You’ve probably heard the saying that the hardest thing to do is to ask for help, and for some people it is. It’s really hard for them to get to the place that they’re so overwhelmed or overworked that they just don’t have another ounce of energy or second of time or something really bad happens and they finally break down and ask for help. But for most people, the greatest challenge isn’t asking for help (that’s the second greatest), but getting to a place where they’re willing to trust and accept the help they receive.
Just about everyone knows or has known someone like this. It may be a parent, it may be a boss or manager, it may be a sibling, it may even be a partner. These people micromanage you to varying degrees, sometimes even to the extreme that the work they give you or things they ask you to do are really only in name, and not in actuality. They ask for help because it’s the nice thing to do or the right thing or because someone told them they had to. To be fair, on one level or another they usually do want help, they just can’t always get to the point that they truly delegate the task to someone else.
So why does this matter? Because we’re faced with a finite amount of time and resources and at some point we have to decide to either take less on (which isn’t always possible) or we have to ask for and accept help from others. We have to decide what we absolutely won’t let anyone else do or what we alone must do (someone else can’t shower for you), and do the sometimes hard work of finding people we can trust to do a good enough or even excellent job in other areas that we honestly don’t need to do ourselves. I know it can be hard to give up control, and you may be right that they won’t do as good a job as you would, but at the same time I know that there are lots of people who have specialized skills or are just really detail oriented and can get the job done or help you get to your destination in a way that will be a ton less stressful and more productive for you.
If you think about delegation as an opportunity to do more in and with your life, and you get tasks that you don’t enjoy off your plate, why wouldn’t you want to hand them off to someone else so that you can focus on the things that matter to you or you want more time to do in your life? And the good news about delegation is that you can change your mind about what you delegate as you learn that certain things may not really need to be on your plate and you do want the opportunity to do things that you had initially passed off to someone else. How have you found delegation helps you to accomplish more victories and more in your life?
Laura Dickey 