Camille Rapacz: Why do we find it so hard to ask for help? Whether it's fear, pride, or believing that asking for help is a sign of weakness, it is a common struggle. But no matter what anybody says, nobody's achieving success on their own. We all benefit from help from others. So today we're going to talk about how to know when we're resisting asking for help so you can get out of your own way and make progress toward whatever you're striving for.
Camille: Welcome to The Belief Shift. The show that explores. What you really need to know about building a successful business.
I'm your host, Camille Rapacz: business coach and consultant who spent too much of her career working in corporate business performance.
George: And I'm George Drapeau: your co-host and her brother. I'm a leader in the tech world bringing my corporate perspective, but mostly my curiosity.
Camille: Together, we're exploring beliefs about success and how to achieve it. But mostly we're bringing practical solutions so you and your business can thrive.
Camille Rapacz: So George, what can I help you with today?
George Drapeau: I love this topic because you can actually help me get better at asking for help. True story.
Camille Rapacz: Ooh. Okay. Well, let's see how this plays out.
George Drapeau: I hate asking for help.
Camille Rapacz: You hate asking for help. Oh, this is fantastic.
I didn't expect that. Okay. Let's see where this goes. So let's first just talk about what kind of help we are talking about. There are lots of forms of help, but for the purposes of this podcast, we are mainly focused on the kind of help that would support your work, your team, or your business.
So that's what we're centered on. So just to sort of lay the groundwork there, let's talk about the nature of helping. So this is kind of defining what we're talking about here. When it comes to helping others, we generally feel good about this, ? You feel good when you help other people, George.
George Drapeau: Absolutely. Love it. Helping.
Camille Rapacz: Well, helping is great, but when it comes to receiving help, it can sometimes be a very different story. Yeah. Just harder. Just harder. In some ways we can get better at this as we mature, though, apparently not in George's case, but...
sometimes it feels like it's less important to have all the answers and we don't have to have anything to prove anymore. So sometimes it gets easier, but sometimes it gets worse. It's like the... The longer we're around and the wiser we feel like we are, we feel like maybe we should have figured it all out by now.
So I don't, sometimes I think maybe age helps and maybe not.
It could also be topic specific. So we might be resistant to getting help in certain areas more than others. And we'll explore this a little bit more later in this episode.
So let's talk about what's happening here though, when it comes to resisting a need for help. As we do this, it's important to think about what's happening in our daily lives and how we interact with people. So when we interact with people, there are people that are of lower status, equal status and higher status.
George Drapeau: All right. Okay. Yeah.
Camille Rapacz: So with people, there's the lower status, there's the equal status, and there's the higher status. Yeah. And we might receive help from any one of these places. So it looks like this when we think about this in the work environment.
People of lower status, I know that sounds, status is a weird word, but you know what I mean. Yes. So people that are your subordinates, those are the people you're hiring as employees on your team, or maybe as just contract. You're contracting with people to do work for you.
Your peers are those people who are your colleagues at work, or you could also have just peers in the industry. Somebody who's a different company, but a peer to you.
And then there's your superiors, the people of higher status, and those are obviously your boss, but it could be another leader that is senior to you. They have a higher level in the organization, but it could also be people that are more knowledgeable or have more expertise that you might bring in, such as a coach, a consultant, or a mentor. So those people would sort of be on the higher status space.
So this is what we're talking about. We're talking about these different layers of how you can receive help.
Now it is human nature for us to want to understand our role in any given situation.
So am I the subordinate here? Are we peers? Are you my senior? We want the relationship to be clear. But when it comes to helping, sometimes it challenges or shifts that status. So if I'm with somebody, for example, I'm with a peer and I offer to help, it could be perceived as me putting them in a lower position of status because I know something you don't, and I'm going to help you with that.
Now, this might not even be a conscious thought, which is why this is so tricky. So you might have this aversion, this resistance, I'll say. And it might not be front of mind that this is what's going on for you in the moment. But it can definitely shift how you respond, it can cause you to have a negative response to somebody who's trying to help you. And this description in our relationships and our statuses and how they're perceived is what causes these things to not go well.
And it's really critical to understand this dynamic in order for you to be able to both give and receive help effectively. So that is why we are talking about this because we want to be able to do it well from both perspectives. We want to give and receive, but in this episode, we're really going to focus on the receiving side.
In a future episode I want to get more into the giving side. So we're just going to focus on how to be a better receiver. Okay.
