I was talking with my career coaching client Janelle this week and she reminded me of this important advice I wanted to share with you. She’s been resistant throughout our coaching process to ask for help in her career journey. We realized this week why that is and what she needs to do about it. You see, Janelle defines success and strength as being able to do everything on her own, without help from others. I challenged her to see if that definition of success and strength served her or not…and she realized it didn’t. It actually hindered her because she’s been unwilling to lean on others to get support when she needed it. Here’s an excerpt of our post:



What is your plan for reaching out and asking for their support? I am so not good a this. I associate strength, and independence with handling things myself. I don’t like to put myself out there and be vulnerable for fear of failure and not wanting others to know I have failed. Also I feel others have so much going on in their own lives I don’t want to impose on them. How do I get over this?



Realize that asking for help isn’t failure, it is setting yourself up for success… Successful people have others to lean on, that’s how it works. And they’re confident enough to ask for help when they need it. You may need to re-define your definition of strength and independence… It doesn’t sound like it’s serving you!



So think about this for me this week, is how you define success, happiness or anything else, helping you or hindering you? Think about the obstacles you tend to struggle with, and look behind those obstacles to see how you define them for yourself. Change them if you need to, re-write your definition in a way that will support you, not in a way that will hold you back!