Are you exhausted from trying to hold everything together, but at the same time you struggle letting go of control. Today I am sharing a story and the words of a client in a recording that we had. Steph used to push through all of the tasks in her business and with her employees design her job, emails, her job strategy, coaching spreadsheets, deliverables, Canva.

All her job, not because she didn't know the delegation was important, she knew it was, but the part of her that led the way was wired to, to control all of the details. It's what got her to her 📍 position. But now that she needed to look at things and moving more into a leadership role, she found it really hard to let go and let other people show her how capable they could be.

📍 By the end of today's episode, you'll learn why hyper dependence and over control are often rooted in trauma, not your personality type, and how one client of mine, Steph, moved from chronic burnout to embodied delegation and why it started with trust, not tools, plus a practical script to delegate effectively without triggering your old patterns of mistrust.

Or the other person's perhaps pain around shame or not. Being trusted.

I'm about to share with you an audio recording with permission from a beautiful client of mine staff about how she actually came to this call celebrating that she had been delegating, and then we went through what it was that actually helped her to begin delegating. Have a listen to that and then we'll unpack how this happened.

I'll share with you that script that I said that I was going to the practical script, and we'll also go over how and why hyper dependence over control is often related to a betrayal trauma.

I've been always like very controlling.

And very hard for me to like delegate. And now I caught myself these past weeks. Like what can I give to like the girl that's helping me with design and just like realizing like, whoa, I am actually like finding, looking for thanks to delegate instead of like the other way around. How did you, I'm curious, like, because I know that this has been a goal for, for a while. I'm curious at what point did you really notice, okay, if I don't learn to delegate, this is not gonna work.

Like, I'm not gonna be okay. , When was that turning point for you?

Realizing it slowly that I, if I don't delegate it, I, I was just burnt out. Uh, so it has been just like slow and just like, yeah, like I, I feel like I'm becoming more of a business owner than a freelancer, I feel like there's two things in delegation. There's actually understanding that we can delegate. So sometimes we have projects that we take on or actions that we take on, and we're like.

I don't know, like the idea of delegating, it just doesn't even occur to us. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And then there's, okay, I know that I could delegate this, but I don't, I don't want to for a reason. Mm-hmm. And what you are saying is that you've been able to identify what you can, whereas before you couldn't, and now you feel confident that you can and that you and you actually are.

Maybe the turning point. The exact one was like finding this girl, like liking her work and working with her a couple times. It was like, this is it. This is like, yeah, I can keep working with her. What made you realize the things you could delegate though? Uh, I feel like we align in like maybe work ethics and also like talent wise.

Because some always there was when I worked with someone, there was something missing, like great talent, but like missing deadlines or things like that, or the other way around. And this grows like the whole package. Yeah. So I feel like I can trust her. Have you experienced with her any of that tension around not wanting to let, especially around the design stuff around not wanting to.

Me not wanting to let go. Let go. Yeah. Uh, a bit, a bit, but I catch myself and I'm, I'm looking at it like I, I am doing things I wanna do things that I cannot delegate. Like more macro stuff, more strategy stuff. Um, so I catch myself and I think like, okay, I'm gonna use my time to do. Something that's gonna give me more money.. It's been like internal work for sure. The coaching with you.

Yeah. I don't think, uh, I'd be here without that.

You will notice that Steph spoke a lot around trust. This often happens because we usually have a bit of a difficult time letting go of control and trusting somebody else to do something because there have been other times in the past where somebody let us down or betrayed us. They said that they were gonna do something or we expected them to do something and they did it.

Maybe it was because your ex always said that he was gonna do certain things and then he didn't. Or maybe that's just me, or maybe it's because your mom or your dad were gonna do things in a certain way. Your best friend when you were in high school, they always said that they were gonna help you with the group project or the thing at home, and like they just didn't follow through.

Or maybe there was a larger betrayal. One around unspoken rules being cheated on or something else. What often happens is this means that we have trouble trusting other people and we bring that into our work and we bring that into our business and we bring that into our leadership. It creates parts of us that show up as the hypervigilant manager who is scanning for signs that somebody else is gonna drop the ball and kind of micromanages.

You may have had one of these managers before. It doesn't feel very good, does it? Or a distrustful protector who just protects you from all types of collaboration and relationships because it thinks, well, it's just easier if I do this myself and if I just take care of it because then I'm do. Nobody will.

