How to Ask For Help Without Being Afraid
Break down this fear of asking for help to aid with personal growth...
Asking for help is tough.
We can often be caught in a dilemma of thinking if we should or should not ask for help. And most of the time, it’s easier to stay quiet and try and do things ourselves.
Asking for help is an essential part of personal growth. It enables us to learn from others, seek guidance and perhaps do things differently which can provide new experiences too.
I had a fear of asking people for help. A billion thoughts would race through my mind each time I wanted to. All those thoughts were around why it’s pointless in asking for help or how other people may perceive me.
That all changed for me and if you’ve had these thoughts too, I want it to change for you. Here is a simple way to help you ask for help without being afraid.
Why We Fear Asking For Help
Asking for help can be a daunting process. Why?
Because we don’t want to seem incompetent.
We think the other person might look down on us if we ask them for help.
We believe we will seem needy or it can make us feel very uneasy.
We fear being rejected.
The list can go on and there is a ton of research that supports these different reasons. For example, being rejected when you ask for help can lead to social pain. As neuroscience research shows, the same areas of the brain light up when we experience physical pain too. It tells us that if we do experience the social pain of rejection, it can feel like we are experiencing physical pain too.
Other research shows that this worry around asking for help occurs in children as young as seven!
The research found the children in the study connected being incompetent in front of others with asking for help.
I’ve experienced this fear of asking for help and I still do sometimes. In my mind, I sometimes think “why would they want to help me?” or “it will make me look less able.”
The reality is, there are actually massive advantages to asking someone for help. For example, another study showed high performing teachers were more likely to seek help rather than be sought out for help.
This tells us, that asking for help can be linked with brilliant outcomes such as performing better. And, the very best continue to ask for help.
Although it can be difficult to ask for help, having a couple of strategies up our sleeves can help us.
Reframe The Way You Ask For Help
It can be a daunting process being stuck on something and thinking you need to openly ask someone for their guidance. I am well aware of the emotions it can bring.
I always remember feeling this way at university. If I was stuck with an assignment or didn’t understand something from a lecture, the anxiety that would arise even if I thought about asking for help was unreal.
I vividly recall a time when I was about to ask a lecturer for help. I wrote the email, proofread it a thousand times, felt my heart pounding and my hands clammy. I hovered the mouse over the ‘send’ button. After rethinking it, the mouse quickly went to ‘discard’ and I deleted the email.
The end result was me staying up all night trying to figure out a theory we learned but I didn't get anywhere with it.
In my mind, I thought I was stupid for asking for help and that I should be able to know what the theory meant. Just like that, I never asked for help.
A way to overcome this is to reframe the way you ask for help. Instead of saying “help me”, see it as a way of having an interaction and conversation with someone.
View it as your about to have a chat with someone who can share some valuable information that can help your situation.
You can start off by saying “I’d like to talk to you about something…”
Following this, you can turn the interaction into how you can work with the person to come up with a solution. By doing this, you see it as a collaborative way of working. A way in which you are actively involved in the help-seeking and solution-finding process.
This can help make you feel better about asking someone for help. So simply change the way you view asking for help.
Test Your Negative Beliefs Around Asking For Help
In many scenarios, we create a story of an outcome of what we think will happen.
For example, if you have thoughts about asking someone in the writing space for help with your writing, you might think “they won’t want to help me.” Or, you picture a scenario where you ask for help but the person ignores or dismisses you.
Essentially, we tend to build up many negative beliefs and predictions over different situations, even before they have happened.
Part of the reason for this is because it protects us. However, it’s what can keep us in the avoidance cycle. We start to generate more negative predictions around asking for help, so we don’t do it. Then, we won’t actually know what would’ve happened if we did ask for help. And the cycle continues.
If you do this, one of the best ways to help you ask someone is to go ahead and test your negative predictions.
If you think asking someone for help to solve a problem will make you seem needy, go and ask someone and see what the outcome is. Ask the person if they saw you as needy when you asked them for help.
We often think we know what is going to happen, but in reality, the prediction doesn’t come true.
This is a great way to help you build evidence for the idea that asking someone to help you solve a problem is fine. People will most likely be ok with this request.
Research even shows we underestimate by nearly a massive 50% that other people will say yes to helping us. The research study showed many more people than they thought responded with a big yes when they asked for help.
When you break down that barrier of fear of asking someone for help, you will truly see amazing results. So test those negative beliefs!
Final Thoughts
Those are just a few ways you can easily break down that fear around asking for help.
As I mentioned, it’s easy to shy away from asking for help because we are fearful of so many things. And, most of us don’t want to experience this pain.
However, asking for help can help you grow, accelerate in whatever it is you’re doing and can result in you performing well.
As I mentioned, the very best also continue to seek help.