Does asking for help set off sirens in your head?
What makes it so hard to admit we might need support?
How tough does it have to get before you seek assistance?
That squirm feeling
Asking for help, support, advice, assistance, tips – whatever you want to call it – goes deep for many of us. Just one short question. One small request that probably takes less than 10 seconds to convey. And yet, sometimes it feels like the hardest thing in the world to do.
The tension in our body tells us. Our pulse rate and temperature. We might feel queasy, light-headed, jittery, embarrassed, guilty, incompetent and doubt our worth. That nagging fear of failure hanging over our heads when we’re unable to get the job done by ourselves!
It can leave us feeling tongue-tied and vulnerable, isolated with our “problem”. Quite the opposite of independent. In fact, that judgemental little voice inside our heads seriously has a lot to answer for! Even if we know logically that we cannot know everything.
Cut yourself some slack
The reality of course is: asking for help isn’t all that simple. Easy on the surface. Not so easy deep down. Emotionally. Concerns of showing any signs of weakness or inability seize hold and you’d rather the ground swallowed you up than admit need for external input.
So, how did we get to this? After all, we used to be so good at asking for support! Demanding it, as kids. How else would we have learnt and developed? But somewhere along the way, this comfort in asking may have been crushed in a bid to nurture our self-sufficiency.
Maybe you were made to feel that your queries were annoying or inconvenient at school or home? You stopped asking for help purely because you felt you were being a nuisance? Not asking somehow became preferable to feeling like a disturbance, possibly disfavoured.
Somewhere along the way, we seem to have cultivated a fear of not being liked or good enough as we are, a fear of what others will think of us if we don’t know something, a fear of rejection, and as a result, a fear of admitting lack of knowledge or capability.
Do what children do
It’s time we listened more carefully to what our inner child would have done. Because the only way we can learn how to do things that we don’t know how to do is to bite the bullet and ask those who know more than us about that particular subject.
Wanting to understand is about growth, not failure!
Contrary to popular fears, people do actually enjoy sharing knowledge, skills and advice! It’s their field of interest. Had you maybe thought you might be doing someone a service by enabling them to revisit and consolidate their pool of expertise in your search for solutions?
Let your imagination guide you
If asking for support still makes you cringe, try imagining exactly what it is you’re wanting to accomplish and how you will feel once you can do it! Imagine too what else you will be able to achieve with this new chunk of knowledge! Envisage the growth in that!
Not only will you have learned how to get the task done properly, but you will have learned from the experience of asking for help – and had a positive response. Asking gets easier with practice. Ultimately, we are just “relearning” what we used to do quite naturally.
If asking for help is standing between you and success, get in touch with me at Freeflow Coaching and let’s tackle this from a different angle.