The Empress Card: Great Leaders Accept Help
So many of us feel like we have to do everything – and do it by ourselves.
On a call last month, my client Mona told me, “I just feel like I can’t do it all. This weekend, I’ve got my youngest child’s birthday party, my second daughter has two tutoring lessons, and I still want to spend some time catching up on work that I didn’t get done this week.”
“I don’t know how to do it all,” she said. “I can’t.”
When I asked her if she could get some support, she replied, “I don’t know – I’m a single mom. I don’t really have anyone around to help.”
I paused for a moment. Then, I asked, “When you think of your mom and how she took care of you and your siblings, how did she ask for help?”
Mona answered immediately – “She didn’t. We were everything to her and she just did everything she could to help us. She didn’t have her own life, her own desires. All of her energy went to us.”
“And how did that work out for her?” I asked.
“She died early of an auto-immune disease and chronic exhaustion,” Mona said quietly. “I don’t want to follow in her footsteps.”
So many of us can relate to this. When we look to the women who raised us, we find that there were no boundaries. There was no asking for help.
Whether we realize it or not, we spent so long learning from their example that we end up pressuring ourselves to do everything on our own.
As I told Mona, “We need a new model to follow – someone else to anchor us into a different way of being. Let’s look at the Empress in the Tarot deck.”
The Empress wears a flowing gown and sits on a beautiful throne, surrounded by a garden of lovely plants. She reigns over her kingdom with love. She has cultivated a life of luxury and abundance for herself, but she also knows how to nurture and protect the people she cares about.
The Empress knows that, in order to be a great leader, she must be able to receive support. She must be open to receiving – receiving love, receiving wisdom and, most importantly, receiving help. In other words, for her to take care of others, she must unabashedly receive the support that she needs in order to take care of herself.
After my call with Mona, she immediately began to embody the Empress.
She invited the mothers of her daughter’s friends to come and help with the birthday party. They had their own pizza and lots of laughs, and managed to wrangle twelve seven-year-olds together.
She called me the following week sounding so excited. “I’m embodying the Empress!” she said. “I pulled the Tarot card and put it on my nightstand so I can see it each night.”
This week, I invite you to open the floodgates and allow others to buoy you up – so that you can manage your kingdom more effectively.
Ask yourself – how can I stand more firmly in my power by asking for help? How can I open my mind and heart to receiving that help? How can I become the Empress of my kingdom?
If you’re looking for a small, concrete way to welcome more support into your life, I would love to see you at our (virtual) Flow Method Get It Done Day this Saturday, August 24.
On Get it Done Days, I’ll walk you through exactly how to use my Flow Method – my process for getting three months of work done in two days – and then we’ll spend the day flowing with a group of other entrepreneurs.
By the end of the day, you’ll not only have made tons of progress on whatever project(s) you choose to work on – you’ll also understand exactly how the Flow Method works so you can recreate the experience over and over again for yourself.
Next time you find yourself leaning into the narrative of solitary sacrifice, remember that the Empress planted her garden with the help of many.
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