Tips to Asking for Help the Right Way.

Happy new decade dear reader, I’m glad we all made it to the new year. This year, we need more collaborations  and support  than we’ve had in time past to succeed, this  makes asking for help critical to our advancement. Let’s learn how to ask for it the right, shall we?

If you need help, you’re going to have to ask for it, OUT LOUD. Asking is where the challenge lies.

Everyone of us need help and we need it almost everyday. Most of the time, we are not always comfortable asking for it. The only way we are going to feel comfortable asking for help is to get good at it. That increases our chances of getting a YES when we ask for help. The helper is going to find it satisfying and rewarding to help you and they will feel motivated to help you in the future.

In psychology, there’s something called illusion of transparency and it’s a belief that our needs, thoughts and feelings are visible to other people. This kind of thinking is not true. Even if someone is going to tell that you need help, how do they tell that you really want it?
Have you ever tried to offer unsolicited help to someone who doesn’t really need it in the first place, you know how nasty it can be right? We should not blame other people who do not spontaneously help us the way we want because our heart ain’t transparent.

Research shows that 90% of help coworkers give to one another is usually in response to explicit request for it.

Here are the tips to help you ask aright:

1. When you ask for help, be very specific about the help that you want and why. indirect request for help aren’t very helpful to the helper and they don’t know what it is that you want from them. Nobody wants to give bad help. Because you’re being specific, they will help you if they can and if they cannot, they might as well point you to the direction of someone who could.

2. Avoid disclaimers, apologies and bribe. For example: ‘I’m so sorry I have to ask you for this, I really hate bothering you for this, if I had any way of doing this without your help, I would…’.
The above example usually make helpers uncomfortable to help you. If you’re sorry for bothering me, then why bother me in the first place?

In the case of incentivizing, it’s okay to pay strangers to help you do something but you really have to be careful in giving incentives to people you have relationship with. If you have a relationship with someone, helping is actually a part of that relationship. It is how we show one another that we care. If you introduce incentive or payment into that, it tends to feel like it’s not a relationship but a transaction and that ironically leads to distancing.

3. Please, do not ask for help over email or text.
We usually ask for help through this means because it feels less awkward for us. Getting a NO feels more awkward.
Research shows that in person request over 30times are more likely to get a yes than a request over text or email. When something is really important to you, make face time for the request or use your phone as a phone to ask for help (by calling)

4. When you ask someone for help and they say a yes, followup with them afterwards.
What is rewarding about asking for help is to know that the help rendered had impact and was effective. If I had no idea how my help affected you, then how am I supposed to render another one next time?
Take time to tell your colleagues that the help they rendered to you really helped you learn that big sale, made that difficult task easy, etc. Take time to tell your partner that through their help you were able to pull through that tough time.

It’s not easy to ask for help because it makes you feel vulnerable but in this modern age, nobody succeeds in a vacuum, nobody does it alone well, we really do need the support of one another.

When you ask for help, do it in a way that will increase your chances of getting a yes and makes the other person feel awesome for having helped you because both of you deserve it.