Asking for Help is a Leadership Skill

Many people believe that asking for help is a form of weakness, when in fact, the opposite is true. 

Effective people know how to ask for help. In this episode, Kate Arms discusses why asking for help is a crucial skill, why it can be hard to master, how to do it well, and how to practice.

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Bite-sized chunks of wisdom about self-leadership for you to chew on.

Asking for Help is a Leadership Skill
Episode 4

Podcast Opening over Theme Music:
Hello and welcome. This is Kate's Nuggets, the podcast where I share bite-size nuggets of wisdom about self-leadership. I am your host, Kate Arms. I invite you to listen lightly, let these ideas wash over you. Take what you take and let the rest go. You can always come back and listen again.

Kate Arms:
Today I want to talk a little bit about asking for help. And the reason that I want to talk about asking for help is that asking for help is such a looked down on thing for so many of us. For so many of us, it brings up a sense of weakness or incompetence.

And lots of us have been shamed for asking for help in various ways, and asking for help is a leadership skill. If we want to feel like we're leading our lives, like we're agents in our own lives, we actually have to ask for help. And we have to ask for help cleanly, and asking for help cleanly can be hard.

I want to unpack first why asking for help is so important. It's because asking for help is how we create community. It's how we create a sense of belonging. We ask for help, we receive help. We are asked for help, we give help. That's how we build community. It's built into who we are as human beings.

We are a social species. Our societies are not designed so that we can live individually. We cannot actually feed, house, or clothe ourselves all by ourselves, from a very practical perspective. If we could do self-sustaining farming for our own selves, it would be a very, very limited existence.

And most of us are not willing to live the way that we were required for us to actually take care of all of our own physiological needs by ourselves or even just with our nuclear family. We need to be connected. We literally need connection. And lots of connection, of course, is transactional in this world. It is facilitated by money. That's one way of meeting our needs.

Biologically, we also have this need for a sense of belonging and connection. We actually need that sense of trust that we will be taken care of if we get ill, if we are in an accident, if we have a string of bad luck, and that comes from community. That comes from a community that takes care of its own.

So we do need others. And if we don't ask for help directly, how do we get what we need from others? One option is to make them do it, to use force and duress and aggression and bully them into it.

Another is to be passively manipulative, to figure out what's going to make them tick and to make them think that they want to do what we want to do and to be underhanded about it. This is the move of someone who doesn't have any sense of power and is unwilling to use force or unable to use force.

There are also people who just don't budge. "I've got my needs, and either you meet them or you don't meet them." This is a very lonely way of being because it drives a lot of people away and it's also a way of being that's out of your control. You say, "This is what I need, this is what I'm willing to accept. Take it or leave it." And often people leave it, often people that we care about and would really like to have in our lives leave it and then we are alone and lonely.

The alternative to all of these ways of asking for help is actually to be clean. To be able to state directly, this is what I need. To ask, can you give it to me? And to be willing to accept no for an answer. You have to be willing to accept no for an answer in order to cleanly ask for what you need in a way that doesn't feel manipulative. Because we see right through the words to the intention behind them. Asking for help itself is an admission of vulnerability.

We have a really hard time being with our own vulnerability because our imagination and our intellect combine together to tell us all of the things that could possibly go wrong if we open ourselves up and expose our vulnerability, all the ways that other people might take advantage of us, that they might hurt us and we can start experiencing in advance before we've even done anything, the pain that we would feel if they took advantage of us if we made ourselves vulnerable. So we have to actually build up the capacity to be vulnerable and exposed without panicking.

Add to that, many of us have been shamed. So in order to be able to ask for help, we have to be willing to wrestle with that shame. And people are often very rejection sensitive. That feeling of being rejected always hurts. So we have to learn to soothe ourselves and to become okay with being rejected, being willing to accept no for an answer.

There's a book that I read last year that is a guy who challenged himself to be rejected, and he tried really hard to stretch himself to things where he knew he was going to get rejected. He wanted to train himself to be comfortable getting rejected. And it turns out, of course, that he got a yes for a whole bunch of things that he asked for that he didn't expect to get yeses for.

So he didn't get as many rejections as he hoped for, but he did get a lot more courage asking for things and he got a lot of experience taking no for an answer.

So know that the rewards are many and wonderful. They are worth putting some effort into, struggling with shame, struggling with rejection sensitivity, struggling with building your capacity to feel vulnerable.

Be gentle with yourself.

This is what courage looks like in action, practicing taking a small risk, asking for a little thing that feels like it's a stretch, it's a gulp, and then you've built your capacity a little bit. Celebrate that and ask again.

So that's today's nugget, slowly build your capacity to ask for help and you will find greater connection.

End Theme and Credits:
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Here's to Thriving! Catch you next time.
Kate's Nuggets is a Signal Fire Coaching production. The music is adapted under license from Heroic Age by Kevin McLeod.