Why Gen X Women Struggle So Much With Support

As a driven entrepreneur, you likely pride yourself on being self-reliant and handling everything on your own. Yet, deep down, you know that to grow your business and thrive, you need to lean on your team more. In this episode of Leadership is Feminine, host Kris Plachy explores the challenge many Gen X women entrepreneurs face: asking for and accepting support.

Raised with a strong sense of independence, you might struggle to delegate, and when others fall short, it's tempting to just do it yourself. But what if, instead of rescuing everyone, you could guide them—and in the process, free up your own time and energy?

Kris shares her strategies on maintaining emotional balance when dealing with disappointments, and how to guide others through their errors, instead of rescuing them. She encourages us to assess situations pragmatically, rather than letting our emotional tolerance dictate our response to setbacks.

As you tune into this episode, discover a new leadership mindset that fosters support, maturity and growth. You won't want to miss out on Kris’s guidance on how to accept and cultivate support and step out of managing and into leading, as the visionary you are.

“‘No one can do it better than me.’ That is the most painful lie you're telling yourself. And who cares if they can't do it better than you or as well as you? You know what they can do? They can do it well, and they can do it well based on their brain, as long as your results are specific.”

Key Takeaways From This Episode

1. Understanding Gen X Female Entrepreneurs: The struggle to accept help due to the innate need for independence.

2. The Problem with Self-Reliance: The high bar set for others while simultaneously experiencing exhaustion of trying to do it all.

3. Allowing Employees to Make Mistakes: Understanding that employees will inevitably make mistakes, taking on their responsibilities will not make it any easier.

4. Managing Emotional Response to Mistakes: The need for flexible thinking and being able to objectively assess problems.

5. Leading through Others’ Mistakes: The need for leaders to guide their employees through the resolution process of their mistakes rather than fixing it themselves

To Listen to the Gen-X Women Founders Mini Series

• Part 1: “GenX Women Founders: A Generation of Leaders that is Changing the World”

• Part 2: “The Sandwich Generation: How Gen X Women Balance Business, Family, and Aging Parent”

• Part 3: “GenX Women Founders: Confronting Imposter Syndrome in Gen X Women's Leadership”

• Part 4: “Gen X Women Founders: How Can WE of All Women on the Planet, Be Afraid of Change?”

• Part 5: “Gen X Women Founders: Our Collective Emotional Load”

Contact Information and Recommended Resources

Get Access to LEAD LESSONS

Lead for Women is now open for advanced registration! Sign up now thru September 18th and join Kris LIVE on October 9th for 8 weeks of Lead for Women Lessons and real-time advisement to get that difficult team member issue solved. Go to www.thevisionary.ceo/nextstep to learn more details.

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Transcript

Kris Plachy:
Well, hello, and welcome to Leadership is Feminine. I am your host, Kris Plackey, and I'm revisiting a subject or topic that I talked about on the podcast in a series I did probably last December-ish, January-ish that I called the Gen X female founder series. This isn't a repeat, but it's a little bit more of an embellishment. And talking about, I want to talk about Gen X women specifically, but not exclusively, okay? Because this isn't always just the way that it is. But I know so many women who are sort of of the Gen X era, and I was having this conversation with someone the other day, and it's sort of an interesting notion that there are so many women who are Gen X women, who are female entrepreneurs who really struggle with support, getting support, accepting support, asking for support, and then tolerating support. We don't like support that isn't in the way that we want it.

Kris Plachy:
Right. And all the things. So, you know, when we dissect the general experience of a Gen Xer, and again, I'm generalizing, but most of us - right - have seen all the memes, and I think a lot of us can identify with a lot of the experiences of our youth, which was that kind of, nobody cared where we were. We were out at night, we were running around, you know, come home when the lights come on. You know, it's not that people didn't love us, but. Right. We didn't have a lot of conversations about feelings.

Kris Plachy:
I talk about, like, when I applied to college, like, I just applied to college, like, it wasn't. I think I worked with my counselor, maybe at school. It wasn't like my mom was really involved or anyone in my family was really involved in the application process and helping me with my essays and all the things that I know that we do now. I did do a PSAT class, though, and that, like, changed my SAT score dramatically. But I know that's true for so many women that I know, that we were of sort of an era where there wasn't a lot of feeling acumen. It's not that people didn't have feelings. It just wasn't really a strong part of what I think what most of us talked about. And we were very independent from a young age.

Kris Plachy:
Right. No seatbelts, you know. Anyway, just a lot of, a lot of freedom to make a lot of mistakes and all the things. And I did unpack this in the podcast before. Right. And then we sort of are also the generation that started to see like kids getting kidnapped and all those things. And so then the way that we raised our kids was very different than the way that we were raised.

