking, I know I’m forgetting to tell them something, I just know it! And then I remembered what it was, and my only excuse for it not occurring to me originally is that it’s such an ingrained behavior for me now that I didn’t think about it as something extra to add in. But I get your DMs and your emails and your media-based, emoji-filled messages that are full to the brim with overwhelm, and I am reminded that not every woman does this. So here it is: ask for help!

Ask for some dang help!

You cannot read the chapter on ambition and allow it to fire you up if you aren’t also going to figure out what resources you need to get you there. Deciding to take adult tap dancing lessons because they light your heart on fire doesn’t just require new patent leather metal-bottomed shoes and a selection of Yelp-recommended dance studios. It also requires someone to watch your kids while you go to class. Ask for help.

Attempting to grow to a new level in your multilevel marketing business doesn’t just require classes and webinars and a sick social media presence; it also requires someone to help you around the house since you will have less time for that. Ask for help.

I get it, girls, I do. I know that it feels awkward for the vast majority of us to ask for assistance. For one thing, we hate admitting to anyone—especially ourselves—that we need it. For another, we’ve somehow gotten this twisted idea that copping to the fact that we can’t successfully do it all means that we’re weak. Ha! Think about how ludicrous that is. The most powerful people in the world have whole teams that they delegate to. They’re getting help in every single direction, from cleaning their houses to expanding their businesses overseas. But you—you with your fledgling business, your loads of laundry, and your two kids under four—you’re the one who’s supposed to navigate this all alone? Dude. No way. You’ve got a twisted perception of what success in any area of life looks like. And it’s not even your fault either.

I blame the media.

Or, more specifically, I blame every perfectly styled, ultra-fabulous-looking woman who’s ever been on TV or the internet in the last fifty years who didn’t tell us how much assistance it takes to keep her at that level. I blame every magazine who showed us thirty-nine ways to brine a turkey for Thanksgiving but didn’t mention asking your sister to stay the night with you the day before so someone was there to help with the baby while you cook for the family. I blame every Nancy Meyers movie with those dreamy houses and all-white wardrobes. Oh, sure, she showed us the zany hardship of navigating a relationship, but she never once showed the staff of people required to keep those mansions clean or those organic gardens tended while our heroine was building up her catering empire.

You’ve likely only ever seen examples both in real life and on-screen of women doing it all. It seems to me that women either try and handle every single thing on their own and don’t admit how much they’re struggling, or, worse, they have help, all kinds of help, and won’t cop to it. Madeleine Albright once said, “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.”1 Well, I say, there’s a special place in hell for women who have the luxury of assistance but won’t admit to other women that they do.

I was watching a segment on the Today Show a couple of years back, and there was a famous celebrity there sharing her new product line. This woman had young children and a husband whose career was as lucrative and as demanding as her own. I really love this person. She’s so beautiful, and she seems like such a genuinely good mama and wife. She’s made a big name for herself in the lifestyle space. She has become the woman that many mamas and homemakers want to be. But when they asked her in the course of the questions how she “does it all”—as in, how did you build this multimillion-dollar business and manage to parent well and be a great wifey?—she looked right at the interviewer and said something like, “Oh, I’m just super organized.” My jaw hit the floor, you guys. She went on to breezily explain how any mom can do just what she does if they apply themselves and work hard.

I was so disappointed in her response, I wanted to cry. Sincerely wanted to cry like a baby. Because here’s the deal: this woman has a massive platform, ten times bigger than my own, and on that particular morning I can’t imagine how many women were watching her, looking up to her, and hoping for some guidance or inspiration. And she evaded. She had the opportunity to tell all of us what it really takes to live life and have a business at this level while raising young children, and she didn’t take it.

There is a zero-percent chance—a ZERO-percent chance—that she doesn’t have help. Having spent years and years working with celebrities, I’d guess she’s got a housekeeper and at least one nanny, if not two. She’s got to have an assistant, and because of their level of celebrity, I bet she and her husband even have some of the higher-level domestic staff you might not have even heard of before. Things like “house managers” and “nutritionist chefs” and, you know what, good for them! I do not begrudge them a single second of their help. I just wish they’d talk about it. By not talking about it they run the risk that it won’t occur to you. If you see their perfectly prepared dinner on Instagram when you know she was at a photoshoot all day (because you watched it in her feed), it might make you feel bad because you struggle to get dinner on the table even when you’ve been home all day. It might not occur to you that a housekeeper or a chef helped her prepare that dinner, which perpetuates the myth that you could also “do it all and have it all” if only you’d work harder.

This is a lie from the pits of celebrity hell!

Friends, women operating at the levels you’d like to both personally and professionally are asking for help. Maybe that help comes from their partner. Maybe that help comes from their mama or their sister. Maybe that help comes in the form of a local college student who babysits or a local cleaning lady who scrubs their toilets once a month. There are tons of ways to get help, but to start we need to understand that it’s required in the first place before we can take the next step. Nobody does this alone. When I put it so plainly, it seems like common sense, doesn’t it? But then we come across terms like self-made and start to wonder whether that’s still what we should be shooting for.

I love the term self-made, particularly when it’s used in reference to my own success, because only I know how much work it took to get from there to here. I was the one who got up before the sun. I was the one who logged all the miles on business trips. I was the one who cried over the P&L and stressed about making payroll. Me, me, me. For years I held on to that title and the idea of doing it all on my own, because it fired me up and helped me keep going when it felt so lonely on this entrepreneurial journey. In the last few years I’ve realized something, though. I am self-made . . . and, also, not.

It’s only recently that I understood that no one is ever truly self-made, because it’s impossible to build big things entirely by yourself. A whole team of people helped me build my company over the last decade. A massive tribe (who started out as a handful of followers) told their friends about my work and are still the greatest hype squad I know. It took family and babysitters and nannies to help keep our family afloat during the times I had to put in extra hours. It took the world’s biggest cheerleader as a husband, celebrating my wins and covering my losses both financially and emotionally in those early years.

It took a village, and it still takes a village. It took me raising my hand and asking for help.

“Hey, hubby, can you help watch the kids this weekend so I can get some work done?”

“Hey, Instagram friends, can you share this in your social media feeds to let people know about this book I wrote called Party Girl?”

“Hey, manager at work, I can meet all of your priorities, but not without another team member or an extension on the due date. I’m only one person.”

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.