Originally published on the Pastry Box Project one year ago today on August 10, 2014
I haven’t been sleeping well lately. I’ve had a lot on my mind. Building my coaching business. Finding a new place to live. Trying to buy a sailboat. Negotiating contracts on upcoming speaking gigs. Rewriting a book proposal for what feels like the ten-thousandth time. It’s a lot.
Being independent means I do pretty much everything alone. I go to every meeting. I make every decision. The buck stops with me.
Only in the last year have I started delegating at all. I hired a virtual assistant to do all the tasks I had no reason doing myself — filling out forms, making appointments, basic web research, that kind of stuff. For years I insisted that absolutely no one else could do these things as well as I could, so I resisted getting help. Of course it turns out he does them better and faster than I ever did.
In our first season of Designing Yourself, Paul and I did all of the editing ourselves. He’s great at it, but I have no idea what I’m doing and wasted so many hours making stupid mistakes. I hated admitting I couldn’t do it and, far worse, hated asking Paul to do it all. So while I was on this delegating kick, I found a professional podcast editor for Season 2. Now we send him our recordings, and in a few days, a finished episode comes back. It’s been bliss.
I face the same challenges in my personal life. Fredrick and I have an amazingly equal partnership, but there’s still so much I won’t let him do for me. It’s been three years this month and I’m still not good at relying on him. When I ask him to do something, I check in on him a dozen times, or worse, look over his shoulder when he does it. It’s not a matter of trust — there’s no one in the world I trust more — but I’m simply not used to the help.
So I’ve been bearing a particularly heavy load lately and I haven’t been getting enough rest. Last weekend, we were both working on the couch and I felt myself getting tired. He could tell. I laid my head on his shoulder as I have a million times before, but this time when I went to move, he told me to stay. “Close your eyes.” “Just a minute,” I replied.
What felt like just a moment later, I opened my eyes. My head was still on his shoulder, his hand in my lap, but the light had shifted in the room. Fredrick was reading on his iPad with his other hand. “Did I fall asleep?” I asked. “About 40 minutes ago,” he smiled. I was stunned. I can’t remember ever sleeping that well. It was like a full night’s sleep.
“What happened?” It’s this weird thing I ask him whenever I fall asleep first. Like I want to know what I missed. “You fell asleep. Hard.” He said he knew I needed rest and didn’t want to risk waking me so he didn’t move a muscle. He said I was lying there lightly at first, and then with each passing minute my head got heavier, and heavier, and heavier. He said it was like I was melting into him, until eventually I had my whole weight on him, my breathing changed, and I went into a deep sleep.
From the way he told it, I could tell this had been a profound experience for him. Half of his body was numb, but his heart was full. I’d let him support me. Fully. Finally.
In a session this week with a client who’s going through a tough time, she kept listing off all the things she has to do for her bosses, her team, her kids, her parents. “Who do you have to support you?” I asked. She paused for a while, like it wasn’t a question she’d considered before. “Well, there isn’t anything anyone else can do.” It sounded like I was talking to myself.
“I know it feels that way,” I said, “but maybe you can let someone try?”
Originally published on the Pastry Box Project one year ago today on August 10, 2014
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