One of my big Let Go moments was about being a superwoman. I could do anything and most everything pretty darn well. And if I couldn’t, I usually found a way to do it anyway.

I hated to be needy.

I hated asking for help. One day, I had an AH-HA moment—let-go moments are often accompanied by AH-HA moments—when I realized I no longer wanted to do everything.

To give you some background on me, I am a casting director in Los Angeles and have had my own business for three decades. I live alone. I train horses. I compete in  50-100-mile races on horseback, a sport called Endurance Riding. My horses live on my property. I do most of the care and upkeep for them myself. I have 2+ dogs, a few cats, and an occasional stray or foster animal at any given time.

I am single. I am single because I want to be for now. I am taking my singlehood time to explore who I am and examine areas of my life that no longer serve me today. We often have to examine our past to move forward and let go of certain behaviors or beliefs to become more self-aware.

I have always prided myself on being able to fly solo on this life journey. Not that I don’t love to be in partnership; I do. However, I have discovered that I was choosing partners who allowed my old behavior (of taking care of everything) to soar, and now I want to change that behavior. I wanted to understand how not to feel like I needed to do everything myself during this leg of singlehood. I saw many female friends who did not have my needs.
I knew this new way of being would be life-changing for me. I had no idea how even to begin. It seemed so “weak.” And I had a phobia about being weak.

By sheer determination to change within me, I decided that despite being self-sufficient, self-reliant, self-made, self-motivated, and self-self-self…, I lacked a fundamental trait that many of my girlfriends had. And that was the ability to ask for help. They could say they couldn’t fix everything, didn’t know how to do everything, and could admit it without shame.

Everything has a yin and yang, give and take, soft and hard. I had the hard part down. That started my quest to figure out how to find the balance and find my softer side. I had to identify the number one factor that it required.

It came down to a simple solution. Just ask for help and stop doing it all by myself.

Ok, it’s easy to say that and completely different to do it.

Our thoughts of who we are create the lives we live. If we want to change the ways we are uncomfortable with, we need to change how we think about things.

We all have thousands of beliefs about who we are and how we see the world. This is normal. And many are great at serving our needs.

And some are not.

I love being independent. I was born on Independence Day, so it must have been in the stars. Being independent has allowed me to explore the world and have many beautiful experiences. It has been a fantastic ride thus far. I have no complaints.

I have affectionately been called “The Hub,” “The Go-To Person,” or “Ask Charisse; she just knows stuff.” I love to help where I can. I, too, can pick up the phone and ask my mom for a recipe or ask someone for an opinion on something.

But that is not the kind of ‘help’ I am referring to here.

I am talking about a core issue of vulnerability. I realized that asking for help was not about me being strong. Every coin has two sides, and I realized I needed to look at strength differently. So I flipped the coin over and saw that my fear was of being vulnerable. It felt like I was exposing my soft underbelly, and it was terrifying.

As I dove deeper into my self-discovery, I realized I had completely misjudged what asking for help was all about. Instead of weakness, I saw the strength in it. I learned that it was a particular strength to be able to ask for help.

I saw that the vulnerability that my girlfriends so easily allowed, was because of a tremendous quality of self-assurance.

Suppressing my cringe response, I was learning that it is ok to ask and seek help. Nothing horrible was going to happen. And it was not shameful to not be able to do EVERYTHING.

I enlisted some of my close friends to assist me on this journey of change, thereby “asking for their help” to remind me when I stepped off the path I was venturing down.

While speaking to a dear male friend about my new awakening, he acknowledged what I was going through and called it my superwoman cape. By the way, he also told me that men LOVE to help solve problems and to have solutions.

Ok, I liked that I was on the path. Maybe I would begin to attract a different kind of man.

A month or so into my journey, I could see if I had truly integrated the behavior I had been working on…

One morning, after a night of heavy rain, my male friend called and asked what I was doing.

I told him, “Oh, the rain has been flooding my horse stalls and paddock; I’ve been digging ditches all night, on my backhoe since about 3 AM, tarping everything before the next onslaught.”

He asked, “Do you need help?”

I said, “Oh no, that’s ok… But if you want to come over, that’s cool.”

He said, “No, I don’t want to come over and get cold, wet, and muddy… But if you need help, I’ll come over. (PAUSE) … (LONGER PAUSE). So take off your cape and ask for help.”

My mind slowly pressed the reset button (REALLY LONG PAUSE). I  took a deep breath, and with every ounce of determination, I answered despite my old belief system screaming at me not to do it.

“Sure, that would be great ( gulp gulp); I could use your help” (teeth clenched).

He did come over and lent a hand. My old inner dialog was still fighting what was happening as I had numerous thoughts, “I really could have done it solo,” floating about my mind.
However, my new thoughts were overridden, and I was happy to have help. I realized I was still alive, and nothing terrible happened by having someone assist me. It was fun not to have to be so capable.

This friend is a true friend. He refused to let me fall back into a pattern that he knew I was working to Let Go.

Friends like this are one in a million.

The lessons we want to learn will often come back to test us to ensure we have understood them. We are tested initially more frequently; as the lesson becomes more integrated into our habits, the tests come less often.

Finally, after practicing my new behavior, I  felt I had this one under control. And then, every once in a while, my friend reminds me my cape is showing. I smile and say, Thank You. It’s great to have friends who care.