The Power of Asking for Help
Learn it, use it, share it
The example you’re about to read below is a trivial one. But, as Sabina Nawaz wrote, “to achieve big goals, start with small habits.”
To harness the power of asking for help, start with doing it when coming back from grocery shopping.
Imagine. You just came back from grocery shopping. It’s lockdown number whatever, and it’s raining cats and dogs outside. You’re soaking wet, and you’re carrying 18 pounds worth of backpack and bags.
Your kids are lying on the couch, reading comic-books, undisturbed. Your partner is on the phone; they barely take the time to meet your gaze and mumble some welcome.
You can hear your blood starting to boil. You’ve been out for two hours maybe, walking under the rain, struggling to find the right kind of cookies and hand cream, waiting forever to enter the supermarket, and even longer to check-out.
You get the idea.
Past me would have thrown out a snarky comment said in a mean tone. I won’t lie. It still happens. But, much, much less.
Here’s how I learned the power of asking for help.
Learning the Power of Asking for Help
I learned this the hard way, and maybe there’s no other way because asking for help is hard. The three main reasons are:
- We don’t want to lose control
- We don’t want to look stupid
- We don’t want to deal with a no
Any new parent or newly appointed manager will no doubt relate. These are the two life-altering events that taught me the power of asking for help.
New managers will often struggle with delegating the work. They often think they can do it faster and better (it might be true) and have a hard time trusting their teams to do everything that’s needed.
Six months after being promoted to my first managerial position, I was still daily logging into the system to launch such a crucial process that nobody else could be trusted with it. That was until I wanted to take some holidays. Finally, I realized it wasn’t so critical, and, more important than the process itself, someone else could do it.
New managers also particularly dislike thinking they appear incompetent. After a while, a topic they don’t fully master will come up. Not wanting to look stupid, they’ll work overtime to understand everything about it, instead of relying on one of their team member’s expertise.
And new managers, fearing to be turned down, might prefer to do easy and repetitive tasks instead of asking a team member.
In the end, they learn to delegate and ask for help a minimum because, even if they’re the best performer ever, there’s no way they’ll manage to do the work of 10 people by themselves.
In my case, I was lucky enough to be part of a mentoring program in my company. And the necessity of delegating tasks was one of the first things my mentor pushed me to understand and practice. It took time, but it worked.
Being forced by our immediate environment to delegate and/or ask for help is a chance, paradoxically.
In our daily lives, we don’t always get this chance. We are usually able to manage without asking for help, but it has a cost. The negative consequences slowly pile up, the toil on our physical and mental health is higher and higher, but, because it’s in small increments, we don’t notice until we break.
James Clear (author of Atomic Habits) writes, “small habits can actually deliver incredible progress very quickly.” That goes both ways. Small habits can deliver incredible regress very quickly as well.
That’s why learning to ask for help is crucial for our well-being.
Learning How to Ask for Help
Heidi Grant tells it all in her book, Reinforcements: How to Get People to Help You, and summarizes it in her article in the Harvard Business Review.
Be personal, specific, and direct.
I don’t ask my family a generic “can someone help?” Even though it’s already much better for mental health than staying frustrated and not asking for help at all.
Neither do I ask the slightly better (more specific) version, “can someone help me with the groceries?”
What I say instead, “Jacob [my son], can you take this bag and put the items in the storage room?”, “Honey! Could you help me with the backpack and put stuff in the fridge?” Both are personal, specific, and direct.
As Heidi Grant explains, asking people individually for help is much more efficient. Asking a group bears the risk that each of its members will think (and hope, maybe) someone else will take care of the request (it’s called diffusion of responsibility).
Be part of a team
In the case of groceries, the best is to add, “I’ll take care of the last bag.”
First, it shows you are all part of the same team. Second, even though you already did the groceries shopping, they weren’t there, they didn’t see it, and therefore it’s less concrete for them. The tasks they’ve got to perform, on the other hand, are real; so, it makes it easier to show you’re part of the team and also participate in the cleaning up.
(One way around this is establishing a clear (and fair) split of the tasks before. Each person then knows what their responsibilities are and is aware others are doing theirs, even if they don’t see them.)
Using the Power of Asking for Help
Learning to ask for help and then learning how to do it saved me several times around.
It saved me as a parent, for example. Reddit is not only a place to team up against Wall Street; it’s also a great place to ask for help on many topics. And the subreddit r/Parenting is a safe place where anyone can ask any question about child-rearing.
Funny enough, by asking for help and making my life easier, I became more available to help others. I ask for help with my weak points, and in return, I’ve got the energy and desire to help others in the areas where I’m the strongest and most confident.
Takeaway — Help Me Spread the Word
It won’t be easy, because you’ll need to be an example and ask for help yourself. But it will be rewarding because it feels good to help others, and it even has health benefits. We can’t do everything by ourselves; we all need help. We need, and society needs, us to be part of the same team.
Here’s what we can do together to make it easier, for all of us, to ask, receive and give help:
- Overcome your fear of losing control, looking stupid, or getting a refusal, and ask for help.
- Be specific, direct, and personal in your requests.
- Highlight what will be the impact of your helpers.
- Make them feel like they’re part of a team. Even better, be part of this team.
- When thanking them, don’t dwell on why it helps you and makes you feel better; focus on their goodness, and make them feel good instead.
Art, Thank you for your help!