Kris Plachy:
But there's this very specific and unique connection, I think, to having a youth and a childhood and a young adulthood of extreme independence and then becoming a woman who ultimately owns her own business and runs her own life, which is fabulous, except for when it comes to getting support and accepting support and asking for support. There's an irony to that, because, of course, I would be willing to bet those of you listening who identify with this, you support everybody. You never think twice to offer your support, to help, to interrupt your own needs, to take care of the needs of others, to give people the very thing that you probably wish you could get for yourself.So one of the things that I know happens as we become very independent and self reliant, which is, I think, a very good word to describe so many people that I know. We become very good at knowing what we need. We become very good at providing the level of support to ourselves that we want and need. So therefore, it's a very high bar for others to meet, to satisfy, for others to be able to deliver at the level of support that you are used to, used to providing to yourself.

Kris Plachy:
Does that make sense? So even though you might be depleted and you're exhausted and you're freaking sick of having to do everything, it doesn't- the flip side is, "Yes, but I know that I do everything, and when I do everything the way that I do it, I like how it's done. So therefore, if I try to bring somebody else into that, it's not what I want, and therefore, I'm frustrated." And so that just keeps spinning over and over and over and over and over again. And then eventually, right, we start having thoughts and conversations that sound sort of like, "It's just impossible to find someone who can actually do what I want them to do, who can actually meet the expectations that I have. Maybe my expectations are just too high." And to some degree, I wouldn't say that your expectations are too high, but your expectations are very innate in you. They're built into you, so they're hard for you to even express.

Kris Plachy:
Right. I know for myself, like, if I know what I want to achieve or do or get or have, I just take care of it. I'm sure I'm very difficult to be, like, married to and or to even work for, because I just know what I want. I just take care of it. Like, I don't even think to ask a lot and part of that is because sometimes when I ask, it's not what I want. And so therefore, I just feel bad because I end up feeling guilty asking for help and then not wanting the help that I've been offered to, but then I don't ever get the help. And so I don't know if you're listening to this, if this identify, if you identify with it, but so what's, what's a girl to do? What is a girl to do if she knows she can't do it all, and yet she really, really struggles to ask for, get, be accepting of, or even like, the support that she can get if she puts herself out there into it. And even when it comes to business, what's a girl to do? Here's what I think is what we do when we turn into professional versions of ourselves, when we get to a level of maturity that we aren't in, the tantrum that nobody knows how to help me, and also the tantrum of, I could just do it all.

Kris Plachy:
When we reach a level of maturity with ourselves, we recognize that we know a we can't do it all, or if we do, it's not healthy, it's not constructive. We become the bottleneck in our company, and maybe even in our lives. This mature version of ourselves decides what we know someone else really could do and could do well. And it doesn't have to be at the level that we're used to doing for ourselves, at least not initially. And if you look at the team that you have, the people that you've hired, and the things that wrap you around the axle, I would ask you to make two buckets. So when you start to get support, let's have two buckets. Just two. You don't get three.

Kris Plachy:
You get two. You get two buckets. You have one bucket. That is them failing at this role, task, tactic, project, whatever. Them failing at this is shut the business down. Bad. Lose a client. Bad.

Kris Plachy:
Lose more than $10,000. Bad. Bad. And then the other bucket is everything else. Inconvenient, frustrating, disappointing. Slows things down a little, causing rework. Might end up costing us five, $600, a $1,000. You get two buckets.

Kris Plachy:
And I believe that Sage, I have my Sage hat on today, so I'll point to it. Right. The Sage version of you is the version that says, "Okay, this is not going to close the business down. This is not going to make me lose my company. This is not going to make me lose whatever. I don't like it. I don't like dealing with it.

Kris Plachy:
"I'm annoyed that I thought we had a figured a solution and they made a mistake. But I'm not going to hyper react as I have to all the other things in my life up until this point that didn't meet my expectations when I had quote unquote, support. I'm not going to take it back and say, 'forget it. It's just too frustrating'. I'm not going to fire people immediately because it's too frustrating. I'm not going to give up on the notion of being able to step away from my business and take a five week vacation if I want to because of this. I'm not going to do that again.

Kris Plachy:
"I am going to be in the Sage version of myself, this mature version of myself that says, 'I don't choose that this could be better, but it's not in the right.'"As my old Weight Watchers leader taught me years ago, if it's not death, disease, or divorce, we're doing okay. I do believe that we hyper react. And so when we're used to being hyper self reliant and we know what it is that we want, we want these things, we can become very dogmatic, very unflexible because we've set ourselves up by being so self reliant to be almost like, intolerant of anything other than what we are used to. And so then at the same time of that, I have my clients do, like a feeling scale. And on one side, it's like, livid, furious needs to go punch a punching bag. Heartbroken, like, just the extreme. And on the other side is like, right.

