Would you rather be right, or free?

A few weeks ago I was telling someone about my career transition to coaching, sharing that I mostly work with founders and senior executives at VC-backed businesses. This person, who happens to be a serial founder and CEO, replied something along the lines of “Wow, I’m surprised people come to you as that means they are admitting failure”.

The best response I could come up with at the time was, “Well, you don’t go to the gym only once you become obese or have a heart attack, so why should this be any different?” - though this only scratched the surface. I’ve been reflecting a lot on this exchange since, as many of my coaching clients hold some version of this view as well (though clearly not quite as extreme, since they came to me for help!). There are two main assumptions underlying this position that I wanted to explore in this post and offer an alternative.

First, it assumes that we should only ask for help as an absolute last resort, and until then the aim should be to do everything ourselves. If you feel this way, I encourage you to ask yourself what belief you hold that underpins this, for example:

• “I don’t deserve help”

• “If I ask for help, I won’t get it, and I would rather avoid the pain of rejection”

• “If someone else does it, it won’t be as good”

• “I can only count on myself”

If any of these resonate, I would then ask: What are you really afraid of? Is it being alone? Being rejected?

In 99.99% of cases, such beliefs stem from early childhood experiences where our emotional needs were not met by a primary carer - most of the time not intentionally - and the only way for us to survive and avoid feeling that pain again, was to shut down and close ourselves off. Adopting such beliefs is an adaptation, a way of protecting us from pain. But we can let them go through inquiring into them with curiosity, compassion and gratitude, and in doing so restore our ability to trust. Each time that we ask for help and receive it is therapeutic in itself - it serves to strengthen and reinforce this new worldview.

For a founder, I understand why, especially in the early days, it can feel that you have to do everything yourself - but I would argue that even then, building a strong support system, learning to delegate, learning to trust, knowing what you don’t know and identifying people who can help you grow in those areas, will set you apart and create the strongest foundation for future scale. If you really HAVE to always do everything yourself, i.e. there is no one in your team capable of carrying out the tasks to the right standard, then you’ve got the wrong team - and that’s on you to fix!

Ultimately, I believe that asking for and receiving help is one of the greatest expressions of strength and self-confidence, and should be something we aspire to maximise rather than avoid.

The second implicit assumption is that admitting failure is to be avoided at all costs. On one hand, I’m not surprised that in business today, most of us, and founders especially, feel extreme pressure to be infallible. The VCs investing in your business are backing you as an individual - so if you make mistakes, you won’t get funded, right? Wrong. You WILL make mistakes, things will go wrong - if not, that suggests you’re not being bold enough and not challenging yourself enough to go outside your comfort zone. It means you haven’t surrounded yourself with people smart enough to show you what you’re doing wrong and help you grow.

What counts is how you recover from those mistakes, what you learn from them, and how you manage yourself and those around you in the process - that is true resilience and, and that’s the most valuable characteristic of an entrepreneur. Can you pick yourself back up and keep going, over and over again? This proves that you have a growth mindset, and the sky is the limit for you. Openly admitting and fully owning your mistakes inspires confidence and helps to build trust, especially with your investors and your board - if you do this systematically, they won’t have to guess what might be going wrong, and will know that you will tackle issues head on rather than burying your head in the sand, and will escalate the appropriate issues to them.

These issues play out in our personal lives as well, in particular in our romantic relationships that require a high degree of trust and vulnerability to flourish. Do you trust your partner enough to admit when you were wrong, or is being right more important? Can you ask them for help or do you do everything yourself, beyond your fair share? Can you ask for help not in a passive-aggressive, “I shouldn’t have had to ask you this” kind of a way, but in a genuine expression of your needs and an invitation to connect? When they try to help, do you let them, or do you push them away? If this happens in your personal life, chances are that it will also spill over to your professional life and is important to examine and address.

If I’m being honest, I didn’t write this post just because some clients of mine also shared this view. I had a particularly strong response to this interaction because I too used to see the world this way. At work, I somehow always ended up in positions of greater responsibility than my age and experience warranted (hello imposter syndrome), and for a long time I believed that to prove I actually deserved it, I couldn’t show anyone that I didn’t have all the answers. I was definitely in “below the line”, “fixed mindset” mode - I was desperately clinging to an image of how I should be, terrified of losing it any moment, and had very low trust in the world around me. As a result I kept myself small and missed out on opportunities for growth and development.

Through deep self-reflection over the last few years, I’ve been able to gradually let go of those limiting beliefs and learn to trust and be open to others. It’s still a work-in-progress (as my husband can confirm), but letting go of excessive responsibility and perfectionism, and realising that the world will catch me if I fall, has liberated me to dream bigger than I ever imagined possible, and execute on those dreams with boundless energy and joy.