Successful people all do this one thing (or two…)
This week I read an article in The New York Times by Angela Duckworth.
She studies successful people for a living, and she says they all have one habit in common.
Do you know what it is?
Spoiler alert: They ask for help.
And it's true. Most successful people have an incredible team behind them — coaches, mentors, people they trust enough to lean on.
But I'd take it one step further.
Asking for help is the start.
What they're also doing — the part that doesn't make it into the headline — is allowing themselves to receive the help they asked for.
I know. It sounds counterintuitive. Isn't that the same thing?
Hear me out. Because I was that person.
I hire a coach.
She gives me exactly what I asked for: clear, specific direction.
Something I can finally hold onto.
And I stop listening the moment she gives me something tangible to do that gets me excited.
Not entirely stop.
Just the part where she says it requires some patience. (Ugh, here's that word again. Anyone else having an aversion to that word?)
Or where the work feels like a stretch to me and brings so much discomfort, I want to run.
So my mind grabs the one line that lights me up, and I'm gone → doing, moving, building, chasing the dopamine hit of visible progress.
Then I crash.
I get confused.
Again.
A few weeks (or days) later, I'm back on a call, asking for the same type of help, again.
I feel like a failure.
Can you relate?
See, it's a pattern I watch in almost every woman I coach.
She finally works up the nerve to ask for help.
Because she's had enough — she's tried everything and nothing has worked.
Not really.
She's done the self-help books, the workshops, the tutorials, the classes.
It helped for a while, but like me, she's back to square one.
Or close to it.
Her mind goes to:
should I just give up on my dream, my want, my...
That may be when she asks for help.
A coach, a friend, a mentor, a wiser voice than the one in her own head telling her she should already know this.
And for a moment, she feels lighter. Held, even.
Then, almost without noticing, she takes that answer and turns it into one more thing to prove she can do alone.
She thanks the person who helped her, and quietly disappears back into handling the rest herself.
“I've got this.”
Then she feels overwhelmed and realizes she doesn't "got" this.
So she “shoulds“ herself.
With the advice I got, I should be further along. I should have figured this out by now. I should….
And finally her mind goes to:
“What's wrong with me?”
Now she's embarrassed to ask for help again.
Because somewhere along the way, she learned that needing help once is human. Needing it twice starts to feel like failure.
The truth: asking for help and knowing how to receive it are two different things.
It's never a "one and done." It's a process.
And part of the process is facing what we avoid.
I've been that woman.
What finally got me over the hump wasn't wisdom. It was exhaustion.
I ran out of dopamine hits before I ran out of problems.
So I learned something new.
To rest before I'm forced to.
To observe before I act.
To ask a question and actually wait for the whole answer instead of grabbing the first line and running with it.
I practice active listening with myself the way I do with my clients — which, go figure, comes so much more naturally when it's someone else's voice I'm listening to.
Now, when the excitement hits, I check in with my body first.
Does this still feel true in 24 hours?
Sometimes it fades.
Sometimes it turns into something even more right.
Either way, I've learned the feeling that lasts is more trustworthy than the feeling that fires.
Even if it's uncomfortable.
This is the part Duckworth's article doesn't get to.
Asking is the door.
Receiving is what happens after you walk through it — and it's the part most of us skip.
That same spiral:
I've got this,
then I don't got this,
then what's wrong with me
doesn't only show up on a coaching call.
And receiving doesn’t only mean receiving advice.
It can mean receiving support, recognition, opportunity, encouragement—or the truth we have been trying not to hear.
This pattern shows up in so much of what you do—or don’t allow yourself to do:
It's the raise you still haven't asked for.
The job you outgrew a while ago but haven’t allowed yourself to look beyond.
The work you finished and still haven't shown anyone.
The relationship you keep hoping will become what you need it to be.
This is your reminder that you don’t have to do “it” by yourself.
Now let me ask you….
Where are you rushing back into "I've got this" so you don't have to sit in the discomfort of letting someone stay with you?
We were never meant to do this alone.
That’s the real habit successful people share—they don’t just ask for help.
They let themselves be met.