Kris Plachy:
What happens is when we are so, we become so accustomed to our own self reliance that when something doesn't go well, we swing all the way over to that rage furious, heartbroken side of the scale, and we don't have the flexibility in our thinking and in our emotions to be able to say, "Okay, this is not what we talked about. This is a mistake. This isn't going to work. This is not what you agreed to. This is not the expectations of the role." We don't have the buffers around ourselves. So we just swing all the way over to this other part of the thing. And then we have all our own, our previous experiences of, like, "It's impossible to find good people. Nobody ever can do what I want.

Kris Plachy:
"My expectations are too high." And then we just, we're all the way over there again. And really, the truth is we're not in the bucket that's going to close the place down. We're just in your bucket of your emotional intolerance of things. And if you want to have joy in your life and you want to have ease in your life and you want to create an environment where people will support the mission of the company and your promise of the company and the goals of the company and the needs that the company has, then we have to allow for other people's minds to function in there. It cannot all just depend on your assessment of excellence, that self reliant version of you that for your life, listen, get it. But when you're trying to achieve work through other people, you're not gonna get it, not regularly. It's okay that people fail and make mistakes.

Kris Plachy:
In fact, we should expect it. It's okay that someone that you actually have hired to support you. We'll miss something. We have to address it. But see, your self reliant self says, "Well, when they screw up, that means I have to fix it. I have to do something about it." No, the mature version of you says, "Oh, dear, that's not what we discussed. How will you fix it? How will you get it done now, we needed this yesterday.

Kris Plachy:
"How will you arrange your schedule to have it finished today? How will you, you, the other person, walk me through the steps that you're going to take to rectify this problem? You show me where you can find resolutions so that the expectation is met here. If you need some support, I'm happy to walk through that with you. I'm happy to bounce ideas off with you." But your assumption that just because you didn't get the support you needed that you have to swing all the way over to self reliance and say, "Well, forget it, I'll just do it," that's what makes you not want to bring more people around you, because all that sounds like is work. I was just, I just got a Voxer from a client. It was so funny to me this morning.

Kris Plachy:
She voxed and she said, I was just listening to your, one of your bonus episodes. And you talked about how after you have a meeting with a client, or, with an employee and you guys go through, like, what you're supposed to be working on and the projects that you're working on, and then you said, have them send you the notes. She's like, that's genius. And of course I'm like, how- I love that she thought that was genius. In my mind, it feels so obvious because I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to do that. That's why this person is in this role is to provide that level of support.

Kris Plachy:
Now I have to tell them that I want to make sure that you're keeping notes here so that you can send a summary. You can send the action items out. You can put them in Asana. You can do whatever it is that we do, but I'm not going to do that. But so many of you are just taking it all right away. Like I just said to someone the other day about job description, she's like, well, I'm going to redo my, my chart and I want to redo the jobs and I want to do this. I'm like, great. Are we doing this with people you already have on the team? And she said, yes, except for one.

Kris Plachy:
I said, awesome. How about you have them rewrite their job descriptions based on the results that you tell them that they have to deliver. Show them how to write a job description. Give them the templates that we use here in our program and have them do it. Why do you take it? Well, we've talked about why. Self reliance. "No one can do it better than me." That is the most painful lie you're telling yourself. And who cares if they can't do it better than you or as well as you? You know what they can do? They can do it well, and they can do it well based on their brain, as long as your results are specific.

Kris Plachy:
But this, this, I'm watching so many women who are my contemporaries suffering over very small, not big deal issues, and I don't want to invalidate the importance of things that you do, but I also want you to have some perspective, because running a company, unless you're just going to be you with a little shingle, and, you know, there's not a lot going on in there, which is totally fine. But most of the people who listen to this podcast, that is not true. The people part will never go away. There will always be people who make mistakes. There will always be people who you think are going to be amazing, and then there aren't. There will always be people who you thought wouldn't be so great, and they, they absolutely turn your head, they're so impressive. There will always be people who screw up, that call in sick, who have major life drama, and it absolutely unglues their whole performance. This is never going to stop.

Kris Plachy:
You are on a carousel. So the only space in this dynamic that you have built for yourself to find peace and joy is in how you respond to the circumstance, not the actual circumstance. There isn't just this magical unicorn team you're going to hire and you're never going to have any problems. People who are able to scale and grow their companies to multiple, multiple, multiple millions have this shift in their brain. Right? Because how could someone possibly run $100 million business? With the way that you think about your $1 million business, you know that's not possible. A hundred million dollar business owner is thinking about such different things than you are. And the way the bridge to get you there, whether you want to make $100 million or not, is your willingness to relieve yourself of the burden that I'm the one who has to fix it. And I am never going to get the kind of support that I need.

