Afraid to Ask For Help?

Are you afraid to ask for help? Do you think that you’re not supposed to need any help? Could you be experiencing perfectionist tendencies? I know this very well!

At the start of a 1992 summer research job, I was given a task to complete. The person that assigned it to me told me that it would take two weeks to complete. After two weeks, it was clear that I needed more time. Week after week, I continued to believe that “I’ll finish this in a week”.

I was too inexperienced to fully understand all that the task involved. I worked too independently. What was supposed to be a two-week task occupied my entire summer! At the end of my work term, it was clear that I would not finish the task before i had to return to school. I collaborated with others for help in the final week of my job, so that someone else could finish the task after I’d left.

People would rather that you ask for help than wonder if you’re pretending that you don’t need help.

I regret that I didn’t ask for help sooner. I feel that I’d wasted a lot of other peoples’ time by trying to ‘figure it out all on my own’. Maybe I was too proud and thought “I’ve got this”. Or, I was afraid to ask for help because I thought “I’m supposed to get this”. Looking back on it, I cringe when I think of this episode in my life. Yet, I’m grateful for the lesson.

It may take courage to admit that you need help. When you ask for help, you create opportunities for collaboration and team building. The contribution of different skills and ideas can create a better final version of the task. Two heads are better than one!

Asking for help isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of strength. It shows you have the courage to admit when you don’t know something, and to learn something new. –  Barack Obama

Are you currently working on something that might benefit from someone else’s help?

Image by DragonFly (iStock)