Why I'm not afraid to ask for help.

There are three things that spring to mind straight away when I think about the importance of asking for help:

1.    If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room

2.    You should strive to surround yourself with people who are cleverer or better than you

3.    When you talk, you don’t learn anything, but when you listen, you might do

To continuously improve, you need to be continuously learning. To get better, you need to have the mindset that you are not the best. To learn, you can read books and take courses – and that’s great – but for me personally, the best way is to ask people who have the skills you require for help. You can either ask for help in learning those skills or you can ask them to do the job that you are not good at.

I set up EMG 8 years ago and I have constantly asked for help since then. I’ve asked for help from business coaches, leadership coaches, and healthcare experts to improve my own skills, and I have also asked for help from the employees who have come on-board who do the jobs that I could not. If I hadn’t asked for help, I would still be a one-man-band.

Ask for Help – Then Listen

Asking for help is great, but where it falls down is when someone is asking the same question over and over. I am a mentor for the NHS Clinical Entrepreneur’s Scheme and I am happy to give up my time for free to help them, but if they were to start asking me the same questions again and again, or making the same mistakes and not taking the advice I offer, I’d have to question whether I was the right person to be helping them. However, if you can see that the person you’re helping is improving and taking it all on board, then it is a privilege to be able to help. I also use that work as an opportunity to learn from the people I am mentoring.

It’s Only Common Sense if you Know it

I open up and ask for help a lot more than I used to and I think it is down to two main things: mindset and confidence. From my experience, as someone who wants to be the best all the time, it can be difficult to ask for help for fear of looking silly for not knowing something.

People don’t have any issue with using a personal trainer to get fitter, but bizarrely, they see it as a weakness to hire a trainer to help your brain get better. We go through our whole lives, from 2 years old right into our 20s, getting help the whole time through education – from teachers or lecturers – why wouldn’t you want to carry that on? You don’t suddenly need to stop learning just because you have reached a certain age.

The older I get, the more I realise that no one knows everything, and I am not trying to be an expert in everything, I am trying to be an expert in one or two areas. So, if I don’t know something, how am I going to find out? Well, I’m going to have to ask for help.

It’s only common sense if you know it – so never be afraid to ask for help.