Learning to Lean (On Others)

I have to admit: I’m a bit of a megalomaniac.  As such, I have a tendency to be a bit of a control freak.  And I think I’m good at it.  I honestly believe that I have everything under control.  My condition is so bad, I once won a few hours of free administrative assistance from my friend Todd Lay, but never used it, even though I was juggling a full-time job and my own business at the time.  It’s a sickness.

I don’t think I’m alone in this.  Many people,especially entrepreneurs, have a tendency to want to “do it all”.   I think we all believe the old adage that “if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself”.  Leaning on others doesn’t come naturally, perhaps because we’ve been jaded by past experience but more likely because we just haven’t learned to trust yet.  If there is one skill the entrepreneur needs, though, it’s the ability to delegate.  It can literally be the difference between success and failure in your business.

Think about it for a minute: how much time do you lose, each and every day, procrastinating and stalling when you have a task you hate that needs doing?  One of my hated tasks is making changes to my website, mostly because it involves looking at HTML code (who came up with that garble, anyways?).  Ugh!  I’d rather have a root canal.  I can do it, though, and that was my hang-up.  I thought that if was able to do it, there was no sense spending the money to hire someone else to do it.  So I would sit down to tackle the project and immediately find 10 other things that “needed” my attention (you know…YouTube, Facebook, Twitter), and the website never got done. 

Then, I met a great web designer who was willing to do what needed to be done in trade.  So I thought, “What the heck?  I might as well give this a try.”  And I learned an incredibly valuable lesson that day: there are people in this world who, believe it or not, actually like looking at and monkeying with HTML code.  For them, it’s a joy, a delight and, as a result, they’re really good at it.  My eyes were suddenly opened to a whole new world, populated with people who were thrilled to engage in all the tasks I hated.  There are virtual assistants who actually enjoy bookkeeping and transcribing and all the administrative tasks that make me cringe.  And there are even people who get their kicks from taking the content I create and blasting it out to the thousands of sites in the social media world, another task I dread.

All of this delegation is allowing me to focus on doing what I really love: creating content and sharing it with others.  Instead of feeling overwhelmed and de-motivated by a bunch of tasks I hate, I feel excited and motivated about doing what I love for a living.

So how does a wannabe world conqueror tame the DIY impulse and learn to delegate?  I’ll tell you what’s working for me: start small.  Don’t jump in and hand off a big, mission-critical task right out of the gate.  Start with something minor and relatively unimportant to you, then work your way up to bigger, more critical tasks. In short, though, do whatever it takes to get out of the way of your own success!