You handle everything. And everyone around you knows it.
So why does asking for help feel so impossible?
This question came up during a recent private event Q&A. And honestly? My first thought was: this is me. I struggled with this for years. If you’re a high-performing woman who can’t seem to ask for support – or you love someone who can’t – keep reading.
By the end of this post, you’ll understand why women struggle to ask for help. You’ll also have clear, actionable steps – whether you’re the one who needs help asking or the one who wants to show up better.
Why Women Struggle to Ask for Help: The Psychology Behind It
This isn’t about personality. It runs much deeper than that.
In my work as a keynote speaker and coach, I’ve identified this challenge as a combination of two of my Overwhelm Culprits™: confidence and community. Here’s why they intersect.
Social Conditioning and Hyper-Independence
Many women are raised to be strong and self-sufficient. We’re taught to put others’ needs before our own. Over time, this creates a powerful ‘do it yourself’ default.
There’s also a deep fear of being a burden. For decades, women relied on men to provide for them. To earn that, we had to be of service. That conditioning doesn’t disappear overnight.
So when we ask for help, it can feel like we’re saying: I’m not enough. I can’t handle it. But the truth? Asking for help is a strategy for success. Even the strongest leaders ask their teams for support every day.
The Workplace Makes It Worse
At work, women face an additional layer. Studies show women are judged on performance, while men are judged on potential. That alone creates a pressure to appear superhuman.
In male-dominated industries, women often feel they must work twice as hard. Asking for help feels like it disproves that. So we avoid it entirely.
This is one of the key reasons why women struggle to ask for help – and it’s not a personal flaw. It’s a response to a very real environment.
My Own Experience With This
After being a single mother for over four years, I remarried. One of my husband’s biggest frustrations? I never asked for help.
Everything relied on me for so long. It didn’t even cross my mind that asking was an option. Even today, it’s a work in progress for both of us.
What helped: I had to shift my mindset. Asking for help isn’t just safe – it’s expected in healthy relationships. Personal and professional alike.
Steps for Her: How to Start Asking for Help
If you’re the woman who can never ask for help, here’s where to start:
- Identify What Comes Up When You Ask What thoughts and feelings surface? For me, it was fear. If I didn’t do it, no one would. I was the breadwinner, the cook, the caretaker. Everything. Get specific about what comes up for you.
- Find the Root of the Belief Where did you first learn it wasn’t safe to ask? For me, it wasn’t something anyone said. It was what people didn’t do. The lack of support taught me not to trust.
- Reframe Using Practical Tools
Two tools I love for this kind of mental reframing:
EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique): Tapping on pressure points while saying affirmations rewires your nervous system. It helps you feel safe while exploring the belief that’s keeping you stuck.
Affirmations: I use an app called Think Up to record myself and listen back every morning. Simple phrases like ‘It is safe for me to ask for help’ can genuinely shift your default over time.
- Start Small and Build Up Start with a tiny ask. Something low stakes. ‘Hey, can you do the laundry this weekend?’ That’s it.
When you see it’s safe, your confidence grows. Bigger asks feel more doable over time.
Steps for Supporters: How to Make It Easier for Her
If you’re a partner, colleague, or manager, this part is for you.
1. Understand Why It’s Hard It’s not a failure on her part. It’s rooted in social conditioning, workplace bias, and often personal history. Understanding the ‘why’ changes everything.
2. Reaffirm That It’s Safe Tell her. Regularly. ‘It’s okay to ask me for help.’ My husband did this repeatedly. It genuinely moved the needle.
3. Suggest Specific Help — Don’t Just Ask ‘What Can I Do?’ ‘What can I do to help?’ is another decision on her already overloaded plate. Instead, try: ‘I know you’re swamped this week – want me to handle bath time tonight?’ Specific offers are easier to say yes to. Think of it like a meal train after a loss in the family. Nobody asks the grieving person what they’d like cooked. They just cook.
4. Complete It From A to Z If you offer to do the laundry, do all of it. Wash, dry, fold, and put it away. Half a task isn’t help. It creates more mental load, not less.
Final Thoughts on Why Women Struggle to Ask for Help
High-performing women want to ask for help. They just don’t feel it’s safe. And that makes complete sense once you understand the layers underneath it.
