If you’re not familiar with it, US Highway 1 is a loooong, two-lane road that twists and winds its way up the cliffside along the California Coast for hundreds and hundreds of miles. 

And there’s a quirky little thing on the side of this iconic road that always cracks me up.

When I drive north on the 1 from the San Francisco Bay Area toward Mendocino, what unfolds to my left is the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean, swirling and crashing in all its majesty and power.

And all along the drive, on my right, there are a series of small, plain brown freeway signs interspersed occasionally along the road. 

They say, simply:

“Coastal View”, in white, with a little white arrow that points to the ocean on your left.

Like: “Hiiii! If you’re looking at this sign… look to your left. You’re missing the ocean!”

Every time I see one of those signs, I laugh at the idea that someone might miss the entire ocean because they were looking in the wrong direction. (Real talk, apparently enough people did miss the ocean to justify putting up signs.)

But the truth is that we all do this exact thing in our real lives, all the time. We are all always surrounded by the people, resources and opportunities we need to fulfill our sacred contracts to be, do, have, learn and create whatever our souls are calling us to do. 

These resources are all around us all the time. 

But we’re only able to see those collaborators and energize those opportunities and accept the assistance that is all around us through the lens of our present beliefs and expectations about the world and about what is available to us. 

These beliefs and expectations are often wired into an inaccurate, isolating, help-obscuring relational template with life early in life, whether from the trauma of being forced to survive without sufficient help very young, or from consistently being rewarded for doing hard things without asking for help and without inconveniencing the adults in our world. 

If you were labeled “gifted” as a child, you might even have been conditioned to believe that needing help is weak or makes you susceptible to bad things happening, that you cannot trust that things will work out well in your life unless you personally spin every single plate, 100% of the time.
This template miswiring is the source of “duck syndrome”, where you try to appear cool and calm on social media while silently struggling and flailing and flapping your feet madly to stay afloat, under the surface.

This broken template is the source of all manner of what I call “moats”, signals we broadcast that keep the people who desire to help us do the hard parts of life at a distance, depriving ourselves of help and of love, connection and community. 

This miswiring is the source of the extreme, dysfunctional ultra-independence I call “I’ll do it myself” syndrome: the detrimental, unconscious inability to receive help or support from others. This is the joy-limiting, soul-shackling, life-limiting curse of the hyper-competent that causes you to spend your whole life doing All of the Things All of the Time, because something deep down thinks you’ll lose points or lose love or lose everything if you stand down, sit still and let others do their part.

So then you attract people who want you to fix everything and do all of the work.

And you cripple those around you, teaching them helplessness by doubting their power.

And you don’t ask for the help that is your Divine Inheritance. 

And you keep your visionary light hidden, because you’re so overextended and busy Getting Things Done, even if they’re not really the things that are the most important to you. 

And at work, you don’t make the business case for the resources you really need. The people you need. The budget you need. Instead, you stay small and play small by doing everything yourself instead of learning how to create and activate a team.

And then your personal and business dreams begin to feel so daunting and impossible because you’re already overextended, and when you envision your dreams you assume that you’ll have to do all of the work yourself, too.

Until one day a crisis or problem in your life flat-out requires more than you can do on your own. And that forces you to seek and receive help. And if you let it, that experience kickstarts the rewiring of this broken template of isolating, dysfunctional ultra-independence. You start to see that there’s a vast ocean of untapped resources all around you, above you, and within you, too. And you begin to learn how to see and leverage those resources.

I’ve learned that the scariest situations and most overwhelming problems in my life are like those brown highway signs. It’s rare, but every time I feel like I might be approaching a breaking point, I’ve learned that I’m being asked to turn my chin to the left by just 6 or 8 inches… so I can see the ocean.

Here’s what I mean. 

Last Transformation Tuesday, a couple days before my birthday, my 27-year-old son was gravely wounded in a violent crime in San Francisco.

He had life-saving emergency surgery. He’s still in hospital, as we speak, but his recovery prognosis looks hopeful.

As the days immediately following his injury unfolded, as we hurtled toward the weekend, when two-year-old Londyn wouldn’t be in daycare, I wondered how on earth I would manage the sleep deprivation and emotionally exhausting days of phone calls, visits and medical conferences for him and also care for a very high-energy, extroverted, outdoor-obsessed 2-year-old with five-star food and customer service standards. 

Enter: my best friends. Or, as Londyn calls them: The Aunties.

First, my homegirl Auntie Felicia showed up, took Londyn for the day and gave her the time of her life. 