So question to you, George, have you ever had one of those moments when somebody offered to help you and you rejected it, but maybe not even without. Thinking about it or realizing what you were doing and, or understanding why?
Oh, yes, absolutely. I'm going to have to think about this, about the many reasons why that's happened in the past. But the first one that comes to mind immediately is this happened not too long ago. I don't know what the setup was. I was talking about some tasks I needed to get done, and somebody said, Hey, let me help get going on that. I knew what I was going to do. I just haven't started yet. I didn't need the person's help. Didn't want the person's help. Thanks. I've got this.
I don't know why they helped. Maybe they thought I was struggling.
They didn't know me very well. I think they were, it was a combination of them wanting things done their way and then wanting to be truly helpful, a combination of like, I really know better. I know how things going. And I want to help. So I'm just going to impose my help on you is what it was.
Yeah. And my reaction was like, no, no, thanks. I'm good. Give me 30 seconds to breathe before I start.
I know there have been more reasons than that, but that's the first one that comes to mind.
Yeah, that's a great example because it sounds like there's also just a lack of unders knowing each other well. Yeah, that was causing some of the disruption as well. So we're going to get into this or some of the reasons and you know, why this happens, but I want to talk first about like, what are some of these reactions?
And maybe you can relate to some of these. Okay. So some of the ways that we react when we're on the receiving end of help is we might just have some initial mistrust. So we're unsure of this person's motivation. Do you feel like that was part of what was going on in your story or no?
George Drapeau: Not in this case, but that makes me think of another example where I've encountered this, where that was, where somebody is offering help as a way to get into my business and, or maybe grab territory or something, or poke their nose in an area where like, no, this is really not your business.
Like maybe they're helping, but mostly it's a way for them to get in.
Camille Rapacz: Well, and that's interesting because then if that's actually happened to you before when you knew, oh, that that is what this person is doing, it can cause you to be more hesitant about other you're going to be looking out for that more.
You're going to be assessing it more, and not that you shouldn't, but it certainly is one of the ways that we can react is we'll just have this mistrust of the person's motivation. Yeah.
Another reaction we can have is to just feel resentful or defensive. This person's maybe challenging our capabilities.
It sounds like that was a little bit of like, do they think I'm just not capable of this or that they have more knowledge than I do in this? They don't even know me. How do they know if I know how to do this or not?
George Drapeau: Yeah, I think that could have been, I could have felt part of that. Usually my reaction to that kind of thought is amusement. Like, Oh, you just don't know me yet. Okay, fine.
Camille Rapacz: You don't know how good I am at procrastinating.
So another reaction is that we might feel a diminished or not value. So maybe we're being perceived as not capable of doing the work. And that can be a negative reaction to somebody trying to help us.
George Drapeau: I've felt that before.
Camille Rapacz: But sometimes, in the best of cases, we do actually feel some relief.
Do you remember ever like somebody offering to help you and you're like, Oh, thank goodness. I'm so glad somebody's helping. Plenty. Yes.
George Drapeau: Yes. And for me, that's good because I'm sure we'll get into this. I'm not the best at asking for help even when I need it. And if it's in the right conditions and somebody is offering help and then they take that me asking off my plate.
That's so great. Like, yeah, I would love that. Thank you. That's great.
Camille Rapacz: Yes. Yeah. Which is such an interesting dynamic. I mean, as you say, it's struggled to ask for help. And yet often when people do offer to help, you're really grateful for it. We're such complicated humans with all of this stuff. Which is why I love these topics.
So let's talk about what's causing some of these negative reactions. So I have six causes that we'll go through. And as I'm talking through these, I want you to think about your color commentary, George, like, does this spark any other good stories and relate things that we can relate to, we can either interject them or save them till the end, whatever you want to do.
Okay. So the first one in terms of, so these are things that will cause us to react negatively to have these like feelings of feeling diminished or being resentful of somebody offering to help us.
So the first one is we might've been looking for validation or reassurance instead of help.
And so the person trying to help us. Is hasn't read off. . A guy, oh, sorry, . is your spouse. Yes. We've all had this experience, where you're just, you're trying to share a frustration or a thing that happened and the person you're talking to wants to help you not be frustrated.
Yeah. And so they try to help solve the problem. You're like, I don't wanna solve this problem, I just wanna talk about it. I just wanna, oh my God. Yeah. I just need to vent right now. Yeah. I mean, that's a real thing. Sometimes we just need to talk about things and not have somebody fix it for us.