Whether you’re working through this yourself or supporting someone who is, the path forward starts with awareness, empathy, and small consistent actions.
Want to go deeper? I cover this – and so much more – in my upcoming book, The Five Overwhelm Culprits™, launching May 12, 2026. You can also take the free Overwhelm Culprit™ Quiz to find out which culprit is holding you back right now.
And if this resonated with you, share it with a woman in your life who needs to hear it!
CLICK FOR TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00] As women, we tend to not ask for help when needed when we are overwhelmed, how can we overcome this?
This is a real audience question that I received during a recent private event Q&A and the reason why this happens may surprise you. If you are a woman who doesn’t ask for help or maybe you are someone who’s supporting a woman who does. By the end of this episode, you’re gonna know why this happens as well as exactly how to ask for or give the support that you need.
If you’re new here, my name is Corrie LoGiudice, otherwise known as Corrie Lo, and I’m a professional keynote speaker, facilitator, and executive coach, as well as author who helps leaders transform overwhelm into confident action even in times of crisis.
When I got this question during the Q&A, my first thought was this is me. I used to struggle with this for years and I share a lot of my stories during this timeframe in my life. In my upcoming book, the [00:01:00] Five Overwhelm Culprits™. This issue is a combination of two Overwhelm Culprits™, confidence, and community. And here’s why.
High performing women often are so great at helping and supporting others that the people surrounding them think that they naturally just have it all together and that they don’t necessarily need support. Which is crazy when you think about it. Ultimately, this ends up becoming our default, especially at home.
So a big part of this is due to social conditioning as well as something called hyper independence. So many women are raised to be strong, self-sufficient, put others’ needs before their own and ultimately this leads to a sort of
‘do it yourself’
kind of mentality. There’s also a huge fear by women of being a burden.
And this makes a ton of sense too, because for many, many years. Women needed to be of service to have their needs accounted for. So for decades and decades and decades, [00:02:00] women were not able to provide for themselves. We relied on men, and in order to do that, we needed to be able to provide some sort of value in being of service.
So when we ask for help on things, and this is kind of due to the social conditioning, many women feel that asking for help makes them seem like they’re a burden on others, even though this isn’t necessarily the case.
Asking for help is often mistakenly seen by others as admitting weakness or failure. Like, I’m not enough, I can’t do it myself, I need to ask for help from you. Therefore, I am a giant miserable failure. Where really the truth is asking for help on things, it’s actually a strategy for success because no one can expect to be able to function at full capacity all the time.
Even the strongest leaders are asking their teams for help on a regular basis.
So speaking of teams, let’s talk about work, because at work is a completely different story. Women in leadership are often judged more on their performance
while men are judged on their potential. And again, this isn’t just conjecture, [00:03:00] this is data this is statistics and studies have proved this.
So women immediately default to asking for help as feeling unsafe because we fear that it’s gonna be misconstrued as us underperforming, ‘ cause we’re always judged on that performance versus our potential. Also too, In male dominated industries, women often feel like they have to work twice as hard to be seen as equally as competent. And this often involves us acting as if we’re super women to be able to prove that we belong there and asking for help feels like it doesn’t prove anything. So we avoid doing it. One great example of this is after I married my husband. After being a single mother for over four years, one of his biggest frustrations that he had with me was that I never ever asked for help. I was so used to doing it myself, I would always do it on my own because I thought I had to and I thought that if I didn’t do it, it wouldn’t get done.
So everything, everybody, and everything relied on me for such a long time. It didn’t [00:04:00] even cross my mind that asking for help was an option. And I mean it when I say this was a sticking point that if you ask my husband, even today, probably his number one critique of me is that I don’t ask for help and it’s taken us both a couple of years to figure this out.
So to break it down, for me personally, it was adjusting my mindset that asking for help is not only safe, but it’s expected. It’s expected in healthy relationships and that doesn’t matter whether it’s personal or professional. For him, it was understanding why it was so hard for me.
Understanding that backstory, understanding that social conditioning, understanding all the pieces that layer into it and for him, adjusting his expectations that I’ll just tell him step by step what I need help with. Because a lot of times people expect you to go, they’re like, oh yeah, I’m available to help.