Then that evening, my bff Auntie Kysha and her daughter Selah came through.

Next morning was Auntie Rebecca. 

That afternoon, Auntie Monisha and Uncle Jonny.

It was like that old Kanye “Woefully Misguided” West lyric: “So many Aunties we could have an Auntie team.”

Every time another Auntie showed up, my little extrovert squealed with glee. 

That night as I put her to bed, she ran through the list of everyone she’d gotten to see this weekend and threw her arms around me and said “thank you, Mamaaaaa.”

She’d had a wonderful weekend. 

And I didn’t do anything to make that happen, except to allow others to show up for us. 

This was an eye-opening experience.

Because basically all of these people have been offering to take Londyn occasionally and give me a little downtime, for many, many moons.

But I’d been telling myself a bunch of stories to the effect that I couldn’t really take them up on those offers.

I’d been telling myself the story that I needed to spend all of her non-daycare time with her. 

I’d been telling myself that I needed a deeper roster of paid sitters, vs. imposing on my busy, powerhouse friends. 

I’d been telling myself that they really might not understand what hang-time with a 2-year-old is actually like.

And in telling myself these stories, I was building a moat. Help was on the way, but I was keeping it at bay. 

I was missing the ocean. 

This help with Londyn from The Auntie Team was just one of a dozen different oceans of help, resources and collaboration that opened up to me, in the past week.

It’s one thing to live through this sort of traumatic terror. 

But it’s a different thing to live through it knowing that both the beauty and the terrors of life are always revealing important things to you, if you stay open to seeing them.

And it’s a radically perspective-shifting experience to live through something like this and feel… YES… exhausted and so sad, but also so supported. So resourced.

It starts to heal your “I’ll do it myself” feedback loop that was miswired when you were so young. 

It starts to remind you to look for help. To ask for help. To allow help. To receive help. 

And not just from above, which I’m pretty good at.

Help from all around you. 

If you relate to the idea of being extremely, dysfunctionally ultra-independent, let me tell you something, [First Name].

Despite what you learned when you were little, you are not getting extra credit in life for doing hard things all by yourself.

You are not getting extra credit in life for doing things the hardest possible way.

Despite what you learned when you were young, working your heart out is NOT the way to create your dream business or your dream life.

In fact, the opposite is true.

The people who build the big, life-changing things know that you can’t build big things on your own.

The way to real-ize your life-changing dreams is to get clear on your vision and get into alignment with it, by becoming a magnet to all the collaborators and components of your dream.

You might not think you have the connections or the money or the whatever you need for the dream that’s in your heart. 

But in my experience, you almost certainly know someone and have some resource that you need to take the next step into your calling right now, that you are simply not accessing or leveraging.

You might not be fully leveraging your inner resources, like your inner wisdom and all your sacred gifts and talents. 

Almost no one I know is fully leveraging their relationships. Every week I talk to at least one high-achieving human who has told themselves their house, their finances, their business plan or their website isn’t yet good enough to reach out to this person or that one who could unlock major new possibilities for them. 

And that, [First Name], is how you miss the ocean.

As I write this, I’m reminded of a scene that stuck with me from the Netflix documentary about Clarence Avant, who they call The Black Godfather.

There was a moment when this power broker, who was behind the scenes of the careers of everyone from Bill Withers to Bill Clinton to Barack Obama, looked straight into the camera and said these words: 

“I don’t have problems. I have friends.”

And you do, too. 

Friendly, universal forces seeking to assist you.

Physical, human friends. 

Collaborative components lighting up and lining up all around you. 

So when the unfathomable happens and you’re not sure you have the capacity to handle it, remember this: Ask yourself what you’re not seeing. Open your eyes to the resources you already possess, but aren’t leveraging. Turn your chin just maybe 6 or 8 inches to the left, so you don’t miss the ocean.

Don’t be literal-minded about it, but get still and quiet and tap into the essence of what Clarence Avant said when he said: “I don’t have problems. I have friends.”

Head up + heart out,

The Inner Critic Coach™

P.S.: When I say leverage your resources, I mean that in the very oldest sense of the word. A lever is what the cave-folk used to lift boulders bigger than they could have with their limited human muscle. 

Every time you’re feeling called (or forced) to do something bigger than you think you, personally can do, look for your leverage. 

And if you start looking for leverage, you’ll find it. You’ll find it in your focus, in your clarity, in your connection to the higher forces that run this place and in your connection to other people.

Tara-Nicholle Nelson, MA, Esq.
Founder + CEO of SoulTour

@taranicholle on FB | TW | IG | LI

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