How to Boost Your Performance by Asking for Help Properly

You don’t have to do everything on your own

You might achieve your goals faster, better, and with less stress when someone helps you. Even simple “Yes, you’re right” could dispel hesitation, and you’ll jump to further actions. An additional opinion, provided at the right time, might save days of work. Or even more: a friend of mine spent several years on his project only to close it after asking advice from a more experienced entrepreneur.

Asking for help doesn’t make you weak. Quite the opposite: it takes some strength to admit that you don’t know something.

There are ways to ask for help properly. Let’s dive into the details.

Photo by Paul Carroll

1. Explain yourself clearly

7am. Your coffee machine suddenly broke. You’re in panic (can’t live without a morning cup of coffee) and call your old buddy Mr. Penguin: “I don’t know what to do, please help me.”

The thing is, this phrase doesn’t give enough information. It doesn’t help to help you. And so you and your potential savior spend following minutes trying to nail down what exactly do you need.

What could you do instead? Three things:

• Explain your current situation (your current point A)
• Explain your goal (desired point B)
• Explain what you have already tried or considered

If you don’t tell this right away, you waste time. So, help to help you, and communicate the required information upfront:

I need to get from A to B. I’ve considered X, but it doesn’t work for me because I don’t like letters with intersections in them. Could you please help me?

2. Ask the duck (identify your A and B)

Have you ever heard about the Rubber Duck Debugging? It’s a half-joking, half-serious technic in software development: you put a rubber duck on your desk, and, when you face a weird issue, you start to “explain” that duck the intricacies of the bug. Frequently, you suddenly realize the cause right during the process of that explanation. This happens because you have to structure your thoughts to explain them (even to a rubber duck). And structuring you thoughts could be insightful on its own.

So if you’re unsure what to do, explain yourself where you are and where you’re going. Identify your A and B explicitly: that will help to find a solution.

3. Don’t turn off their imagination. Use open-ended questions

Remember the advice to tell them known roads from A to B upfront? Well, that’s actually not always a good idea.

You see, sometimes you know of road X and road Y. Both of them are fine, but neither is quite good. X has lots of traffic jams, and Y is long as lines on Christmas. So you go to Mr. Penguin again and ask:

Which road from A to B is better, X or Y?

And you just have shut down Mr. Penguin’s imagination.

When you’re faced with a direct “X or Y” question, it’s easy to scope yourself to these two options, forgetting about the bigger picture. Let’s rewind a bit and reword:

Which road from A to B is the best?

Outcome: use open-ended questions to not lose important information.

4. Avoid confirmation bias

There are many ways how our brains could trick themselves. One of them, confirmation bias, is that people tend to assign more weight to those pieces of information which they already agree with. Let’s explore it with an example.

You’re choosing a present for Ms. Horse. You’re considering bananas and oranges and inclined towards bananas. You asked Mr. Penguin and Mrs. Duck opinions; his answer was bananas, and hers was oranges. You’re happy that somebody confirmed your thought and choose bananas without further hesitation.

Checkmate.

Noticed how you disregarded oranges without really analyzing why? It was seeking confirmation, not an optimum. Instead, you could have gone deeper and ask why:

• Mr. Penguin, shrugging: “Why not? I like bananas”
• Mrs. Duck: “I know Ms. Horse for many years and know that she absolutely adores oranges”

With underlying reasons in place, oranges become an obvious choice.

In real life, it’s difficult to notice it when confirmation bias affects your thinking. The best way I know to deal with it is to write down the pros and cons of each decision; this brings rationality into play, and the decision becomes more conscious.

5. Offer your help

It feels warm and rewarding to help a person who helped you in the past. You could take advantage of that: offer your help occasionally, and people around might be more willing to help you in the future.

It doesn’t mean putting somebody in “help debt.” After all, it’s frequently fun to help. And it doesn’t have to be huge. Grabbing a cup of coffee on the way to the office? Message your colleague and ask if they need one, too. Ask if you can help with that report. Offer walking their dog while they are on vacation.

6. Leave an option to refuse

For somebody, it might feel awkward to refuse to help. So they help, but then some tension appears. Healthy relationships (with colleagues, friends, or relatives) in the long run are more important than a bit of help in one particular situation.

Avoid awkwardness and tension. Explicitly state that it’s fine to refuse to help.

7. Extend your contacts network. Or use Reddit

I have a rather obvious observation for you: the more people you can ask for help, the higher chance one of them will be able to help you. So, extending your contacts network is one way.

But if you’re like me and not into meeting a lot of new people, there’s an amazing world of Reddit. Lots of different communities, many people ready to share their knowledge and experience.

After all, if you search for somebody who can help, why scope yourself to only so many people around when you could ask a whole community of thousands of Redditors?

8. Various tips

• In the case of remote conversation, gather your thoughts, and write the whole request in a single message. Thus you save another person’s time.
• Get another pair of eyes when you’re about to invest a significant amount of resources on an approach, and you’re not exactly sure if it’s going to be fruitful. Do you know someone who has already tried that? Maybe they can share their experience?
• Don’t assume you only burden people when you ask for help: they might feel rewarded when they help you.
• Don’t take all the credits after being helped (relevant in the working environment).
• Google first. I should have got used to the fact you could find anything on the internet, but still was surprised when found penguins pictures for the illustrations in this article, drawn exactly as I wanted. Humanity has solved a lot of tasks (including pictures of confused penguins), and the internet has made the solutions readily available. Don’t hesitate to use that.

We all can do great things. With help, we can do more of them. So let’s help each other and make our world a greater place to live.