How to Ask for Help

Thank you for tuning in for another edition of my newsletter! This week, we have advice from Deborah Riegel and Sophie Riegel, the coauthors of Go to Help! And, if you are around later on today, join in on my weekly Newsweek interview series, Better, at 12 pm EDT / 9 am PDT/5 pm BST. This week’s guest is New York Times bestselling author Marcus Buckingham! We’ll be talking about how you can bring more love into your career. These conversations really take off when you share your thoughts with us, so please join us?here?- I hope to see you today!

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At a time when so many of us are empowered to take action into our own hands, it can feel like an imposition or be a struggle to ask for an extra hand. Last week I spoke with Deborah and Sophie about how to navigate asking and offering assistance to those in need, and how we can ask for ourselves as well. Here are a few offerings from both Deborah and Sophie about what you can do to make providing and receiving help a bit easier, and if you’d like to hear more, watch our entire interview here.

How your mindset impacts getting help

“People have a certain mindset about asking for help. Some of the mindsets they have might be, ‘If I ask for help, I'm going to be seen as incompetent,’ or ‘I should be able to do this on my own,’ or ‘I don't want to be a burden to other people.’ And it's those thoughts and those beliefs that are really getting in the way of them asking for help. You can shift your beliefs into thinking, ‘People are actually wanting and waiting to help me,’ instead of ‘They don't want to help me I’m being a burden.’ Our mindset directs how we behave.”

Helping someone who didn’t ask for help

“Your intention in helping does not necessarily match your impact in helping. Most of us have often thought to ourselves ‘I’m only trying to help,’ or ‘I was just here to help.’ We need to recognize that there can sometimes be a gap in what it is we're trying to do and how the other person receives it. We're trying to be generous. They experience it as us undermining their autonomy or sense of agency. What most of us don't do, is ask for feedback about our help. ‘Hey, share with me a time that I was particularly helpful to you and what did I do?’ And ‘I have the feeling that sometimes my help isn't as helpful as you would want it to be. Can you tell me a little bit about that? That way I can be a better helper for you moving forward.’”

Asking for help without feeling needy

“Check your tone and check your frequency. There's something about the tone in which you might ask for help. So for example, I might say, ‘Hey, I could use a little help setting some priorities for my project.’ As opposed to, ‘Please please help me, I'm dying here!’ You don't want to be the person who cries wolf, where everything has a sense of urgency. And check the frequency with which you are asking for help. If you are asking the same person over and over again, you may want to vary the people who are helping you out. If you’re asking for help on the same topic over and over again, it might be time to tap into your resources and learn that skill, or outsource it to somebody else so that you don't have to do it.”

Thank you so much for reading my newsletter! Please join me later today for my conversation with Marcus Buckingham!

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Wishing you health and success -?

Dorie