My message today is so important that I’ll get straight to it →→ you should never let the fear of sharing your vulnerabilities prevent you from asking for the help you need.
Share Your Vulnerabilities and Move Forwards To Your Goal
It’s really quite simple! When you share your vulnerability and ask for help you’ll find a way to move forwards towards your goal. When you don’t share your story, when you let your fear of showing your vulnerability to someone else get in the way of your purpose, then chances are you won’t move forwards the way you should.
Courage Will Help You Break Free From Your Vulnerabilities
Do you think the challenges you’re facing, your vulnerabilities, are unique only to you?
I don’t think so.
I think that there are people around you who have faced exactly what you’re facing, or something similar. And the thing is that it’s through hearing other people’s stories—the story of how they succeeded out of their challenge—that you begin to realize that it’s really courage that connects you to success. It’s actually courage.
When you listen to other people’s stories you’ll soon learn to understand that it’s courage that causes you to get out of your own way, to ask for the help you need and to continue to create the results that you want.
Now it’s really important you get my next point. It’s not a competition. It’s not about who has succeeded the fastest or the best. It’s about getting away from comparing your journey to other people’s successes and questioning whether you’ve got what it takes to succeed or not. You were born with a purpose and because of that you have what it takes! And what it takes is to be bold and strong, to be fearless in your vulnerability.
Get Out of Your Own Way
It’s so easy to take the steering wheel and pretend that there is no bad or ugly in your life. I do it all the time! I don’t want to face my vulnerability, and because I don’t I usually I end up in a bad situation.
I fear the intimacy of sharing those aspects of my life. If I’m not intimate with them, I don’t have to face them. Then I don’t have to be accountable to anyone: not a coach, adviser, partner or friend. I can hide that vulnerability away where I don’t think anyone else can see it. And I won’t get to my next level of Shanda.
There’s a fearless vulnerability when you’re willing to expose your next building block and being willing to put in place ways to overcome your challenge. Sometimes, there’s a lot of emotional baggage that stops us from wanting to take a long hard look at the vulnerabilities in our lives. We safeguard our hearts; emotionally it is so much easier to put a mask over it and pretend it’s not there.
But this is such an incredibly wrong thing to do.
Don’t Isolate Yourself Out of Fear
You isolate yourself when you’re too scared to just let people see you.
Here’s the truth of the matter, the devil loves isolation. He’ll use your fear of vulnerability, fear of facing that deep emotional challenge, to slowly chip away at your confidence to the point where you want to give up.
When you take off your mask and allow people to see your truth, to see the intimate you, to see what’s not working, and what’s working; then the people who love you are going to pour into you, and you’re going to get to that next level. (I encourage you to return to my earlier post about how being open to your vulnerabilities leads to growth and leadership: Vulnerability is Leadership! Being Open Leads to Growth.) But if you don’t share it, that won’t happen!
Asking for Help Doesn’t Make You Weak, It Makes You Strong
Do you recall my earlier post about the biggest learning you’ll do about yourself is when you’re on your journey (Commit to the Journey, Not the Destination). It provides a wider context to my next story.
Let me tell you about a great friend of mine. The story goes that I asked her to join my PACE program three years ago but she didn’t. However, her partner did do our PACE program and now has an amazing podcast, she’s built an email list, and learned how to sell to it, learned how to survey and she’s failed her way forward.
My friend called me up yesterday. And she said, “You know, I’ve heard you say a million times that podcasts don’t exactly monetize,” (and don’t get me wrong, some of my friends are successfully monetizing their podcast) “but I didn’t listen to you, and I spent all this time and energy creating a podcast. You know my partner is making money and I haven’t made a dime from the podcast.”
It’s been three years since I invited her into our PACE program, and tonight we’re going to have dinner, and I’m going to help lay out a plan for her network. Remember, your network is your net worth.
I said to her “You know, if we would have started three years ago, you could already be doing half a million dollars a year.” (Do you know that some people make half a million dollars in the first one and a half years. Some people do in the first year. Some people do seven figures in the first year.)
