She told her team she was stuck. She's the CEO.

A CEO said to me recently: "I have fifty people who think I have it all figured out. And not one I can tell the truth to."

He wasn't looking for sympathy. He was describing the job as he'd come to know it. And I've heard a version of that sentence more times than I can count.

Here's the part that stays with me. The thing that put him in that lonely place started as the same trait that made him successful.

Let me show you what I mean with someone else.

Last year a CEO I work with was stuck on her growth strategy. Weeks at it. Spreadsheets, frameworks, and that quiet feeling you can't shake that something was off.

I asked her one question. Have you told your leadership team you're stuck?

She looked at me like I'd suggested setting fire to the building. "I can't tell them I'm stuck. I'm the CEO."

I understood the reflex. Most leaders learn it young. Adam Bryant, who has interviewed over a thousand CEOs, told me how many came from hardship. Absent parents. Homes where nobody was coming to fix things. They learned early: when it gets hard, I handle it alone. That reflex took them all the way to the top.

And then it traps them. The problems at the top are too big for one person, and the information you need lives in other people's heads. The CEO who carries everything ends up with a team that stops offering and problems that surface too late. That's how you get fifty people who think you've got it and nobody you can be honest with.

She decided to try something different.

The next week she walked into her leadership meeting and said: here's where I'm confident, here's where I'm stuck, I need your help thinking this through.

Best meeting they'd had in a year, she told me. Two VPs brought perspectives she'd never considered. One had been sitting on a concern for weeks, waiting for permission to say it out loud. The moment she asked, the room changed. They stopped being an audience and became a team.

Four words did that. I need your help.

They don't cost you authority. They hand some of the weight to the people who were ready to carry it. And the leaders who learn to say them earn a kind of trust the ones who never ask will never have.

But here's the harder truth. Your team can't be the only place you're honest. They've adapted to you. Some things you can only say out loud to peers who sit where you sit and won't flinch when you do. That's the whole reason WCL21 exists, a private room of CEOs who drop the performance and tell each other the truth. If you've been carrying things alone, reply WCL21 and I'll show you how it works.

So here's something to try this week. One meeting. One thing you've been holding on your own. Put it on the table and say: here's where I'd value your thinking. Then watch what happens.

And if that first sentence landed a little too close to home, hit reply and tell me the one thing you're carrying right now that you haven't said out loud to anyone. You don't have to do this alone.