Is guilt stressing you out?

I talk with many individuals that really and truly need an extra hand.  Many are small business owners that have always done everything on their own but are just hitting that stage where they know it no longer makes good business sense to do it all on their own but they are too busy to slow down to figure out or implement a solution.  Many people in this boat are working parents.  They plug along all day at the office just to turn around, go home and realize that running a family is similar to running a business.  Bills need to be paid, you need to ensure that more money is coming in than going out the door and  though the kids aren’t “staff” you still have to manage them and you can’t fire them when the going gets tough.  Your home office is a wreck and you need to find the receipt to the computer that just hit the floor. “I did buy that extended warranty right? Where did I put it?”

In addition to being too busy to ask for help in these scenarios, guilt often plays a significant role in holding people back from seeking out assistance. “I should be able to juggle it all on my own”  “Everyone else has to do these same things, I SHOULD be able to do it!”  “Our budget is tight.  I can’t justify help.”

Maybe you have experienced these same thoughts yourself.  Here’s the thing.  Yes, there are others who do it all…and even some of them might enjoy doing it all but my guess is that the large majority of people doing it all on their own are stressed to the max and are pretty miserable doing so.  Yet there are others still that would like you to believe that they do it all…and there are balls dropped, bills that get overlooked, the small business forgot to make sure that the phone number listed on Yelp is the correct number…and they didn’t even realize that there was a scathing negative review of their business floating out in cyberspace for everyone to see so it goes un-addressed.

Guilt can cost time and money!  The fact is that it’s ok to ask for a little help now and then.  Not only is it ok to ask for help, there are many times when it is simply a bad business and a poor family decision not to ask for a little help.  How much is your own time worth to you?  How much is it worth to your business? To your family?  Now try to put a dollar amount on your sanity.  Yes, you can absolutely get everything done that needs to be done for the family, the business, the organizations that matter to you but at the end of the day, what’s left?  Will you have enough time for sleep, for laughter, for a walk in the park?

If we distill this feeling of guilt down a bit, and try to get to the root of it, recognize that the guilt is not as strong when we are asking for help on a task that we don’t know how to do ourselves.  For example, most of us do not know how to change the oil in our car.  There are a few people out there that know how to do this task but for the vast majority of the car driving population, that is just not a skill we ever picked up.  SInce we don’t know how to do this task, there really is very little guilt associated with going in and getting our car serviced and the oil changed.  Now, if you did know how to change the oil in your car, your feelings of guilt might be higher than the rest of us.  The same goes for hiring a graphic designer to create a logo for us.  If we don’t know photoshop or similar tool, it’s going to be difficult to create something and we might as well hire someone to help us.

On the other hand, for the most part we know how to pay our bills, organize the paper clutter that comes at us every day, search the web to make sure that our business is represented correctly online and in social networking but all of these tasks, though extremely important, take time, energy and organization.  Yes, we can do these things and many more on our own without any extra help. But there is an alternative.

What if someone helped you out for just a few hours every week?  Every month or just when the stacks get too high for you to quickly find what you need when you need it?  What if you could bring in someone that LOVES doing this and looks forward to diving into the clutter of your home office and busting through the madness?  Does asking for help mean that you can’t or don’t know how to do a task on your own?  NO!  It simply means that you choose to spend your time in other ways, in other places be it at home with the family or on tasks that are going to bring you and your business a bigger return. What if you FOCUSED on your strengths and DELEGATED your weaknesses?

Keep that guilt from stressing you out. Let it go. Ask for a hand. I have two to lend.