Nobody will like betray me because if I just do it all myself, then I can't be let down. These parts can be really helpful in some scenarios, but in others not so much, especially as we step into roles or ages that require us to let go and have other people do things so that we can focus on what we do best.

So how do we begin to delegate in a way that feels safe for these parts of us? First of all, it has to be slow. Steph spoke about in this audio that she's been coming to coaching for a little while now. In coaching, we didn't overwrite any of her fear. We attuned to it and we gave her clear, calm instructions to the part of herself that needed a sense of grounded leadership from herself.

And then we took that out and we used that with people that she was delegating with. There is a script that I often recommend when clients are ready to delegate or you're trying to delegate in a way that builds safety inside of your team. I share this inside of my book in chapter 13 of Somatic Intelligence for Success.

It goes like this. There are three steps. Number one, share the goal. So we're just getting them on the same page for the goal. What are we doing? We need a report with insights on this thing. Number two, make sure the outcome is really clear. This might involve a little bit of thinking on your behalf. I believe in you.

You can do it. If you can't use track PT, it should cover Y and Z. Be clear. And then number three, this is where that safety level comes in, and this is where we get to actually experience and encourage the best parts of other people, which is to allow creativity, which means just like you want to be given space to express your own creativity, other people want that as well.

So it's like use the format that you prefer, I'll review it. All I need you to do is make is X, Y, and Z. These are the important parts. The rest, you do it your way. This is safe leadership. This is a leadership that pulls out the best of you and the best of somebody else. It's leading from a, a space inside of you that's like, I'm safe to be supported.

I'm allowed this because letting go of tasks, especially creative ones, if you are kind of in a design or a marketing or or type of industry, isn't, it's not about discipline. So your resistance to delegation isn't laziness. It's not your ego. It's more about safety, trust and clarity. When we are resistant to delegation, it's just your body trying to create predictability and create safety, so we create it actively instead.

Meaning that we invest in people and we invest in systems and little scripts like I'm giving you that make it feel like the team isn't gonna collapse without you. It's that you practice trust before you're even ready to feel it. Trust in yourself, trust in your system, trust in your team, and you're really clear on what you expect, as well as what your energy is most valuable on.

So as you take this into your week. The three things that you're gonna really consider so that you can practice letting go so that you can support the parts of you that may have been betrayed in this in the past. And so that you can use the framework. And the script that I've given you is to identify your ROI zone, like your, what is the thing that only you can do?

Identify what energized you most at the moment. What are the things that you want to do, and then anything else that doesn't lay between those zoned. Those zone is a candidate for delegation. Then think about delegating and notice what happens in your body. Tight chest tension if you delegate it. Do you feel like you're gonna be like checking your phone a thousand times to just see if something's happened?

Do you have thoughts of, ah, it's just quicker if I do it myself. I don't wanna have to explain it. And then ground. Use your regulation practices. Breathe into your belly, pull your shoulders back, pull your energy in and down. Check in with your body, check in with that tension. Are there parts of you that are afraid?

Inside of chapter seven, inside of my book, we have a parts dialoguing, um, practice. Use that to kind of dialogue with these parts. What are you afraid of? How can I support you? What do you need? Is there an emotion that you need to process? Do we need to prove to you that this is safe by actually doing it?

And then. Letting it be okay, and then showing you that it was okay or does that feel too scary?

Maybe you can trace these parts of your back to, I don't know, to another time in your life. Maybe it's just scary because you haven't done it before, and that's okay. Then therefore, the answer is to do it.

Steph said in the recording that. She was able to trust delegation after she had seen that somebody else had earned it, which means that you can trust and you can begin to almost like test somebody, put them on trial and learn what can I trust them with? That's okay. You're allowed to be skeptical. Trust is earned.

It's not given, but can you lean into the discomfort little bit by little bit and just learn to build that trust? So that you can delegate, so that you can do things that energize you, that only you are good at, and you're not tied to your computer fricking day, doing things that make you feel like you have to squish yourself into a box.

Thank you for listening. Go back through and scroll down to episode number 218. It called, I don't even know where to begin. It's a breath practice for nervous system burnout, and it's one that I've used and lived by for many, many years. When things are hard, I highly recommend it. If things are hard and you're like, eh, Sheridan, cute, but like, what do I do with that 218 breath practice for I don't know where to begin.

Go find it. I'll also put the link in the show notes.