You haven't asked anyone for help in months. Have you?

Hey Reader

Have you ever noticed how easy it is to give advice, yet how hard it can be to apply the same advice to yourself?

"It's lonely at the top" is a statement you hear quoted repeatedly for leaders. It's real, it's true, but it's also a choice. We just do not realise we are making that choice most of the time.

Last week, I was talking to a friend and shared some of the pivots we are making at MindsetShift. As she listened, she offered ideas, introductions, named people and organisations who could open doors. I said thank you. She looked at me and said, "It's okay. I know you're not used to asking for help, are you?"

She was not lying. I had not stopped once to think about her network or how she might help me, as much as I would like to say that was because I was just sharing the truth, is she had rightly called out one of my weaknesses. Asking for help is one of the hardest things I find to do.

Two days before, my mentor said something similar. You are good at being present for other people, but when it comes to you, there is a level of armour. You are not as vulnerable as you think you are.

Both were right. And as I sat with those two conversations, I realised the same forces I coach clients through had been at play in me. I was encouraging vulnerability in others while my own armour was running quietly in the background, keeping people at a safe distance. Letting me give without receiving.

You got to where you are by having answers. By being the one others lean into and somewhere in that climb, you started editing what you let people see. Not all at once, just a little at a time. Until the gap between who you are in rooms and who you are privately became wide enough that you cannot close it quickly, even when you want to.

The irony is this. The higher you climb, the fewer safe spaces you have, which means the more intentional you need to be about creating them. Yet the armour keeps working against that. You push people away without realising it, not because you do not want connection but because asking for it feels like an act of exposure.

My friend gave me some of the most useful perspectives I had received in months, not because I asked for it, but because she did not care about my armour. We have a friendship where she felt she had permission regardless. She was going to call it out, whether I was ready or not; she treated me like I treat my clients, but that is not the norm.

Most leaders do not have someone in their corner who will push through the armour uninvited, which is exactly why the gap exists and why loneliness is so real for so many people carrying far more than anyone around them knows.

If you are carrying something you have not said out loud to anyone, that is where we start.

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This is not just a corporate leadership problem. It is a life one.

Whether you are running a team, a business, a household, or just trying to hold it together through a season that is harder than you are letting on, the pattern is the same.

The more you are carrying, the less you say and the less you say, the more convinced you become that you are the only one carrying it.

Leadership is not a job title; it is how you show up in every room you are in, including the ones where no one is watching, and no one expects anything from you. Those rooms matter too.

And that is where I want to leave you this week.

Think about the last time you said something genuinely unfiltered to someone outside your home. Not venting at midnight. An honest conversation, in daylight, with someone who could hold it without needing you to be okay by the end.

If you cannot place one recently, that is your answer. Not because you lack the people. but because you have been telling yourself you do not need it yet. That is just the armour talking.

You might still be lonely at the top, but the question worth sitting with is whether you built it that way.

Three questions:

1. Who has seen the unedited version of you in the last three months? Not the polished one. The actual one.
2. What are you currently carrying that you have not said out loud to a single person?
3. If your armour is working exactly as designed, what is it keeping out?