The woman who built everything herself is the last one to believe it can run without her.
You know this about yourself. You're not unaware. You see the irony: managing teams, running organizations, making decisions that affect hundreds of people. And yet you cannot stop rewriting your assistant's emails. You check behind the housekeeper. You redo the school form because it's faster than explaining. You plan the vacation yourself because "it's just easier."
It's not easier. It's just yours.
And you're tired. Not the kind of tired that sleep fixes. The kind that comes from carrying things you don't know how to put down.
This is the part no one talks about: for women who built their lives on competence, delegation feels like self-erasure. Your hands made this. Your judgment, applied ten thousand times until it became instinct, shaped every corner of it. Handing something off doesn't feel like efficiency. It feels like handing off proof that you were ever here.
So you hold it. All of it. The things that matter and the things that don't, held the same way because you've never learned to tell the difference. Not because you're incapable. Because everything you touch becomes yours, and what's yours, you keep.
You're senior enough to have help and successful enough to afford it. And you're still the bottleneck of your own life.
The lie underneath
The story you tell yourself is about standards. No one will do it the way I would. It's faster to do it myself. I'll just fix it anyway.
But underneath that is something else. Not whether you can rely on them. Whether the outcome can survive without your hands on it. Whether something can be good enough even if it isn't yours. Whether your standards can be absorbed by someone else and still be your standards.
And honestly? It makes sense that you'd struggle with this. You learned early that your hands were the safest place for things that mattered. That lesson served you well for a long time. It just doesn't anymore.
Delegation asks you to let things get missed sometimes and not die from it. That's not a skill gap. That's an identity built on being the one who never let things slip.
What actually has to transfer
Most delegation advice focuses on tasks. Hand off the task, define the outcome, check in later. This misses the point entirely.
What has to transfer isn't the task. It's four things underneath it, and if any one is missing, you'll take it back within a month.
The standard, made visible. Not "do it well." The actual standard, externalized. What does done look like? What does good enough look like? What would make you redo it, and what would make you let it go? Most capable women have never articulated this because they've never had to. The standard lives in their body, in their eye, in the thing that tightens when something is slightly off. Delegation requires translating that into language someone else can use.
