The best leaders ask for help. Here's why most don't.

There's a story that gets told, usually quietly and usually to yourself, about what it means to need help. That if you were capable enough, senior enough, experienced enough, you'd be able to figure it out. That needing support is evidence of a gap. That the right move is to push through, stay busy, keep moving.

Most of the leaders I work with have been telling themselves some version of this for a while. And most of them, when they finally do reach out, say some version of the same thing: I wish I'd done this sooner.

Why asking for help feels so hard

Vulnerability is at the core of it. Asking for help means acknowledging that something isn't working, and that acknowledgement can feel exposing even when it's entirely private. So instead of sitting with that feeling, most people find ways around it. Stay busy. Add more to the list. Focus on the next thing. Keep moving fast enough that the discomfort doesn't catch up.

The brain's threat response doesn't distinguish neatly between physical danger and social or emotional risk. Vulnerability activates the same protective systems as a more concrete threat. Avoidance feels like self-preservation because, in a narrow sense, it is.

But carrying something you haven't looked at directly takes up cognitive space. The more you push it away, the more energy it draws.

When the problem isn't the problem

A client came to me with a work problem. Or that's what they thought it was.

They were studying a course alongside a full-time job and parenting. Every waking hour was dedicated to something. They wanted coaching to help them make progress on their goals and arrived with a clear list of obstacles in the way.

What we uncovered fairly quickly was that the problem wasn't the obstacles. They had been running at full cognitive capacity for so long they'd simply run out of the mental resource needed to tackle anything. No proper break in months. No time that wasn't allocated to achieving something. They weren't failing to solve the problems because they lacked capability. They were failing because a brain under sustained load stops generating good ideas. Full stop.

What they needed wasn't a plan with more actions on it. They needed rest, permission to step back, and space to feel like themselves again before anything else could shift.

The research backs this up. The brain's default mode network, associated with insight and creative problem-solving, is most active when we're not trying. Rest isn't the opposite of progress. For many leaders running at full tilt, it's the thing that makes progress possible.

The biggest misconception about coaching

People often put off coaching because they don't feel like they have a clear enough problem to bring to a session. They're waiting until things crystallise, until the situation is defined enough to work on.

That's a very old-school way of thinking about what coaching is. It comes from a narrow model of practice where the coach helps a client work toward a predefined goal. And while that kind of coaching has its place, it's a fraction of what the work can be.

Coaching more often than not helps you widen the lens. It creates space to put the to-do list down for a while and actually look at what's going on. It surfaces the patterns and beliefs that are shaping your behaviour in ways you haven't noticed. Sometimes a client arrives thinking they have a strategy problem and leaves having understood something about themselves they'd never quite articulated before.

You don't need a neat problem. You need to be ready to have an honest conversation.

Asking for help is a leadership skill

Research on leadership effectiveness points to self-awareness as one of the strongest predictors of performance. Not technical skill. Not confidence. The capacity to see yourself clearly, including where you're stuck, where your blind spots are, and what you're avoiding.

Seeking coaching is an act of self-awareness. It's saying: I know there's more available to me than I'm currently accessing, and I'm willing to look at what's in the way. Leaders who do this keep growing. The ones who don't tend to plateau.

The leaders who ask for help aren't the ones who've run out of answers. They're the ones who understand that thinking alongside someone else gets you somewhere thinking alone never will.