Kris Plachy:
No, the person who will always support who what she needs is you. We've figured that out. Now what we have to do is build a team that's going to help achieve the goals of the business. And sometimes they'll make some mistakes. And when mistakes are made, that is not an invitation for you to fix it. It is an invitation for you to lead them through it. And the sooner you can sit with this and make yourself okay and not let your emotional health be driven by whether somebody called in sick or not today, the more you're going to love your company, the more you're going to love people on your team.

Kris Plachy:
They're all so unique and different and interesting. And are there some people that you hire that really shouldn't be in your business? 100%. And could we stop compensating for that? And could we stop tolerating them? And could we stop doing their job so that we could actually just make it very clear that they shouldnt be working for you anymore? It really will be okay. But the first place it has to get to be okay is in the way that you think, not in the people that you have who support you and the business. So if you're a Gen X woman or you're not, you're just someone who's like nodding her head like, "Oh, yeah, that's me too." Right? I just happen to know that everybody who's about my age seems to be dealing with this. It's that, yes, you have set yourself up for really high levels of self support because of your self resilience and the way that you have had to be independent and take care of yourself. Like, you know what to do to take care of yourself, and you know what to do, honestly take care of your business.

Kris Plachy:
But what you do is not something that you can keep doing over and over and over again without help. And we have to practice asking, and we have to practice being very clear about what the result is that we want. And we have to practice holding people accountable if they don't deliver what they said they would. And we have to practice not being their rescuer when they don't do what they said they would, but instead redirecting them to solve for their own errors, mistakes, oversights, or missed deadlines. We do not rescue people. That's what all of us have been doing with our children, all the kids we've been raising, right? We've been raising kids and fixing everything for them. Why? Because nobody did for us. So of course now they're going to probably raise all these kids who nobody knows where they are.

Kris Plachy:
And they come when the lights come on. I just feel like it's this circle that we're all just going to keep spinning different cycles in. But regardless, I want to see you learn how to be supported, and to allow the space that can come into your life, and into your mind, and into your business, and the success that could follow that when you are letting go, once you've let go of your desire and need to control everybody's outcomes so that you feel safe. We can't do that. We have to trust other people's minds and we have to trust our own to be honest about what success looks like and how to make that happen and then hold people accountable to it. So the support, dynamic and challenge is real. I know you know it's real and I would love to help you resolve this personally, which is why we are currently accepting people on our wait list for Lead for Women. So if you're ready to work with me in person,

Kris Plachy:
in fact, I think this podcast, we will actually be open for registration. We start on October 9 and we will meet once a week for eight weeks. And it's a live experience with me, complemented by ten lessons. And we have a Live CEO Hotline where you can work with my team and get your questions answered when you need them. Plus, you're going to get to be in the room with other women like you. And this is different than normal. Like, I think what you hear about business coaching, this is really for you as the leader of your business, so that you can transform the way you think about yourself as a leader and ultimately how you lead the other people in your business. I don't want you to be managing people, not if you're running a multiple million dollar business.

Kris Plachy:
We need to get you into leadership, and that's a different posture than managing people all day. Who the heck wants that job? Not a Visionary, not a woman who sees the potential of a future that other people don't see. She does not want to be managing people. She wants to be changing the world. But you've got to do the lifting and the investment in yourself so that you can make that transition. Because if you've been growing this business, it's understandable that you're managing. And it's understandable that it's hard for you to believe you can build a team that can support the vision because it has been you driving it all along. Is that scary? Yes.

Kris Plachy:
Is it likely you might hire people and they will fail? Uh huh. Is that a good reason to stop? No. No. Your vision, it wants you to win, but you've got to walk through the scary, dark, messy parts to get there. It's so worth it. It's so fun to talk to the clients I've worked with now for several years who are, like, looking at their life future, of like, millions of dollars and selling their company or giving it and selling it to their team, and, like, having this whole other version of the life that they want. And their business bought them that independence and freedom because they were willing to transform who they are in the way that they think about leading their business and accessing and tapping people, other people, for support. The promise is available to you, but it is effort and it is commitment.

Kris Plachy:
But I would like nothing more than to work with you. This is the only time you can work with me live for the rest of this year. We start on October 9. Go to thevisionary.CEO/nextstep, and let's go. What if you knew within three months time, you could have the major issues in your business triaged and you would have a plan for going forward? What if you knew that? What if you really believed that was possible? Why wait? Let's go. Let's get you some support, Mama.

Kris Plachy:
I think we can. All right, talk to you next time.