But then they want a step by step checklist of everything that you’d like them to help with, which creates more mental load on you, which isn’t very [00:05:00] helpful. It doesn’t help women in their mental load, so that was something that we had to work together to help figure out a solution for him to be able to step in and take on some of that.
So I’d absolutely love to know, have you ever experienced this with your partner? Leave a comment below. I’d love to hear about it.
All right. So from here, let’s break down some steps for her. i.e you are the woman who never asks for help. What you can do to begin to feel safe enough to ask for help. And then I’m also gonna break steps for everybody supporting her, whether you be a partner, a colleague, a boss, whatever that looks like, so that she feels safe enough to ask for help.
So let’s go about steps for her first. You first and foremost have to identify what thoughts and feelings come up when you ask for help. So for me, when I was initially unpacking this, I had thoughts and fears more or less because I had been in an abusive kind of neglectful relationship for many years before that if I didn’t do it, [00:06:00] no one else would do it. I was the breadwinner, I was the one that kept the roof over our heads that kept food in the fridge. Literally and figuratively. I paid for the food as well as went and bought it, as well as cooked it. So I literally felt like if I didn’t do it, it wouldn’t happen and then me, my kids, my family would not be safe. So I had to identify what the specific thoughts and feelings were that came up regarding asking for help.
So then from there you identify the root of that thought. Where’s the first place that you ever heard it? For me, it wasn’t necessarily something someone said to me.
It was the lack of actions from other people surrounding me that taught me that it wasn’t safe for me to just be able to trust and let go.
Then from there, it’s a matter of releasing the negative belief and reframing that it is safe to ask for help. So some tools that are phenomenal for doing this type of mental reframing would be things like emotional freedom technique, otherwise known as EFT.
[00:07:00] That is tapping on different pressure points on your face while saying different affirmations. It rewires your thought patterns in your body so that you neurologically feel safe while talking about whatever it is that currently freaks you out.
So, for example, some things I might have said while doing EFT would’ve been like, it is safe for me to ask for help, it is safe for me not to have to do everything myself, it is safe for me to be loved and supported. And Another great tool to use are things like affirmations. Affirmations work similarly just without the tapping on the pressure points.
And by listening to them every single day, either reciting them, writing them, listening to them. I talk about this a lot in my book. I love an app called Think Up that I actually record myself saying the affirmation and I will listen to it while putting on my makeup and making my bed in the morning.
So any kind of negative thought that you want to be able to reframe into something positive, like an affirmation, that’s a great way to do this.
So [00:08:00] from there, you’re gonna start with super small asks and you build your way up to bigger ones. So for me, some super small asks for things like, and I actually did this weekend like, Hey, could you do the laundry
this weekend while I take care of some other stuff? Not a super big ask, but an ask nonetheless. And then as you get more confident with asking for help and seeing that it is safe and that people aren’t going to abandon you when you do it or critique you for not being enough or strong enough or able to handle it.
The more you start with the smaller stuff and then build up, the more confident you are in asking for help regardless of what the situation is.
All right, so let’s dive into some steps for supporters. So if you have a woman in your life that you are supporting in some way, shape or capacity, first it’s so important to understand why it is not easy for her to just ask for help.
We talked a lot about it earlier in terms of like social conditioning or even just different bias in the workplace. There’s a lot of reasons [00:09:00] why women in particular, we do not find it easy to ask for help even when we need it. So first step is understanding where they’re coming from. It’s not a failure on their part. A lot of times it’s just based on the beliefs and things that they grew up with or what they’ve experienced in places like the workplace.
Next is to reaffirm to her that is safe to ask for help. This is something my husband did to me all the time. It’s okay, you can ask me for help if you’re stressed out. He constantly reaffirmed and revalidated for me that it was okay to do so.
And then the next thing, which this was the biggest shift that we made in my relationship and for me to be able to give up and let things go, was my partner would suggest things that they could do to help, as opposed to just asking, what could I do? So some examples of this would be like, again, like what happened this weekend. “Hey, I know you’re shopping for holiday gifts for everybody why don’t you let me do the laundry?” I’ll take care of that. [00:10:00] Or like, “Hey, I know you have a lot going on with work and you need to pound out a few emails tonight. Why don’t you let me take on kids’ bath time?” Or even in the workplace too. “Hey, I know you have a lot on your plate looking at Google Calendar and you’re fully booked up this week, why don’t you let me take that project off your plate?” Or “Why don’t you let me reassign that project to somebody else who has more capacity?”
