Learning That I Can’t Be the Workhorse

By Vena Jones-Cox

I’m very slowly, very painfully, and with a lot of stops and starts, learning something uncomfortable about myself.

In my heart, I’m still the workhorse/get ‘er done/no one can outwork me, person I was 30 years ago.

I’m the one who’s always ready to jump in, take out the trash, move the chairs, stay up all night painting the unit for move-in tomorrow, stay late, handle the problem, make it work if it kills me.

And for a long time, that was a strength. It’s how I built credibility, survived early deals, got experience, and showed everyone that I wasn’t “above” anything and that I was useful.

But here’s the hard truth I keep running up against: that identity, that instinct, is now the thing holding me back.

Because every time I insist on doing work that someone else could do — even when I’m good at it, even when it feels virtuous — I’m stealing time and energy from the work that only I can do.

I have a lot of business (not something I necessarily recommend to others!) and that means a LOT of chances to jump in and fix things and be a team player and prove I’m not stuck up (which was the WORST thing someone could say about you on the Oakley Elementary School playground, and an accusation that still rings in my head lo these may years later).

It’s really, literally painful to think about saying things like, “I’m sorry you don’t have time to show that vacancy today, and that today is the only time they can see it…but I can’t do it either.” Or, “No, that Canva isn’t perfect. Let me go in and fix it”. Or “What do you mean your speaker cancelled on you? Let me grab a last minute plane ticket and run on down there to help”.

But if I can’t control my compulsion to fix everything, and my desire that every outcome be ideal, and my fear that if I don’t get involved everything will go wrong, how can I focus on:

The thinking
The planning
The reacting to changing markets
The system-building
The delegation
The decisions that actually grow the business instead of just keeping it running?

I learned from my father that people who didn’t jump in and do everything were stuck up or not team players. And I absorbed that to the point where it’s an ingrained belief. Like that the sun will rise in the morning and that gravity will probably continue to keep me from floating off into space.

But I’m sort of realizing, at least intellectually, that there’s a difference between:
• refusing to help because of ego
and
• stepping back because your job is to build a system that works without you.

For a lot of real estate investors, especially us scrappy ones, “I’ll just do it myself” isn’t just control-freakiness: it’s a badge of honor.

Until it quietly becomes a ceiling.

Maybe it’s not that you can’t scale because you’re lazy.
Maybe it’s that you scale because you’re too capable — and too attached to proving it.
Maybe leading a business isn’t about doing more.
Maybe it’s about letting go of the work that feels good and familiar so I can do the work that actually changes things.

Ouch. That feels risky, and it messes with my identity.

But if you’ve been feeling stretched, scattered, or stuck in a loop where everything depends on you… this might be worth sitting with.

I’d genuinely love to hear from other investors:
Have you struggled with this shift?
What helped you stop being the hero and start building something that runs without you?

(And yes… I’m still learning this in real time, so don’t expect to see me NOT moving the chairs at the next COREE meeting.)