On asking for help at work, and what happened when she finally did.

I noticed it within the first few minutes of our session.

She looked lighter.

Not rested. She'd had a brutal week, and told me so.

But something in her face had shifted since the month before, and it took me a few minutes to identify it.

But there it was: she'd stopped holding everything together on her own.

Here's what I've learned from working with senior women for over twenty years.

The structures we build in a crisis are usually exactly right for that crisis.

The trouble is, we rarely take those structures, that mental scaffolding, down afterwards.

The scaffolding went in to protect us.

So we leave it standing long after the danger has passed, and it quietly starts cutting us off from the very things we now need.

Help. Honesty. Other people.

In our previous session, she'd started to loosen the scaffolding.

She found it really hard.

Saying out loud the things she'd kept locked away for months was, in her words, hugely challenging, to say the least.

After all, she'd made her reputation on being the person other people could go to.

But in the weeks between sessions, she'd done something she'd never done before in her career.

She told her team that on the days after her treatments, she wouldn't be able to function.

Someone would need to step in.

They didn't just step in.

They got creative.

They created solutions for problems she'd always found annoying, but had simply worked through.

This led to a better result for everyone, even beyond her team, which became a real unexpected, and certainly unasked for, win.

Then she went further with her vulnerability.

She admitted to a senior colleague that she was worried about losing her job.

Her difficult boss's star was no longer rising, and she feared she'd go down with him.

The colleague was astonished she'd even been thinking it, and reminded her how valued she was within the wider organisation.

Two days later, that colleague came back, having spoken to the right people.

If the worst happened, there was a role waiting for her. Agreed. Done.

None of that could have happened while the worry stayed hidden.

She'd spent months feeling insecure at work.

The security arrived the moment she stopped pretending she didn't need security, or a 'coping mechanism' that kept her stiff upper lip intact.

She said something in that session I've thought about ever since.

She'd always seen herself as a complete package for her company.

But to her, asking for help meant admitting weakness.

And weakness was the one thing she couldn't afford.

Now she put it differently.

Being able to say what she needed had turned out to be one of her greatest strengths.

It was still frightening, she admitted.

You never know how people will react.

But most people, it turned out, reacted with kindness and empathy.

Far more than she'd anticipated, even.

Many seemed glad to be asked.

As I explore in why "be more confident" is the wrong advice for senior women, the problem is rarely what it looks like from the outside.

She'd never lacked confidence.

She'd been carrying everything alone, and calling it strength.

You may have built something to get you through a hard stretch: a rule, a facade, a way of keeping everything contained.

It may have served you brilliantly.

But it's worth asking whether it's still serving you now.

The same structure that kept you safe may be what keeps the right people from helping you.

Much like letting your work speak for itself, staying silent about what you need assumes others will notice without being told.

They rarely do.

If there's something you've been holding together on your own for too long, I'd love to have a conversation.

Email me at suzanne@doylemorris.com to arrange a chemistry call.

If this resonated, I write about moments like this every week, the ones senior women in STEM recognise immediately and hadn't quite named yet.

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