So being specific with it helps her because otherwise when you just say, what can I do to help? You’re just putting another decision on her plate, which makes it that much harder to delegate. Not just her, but anybody. It doesn’t matter what your gender is. If you’re not being specific on what it is that you could help with, you’re doing more harm than helping.
And then when you offer solutions upfront on specific things, it makes it so much easier to say yes. Think about it from a standpoint when you are in a position where you needed help with something. Here’s a great example when you have a loss in the family, a lot of times it’s a tradition and custom for people’s communities and families to come together and [00:11:00] create like a meal train.
It’s not like people are coming to the folks who lost somebody and are grieving and are saying,
“Hey, what could we do to help you?” No they’re proactively going out and they’re organizing things like,
“Hey, we’re gonna cook food for you. So that you don’t have to worry about it”
they’re thinking about it in advance.
Not that the person grieving has to think about, oh what am I gonna make to eat? ‘ cause otherwise they’re not gonna eat. So it’s a very, very similar course of action, but it helps solve the same problem when you’re so overwhelmed and so stressed out that you freeze. Offering a solution upfront makes it an absolute no-brainer for the person in that position, feeling overwhelmed to say yes.
And then last but not least, and this is really important, whatever that support is, make sure you complete it from A to Z. So, as an example of this, let’s go back to the laundry, right? You offer, okay, I am gonna do the laundry. That’s not running the laundry through until it gets to the last load. And then you leave it in the dryer for her to then ask, where’s the laundry
and then having to go and pull that last load and then have to fold it and put it [00:12:00] away. Also, It means like it’s from start to finish. It’s from putting it in the washing machine, folding it and then putting it away. Like complete that process from A to Z, whatever it looks like, don’t do half a project. If you were to take on a project from somebody at work, it would not be acceptable for somebody to hand in half a project when you’re taking it over from somebody else.
Life doesn’t work that way, so make sure you’re completing the whole thing start to finish. So to recap everything we talked about high performing women, we want to ask for help, but we don’t necessarily feel it’s safe to do so. And this has a lot to do with social conditioning, with hyper independence, with fear of being a burden to others, as well as performance and competence bias in the workplace.
So if you are a woman who wants to start asking for help first is make sure you gain self-awareness on your fear surrounding asking for help. What pops up? Where did you learn to believe that it is not safe to ask for help? Identify the root of that fear. And then from there, work on releasing that belief utilizing tools like emotional freedom, technique, [00:13:00] EFT or maybe even affirmations.
And from there, start with small asks. Ask for something super minor so that you don’t feel like you’re a burden, see that’s safe to have that delivered to you and to have that help. And then from there, increase the asks with time as needed.
For folks who are supporting women who really need the help at the time, understand the many reasons why it’s not intuitive for her to just step up and ask for help.
Also validate her that it’s okay to and is safe to ask for help. Suggest things that you could take off her plate. Don’t just ask what can I do to help, suggest specific things and when she does actually say yes, it would be awesome if you handle that for me. Make sure you complete it from A to Z. Don’t half ass it.
So hopefully you found my sharing this all today valuable. If you have a question and you’d like me to answer it, maybe it’s a follow up to this or maybe it’s something completely separate from it, feel free to leave a comment, send me an email. We would love to feature it on a future episode.
And as I mentioned before, I cover this question in detail with [00:14:00] even more strategies in my new book, the Five Overwhelm Culprits™, which is launching on May 12th, 2026. It is available for pre-order and it’s in the show notes. Go ahead and click the link there. You can also learn more ways to work with me, whether that be one-on-one or with your organization in the show notes as well.
Thank you so much for being here, and I will see you on the next episode.
Thanks for checking out the next step with Corrie Lo If this episode resonated with you, share it with a friend, subscribe and leave a review. Together we’ll transform overwhelm into action and we’ll keep taking the next step towards competent leadership. See you next time.