The hidden cost of self-reliance
“People aren’t going to be there for me. So I need to take care of myself.”
Hi there,
Self-reliance began the first time you realized you weren’t going to be taken care of.
It was when you learned, often at a young age, that you needed to take care of your caregivers, whether it was your parents, grandparents, or teachers. Perhaps you needed to make them happy, relieve their fear, or stop their criticism.
The belief underneath is: “People aren’t going to be there for me. So I need to take care of myself.”
What most people miss about self-reliance is that everyone carries this pattern to some degree. The question isn’t whether it’s present, but how deeply it’s running your life.
Self-reliance has a lot of upsides. It’s often the thing that drives people to be successful. But it can also have lots of negative side-effects. Here are some ways self-reliance can end up impacting your company:
1. You take responsibility for your team’s emotions
When a child learns it’s their job to keep caregivers regulated, they carry that responsibility forward. As a leader, this shows up as managing feelings instead of setting direction, taking responsibility for people and their outcomes, and a constant feeling of obligation.
Over time, this creates resentment in the leader and the employees. You feel like you need to take care of others in ways that you’re not actually able to. And the company as a whole starts to organize around protecting feelings instead of producing outcomes.
2. You rarely share your wants
Self-reliance teaches you that wanting is dangerous. If your job was to take care of your caregivers, your wants become secondary, invisible, or not allowed.
As a leader, this creates two problems at once. One, you don’t clearly express what you want, so your team doesn’t know how to win. And two, the wants that do surface rarely come out cleanly.
The result is fear. Your team doesn’t know what success looks like, so they often feel scared because they don’t know if they’re doing a good job, and end up in inefficient loops because they’re trying to guess what will keep you happy.
3. You have a hard time asking for help
When a child learns their job is to take care of others, asking for help feels foreign, weak, or even selfish. But your desire for help doesn’t just disappear, it gets stuck.
This creates a paradox: Wanting help while pushing it away. The stronger your self-reliance, the more you secretly wish that someone can someday take care of you.
But at the same time, you reject or invalidate the help that’s actually available by asking in ways that seem indirect, resentful, vague, or desperate. This repels people, so they’re less likely to help. And this reinforces the original belief that “No one will help me.”
4. You don’t own your power
Most self-reliant leaders don’t trust authority, because your early authority figures were unsafe, unreliable, or emotionally costly. This creates a double bind with power. You don’t want anyone to have power over you, yet you also feel uncomfortable in authority positions, because of what you experienced authority to mean.
The result is a desire for power without fully being able to own it. And that creates power vacuums. It creates a leader who is technically in charge, but not fully occupying the role. A leader who doesn’t feel comfortable telling others what to do when it’s needed. And when the team sees this vacuum, they feel unsafe or step in to fill it. This leads to unnecessary conflict or drama.
Go deeper. Listen to our podcast:
Big Love,
Joe
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