And it’s true! If my friend had faced her vulnerabilities earlier and asked for my help, she would now be in a better financial position. Luckily, it’s not too late for her to turn things around. Don’t leave your vulnerabilities unchallenged. Open your heart, face them, move forwards and be ready to be the next level you.
Asking for Help Lets You Control Your Way Into Success
My point is that so often we control our way out of success, not into success. We tell ourselves stories—really these stories are lies we tell ourselves, lies about whether or not we are ready for it. We hide the areas of our life that we suck at. We hide them and then do nothing with them until suddenly they’re there right in front of us and we have to deal with them. We can either face our vulnerability or let the fear of sharing it derail us from our journey.
The most humble people are those who have high humility. It’s an interesting thing, but the people who are most willing to share their challenges and vulnerabilities have the highest numbers of followers and the highest engagement. And it’s because people want to hear. They want to hear your vulnerability story.
Why? Because they can see you in themselves. They can see how you’ve succeeded through your vulnerability. Now, that’s inspirational!
What’s not motivating is letting your fear of sharing your vulnerabilities stop you from asking for the help you need to change your life. Just think, if you don’t face your fear and ask for help, and use that help to make change in your life, how can you inspire others to do the same. Your strength is their strength. Remember that next time you are faced with being fearful or fearless!
Ask for Help For Your Vulnerabilities
Today, I want you to start looking at areas in your life where you’re not asking for help. And maybe if you could just get a little bit more vulnerable, be a little okay with not succeeding or be okay with failing then you might ask and get! the advice or support you need to be able to create the business, or even the lifestyle that you want.
Right now, I want you to note down five different ways that you can ask for help; maybe it’s friends, maybe it’s asking for support from your partner, maybe it’s reaching out to this group.
And here’s why I asked you to do that.
Fearless Vulnerability Breaks the Isolation Cycle
Isolation gets broken when you see that there’s more people that are in the same boat that you are. Sharing your struggles opens the door to others sharing their own experiences.
- Perhaps you might want to do a telesummit or video summit and you need to reach out to some big players but you’re afraid. You’re thinking what if they reject me? Well today, maybe you can just approach it a little differently, from a place of fearless vulnerability. There’s a lot of power to that. Don’t be afraid to reach out to these people to ask for their help.
- If you’ve got a relationship challenge right now, don’t be afraid of it. You don’t have to hide it. Most people have a relationship problem. Talk it through with someone and realize you have a way forward.
- The current crisis we find ourselves in has left many people financially vulnerable and struggling to work out what their next financial steps are. It could be becoming an entrepreneur but you don’t know how to start. So go ahead and share, ask for help.
- If you’re new to online entrepreneurship and you need technical help, maybe you don’t know how to put a registration page up, then ask for help from The Coach Yourself to Success for Entrepreneurs private Facebook group. There are people there who know how to help.
- You don’t know how to be more consistent with your workouts by changing things around in place in your life. Heck, you don’t know how to restructure your life to even get a workout into your day. Ask for help.
- You feel afraid to make a sales call and know you need to upskill and be more confident but not sure how you can achieve this goal. Ask for help.
What Are Your Vulnerability Challenges?
What do you need to ask for help for? What are your vulnerabilities?
Go ahead and share your thoughts about that now, either in the comments section below or on our Private Facebook Group.
And then this way, you read other people’s comments and grow. Maybe you can look and see how you could help another person. So maybe you’ll get your problem solved just by people reading your comments. Remember, you have got to let people see who you really are in order to go to the next level.
So, that’s my challenge for you today.
I’d love to see your comments. Just say where’s the area you need to ask for help.
Inspire Others
I touched on this above, but I wanted to say it again because it’s really really important.
You’re courageous when you challenge your vulnerabilities and ask for help. You’re strong when you get out of your own way and change your life because you won’t let your vulnerabilities control you. It makes you powerful and inspires others to follow in your footsteps and be fearlessly vulnerable as well. And that is what true leadership is all about.
