Asking for Help: Why Is Seeking Support So Tough for Us?

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There are times when asking for help sucks!

I began my career as a Java programmer, and just a few months into my first job, I was working on a rather underwhelming project. On the day of the first project delivery, while testing, I discovered a nasty bug in a piece of code I had worked on a few days before. Despite hours of debugging and head-scratching, I couldn’t, for the life of me, fix it. I had absolutely no clue why it wasn’t working as expected. I asked a couple of colleagues for help, but neither of them had any idea. Then one of them said, 'Have you tried asking him? He’ll know for sure!’

There was this very senior, very talented, very annoying, unrelatable, unempathetic, snobbish, know-it-all guy in the office. When there was a technical problem, everyone went to this guy for help. Let’s call him “Joe”.

“You mean that arrogant, self-centered, egotistical piece of s**t!? Oh, no! No f**ing way! I’d rather die than ask him for help!” — That’s what I wanted to say, but instead, I replied, “Sure! Let me try this one last thing, and then I’ll go talk to Joe.”

Now, I could have asked that guy for help, and I’m sure I’d have been done in a matter of minutes. But just the idea of asking him for help made me sick. So, what I ended up doing instead was spending the whole day and night debugging… to no avail. The next morning, on day of the delivery, exhausted and defeated after a sleepless night, I went to Joe, who fixed the code in less than 5 minutes.

Sometimes asking for help sucks. But you know what’s worse? Failing to reach your goals. There are times when getting things done requires swallowing your pride.

The Ego Barrier

As I learned the hard way, self-importance can be a very complicated enemy to fight.

Taking pride in what we do is a good thing—it’s most of the reason why we care so much about our work. It’s why we constantly strive for the best and don’t compromise. But pride and ego can become barriers to success. Sometimes they make us lose sight of the larger objective. If we are not able to ask for support, collaborate, learn from others, and occasionally swallow our pride, we let ego and pride work against us.

But that’s not the only reason why we fail to ask for help.

Overcome The Fear of Judgement

Each of us wants to appear competent, self-reliant, autonomous, and reliable. We always want to be the person capable of getting things done independently. And, again, that’s generally a good thing. But that’s also why we often perceive asking for help as a personal defeat. We usually associate it with not being able to accomplish something on our own. We feel useless, redundant. Those feelings make us nervous and anxious—perhaps we’re not good enough, maybe we will be replaced by someone more skilled.

The Overconfidence Trap

At times, we have no problem asking for help but simply realize we need it too late. This happens to me A LOT! Usually, it’s because I ignore the weak early signals. I ignore them because I’m somewhat confident I’ll eventually be able to “deal with stuff.” I tell myself, “I’ve been in this mess before; I’ll come out of it again. No big deal!” But then reality creeps in, bringing along copious amounts of new, unexpected stuff… then you’re overwhelmed, you try to handle it all, you get sucked in, and then the day of the deadline arrives. That’s when you realize you need help. But it’s too late!

What Do We Do About It?

When it comes to ego, pride, and self-importance, in my experience, there’s no simple way to combat them other than learning from our own mistakes, i.e., failing because of pride and realizing how stupid we were for letting that happen.

There is no heroism in doing things alone—this is a thought I often return to when I’m stuck in my ego trap. The second is that asking for help is not, by any means, a sign of weakness. Quite the contrary—it shows we know our limits and are capable of overcoming them through the help of others.

Finally, getting to the more practical stuff, two very simple yet highly effective strategies that worked great for me in the past:

1. Have regular check-ins: If you can’t rely on some old-fashioned project management, even if you’re working on something solo, force yourself to have regular, scheduled check-ins where you do some honest self-assessment. Write down what you’ve accomplished since the previous check-in and what’s next. This helps you raise your head and do some meta-reasoning about your current situation.
2. Having an accountability partner: If you find the right person, this can be very powerful. You need someone who challenges you and asks you the right questions. This could be your boss, but we have this (stupid, yet common) tendency to sound optimistic to the people we report to. So, I suggest you choose a different person.

Conclusions

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Cheers,

Fusco

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