Squiggly Skill Sprint Day 2: Asking for help

Day 2 of the Squiggly Careers Skill Sprint, and today’s topic was about asking for help. (Link: https://www.amazingif.com/listen/skills-sprint-asking-for-help/)

There were some interesting points today on why someone may not want to ask for help. It may be taken as a sign of weakness, there might be a desire to get it all done by oneself, or someone just doesn’t want to be a bother. Reflecting on that, I’d add another one, that perhaps the person doesn’t feel like they will get the help that they ask for, which may be right or wrong. Either way, that would be something someone would need to think about seriously.

Sarah & Helen discussed the helpful high, which is the rewarding feeling someone gets when they help someone. Ultimately, it’s a nice feeling when someone helps someone else, and if everyone approaches asking for help with a mindset of everyone is doing nice things for everyone else, and feeling good about it, it can help lessen the load.

People need to be careful with this of course. Colleagues can be overloaded with requests for help, and it can burn people out if they feel like they can’t say no to anything. Gretchen Rubin talks about the different tendencies people have, and her Obliger type can very easily end up fraying themselves when they spend all their time meeting other people’s expectations and not fulfilling their own.

Ultimately, the best way around this is to be transparent & candid about what you are asking, & what you are asking for. It’s important to respect people’s boundaries when they say no, and it shouldn’t feel like a burden of guilt on anyone if help is asked for and can’t be given right now.

The final point from today was to close the help loop, and make sure people know how valuable their help was. It’s not something that I’ve done deliberately in the past, though seeing some of the nice sentiments I’ve had from people since my redundancy, it’s so nice when someone specifically calls out something that you have done to help them, and shows you the narrative of what a difference it made to them.