George Drapeau: It's a classic guy blind spot, by the way, just to tie this episode to our previous episode, huge guy blind spot.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. I'm glad that you said that and not me. Cause I was thinking that, but I'm not a guy. So I didn't want to say it.
George Drapeau: I mean, I, I definitely have this blind spot. I probably for the rest of my life, we'll have to get continuing reset and training. Like, Hey, no, you don't have to solve the person's problems.
A lot of times it's just, just venting be better recognizing that dude.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah, dude. Yeah. Always end it with dude. So this is, this is a big one. This is a big reason why we might have this trouble recess. And you know, of course there can be other ramifications of that of, well, now this person's not going to want to share things with you.
It's like a problem solving bomb. So that's number one.
Number two is just fear of being vulnerable or of being judged. So maybe you fear you're going to look incompetent. Like if you let somebody see what you've been doing, you feel incompetent or inferior.
This is where imposter syndrome can sneak in. And this can be very specific to the environment or the person or the topic. So in certain environments you might not feel good about getting vulnerable, or there might be specific people that you don't feel comfortable getting vulnerable with. I think that's a big one just and that just the judgment that might come with it as somebody starts to help you.
George Drapeau: Yeah, totally. I mean, this one is one that is not a big weakness of mine. I don't mind being seen as not knowing something because I'm very healthy about the learning mindset is the thing that addresses that. It's like, however stupid I am now, I'm going to be less stupid after you help me. I'm going to improve.
And I'm very confident about that. But I also have tools that I used to like with my manager, I've got a great manager right now. And he knows a lot that I don't know. And there's things that I need to ask him from time to time that are clearly newbie questions or expose what I don't know. I'm just like, Hey, look Hey boss, I need some help with this.
This is a newbie question or I'll address, address my vulnerability upfront. And he's a professional. And so whenever he hears it, he's like, Oh, sure. Hey buddy, ask me, just ask me. He does not judge. That's a gift that I have from a manager. He doesn't penalize me for this, but this is, I totally get why people would be afraid of this.
Cause oftentimes we will have a manager who's like, really? That's your question. You don't know that by now. Well, I now think differently of you, not this guy. So I can tell him, I know I should probably know this. I don't, I just need to solve this problem. Can you answer this question? He's like, Oh yeah, sure.
Don't worry about it. Here's the answer. Good. Yes. We go faster.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah, and it can happen even with just a peer. You can still have this sense of feeling a little like, oh, I don't want my peer here to see that I'm not competent in something. Yeah, because oftentimes we perceive that other people are farther along or smarter than we are about things. But they're probably having the exact same thoughts.
Yeah, so it's interesting that I'm having these thoughts, they're having these thoughts. Absolutely.
So number three. Number three is we just have this need to be independent. So sometimes we feel like it just doesn't count if I don't figure it out myself. This can often come out of, that myth of being the self made person. I got to do it all on my own.
And it also could just simply be that, you know, you've been doing this, this long, you just believe you should have it all figured out by now.
Like, I've been doing it for so long, can't possibly need to ask for help at this point. So there's just this level of independence that gets in the way.
George Drapeau: I hear you say that I see somebody like that. I see a person who doesn't understand leverage. And that means they are not a senior leader. Senior leaders, people who really know how to lead organizations.
They all about leverage. This also reminds me about a person in your past whom I will not name, but you worked for, for a while for a very small independently run company. It seemed to me that this person was that way. They wanted things only so big that they can control them themselves and really needed to kind of know everything. And like, that's one of the reasons that business wasn't ever going to grow that much.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah, absolutely. will definitely have all sorts of other ramifications around just keeping you small.
If you just feel like you have to be able to, own it all.
Which relates to the number four, which is fear of losing control. I don't want to be beholden to this other person, or I'm fearing they're going to take credit, or that I'm just going to lose control or that they're going to hold this.
There's just all sorts of fears. Like I'm going to lose control of this thing if I let somebody else in. Yeah.
George Drapeau: Yeah. Very real. I get that. Totally get that. I think there's a jujitsu move that can happen here too. So for example, for me, if that happens to me and they're starting to take the credit.
Well, first of all, I, I really try to hold to, was it Harry Truman said, you can get a lot done if you don't care who takes the credit? Yeah. A lot more done. It's a beautiful phrase. And I think that's a very important leadership, not management, leadership phrase that I really try to hold true to. You can get so much done if you don't really worry about credit.
But then you do have to watch out about, and this would be interesting to talk about.
Self promotion versus letting other people take credit. What's that balance? But also somebody does that to me. Then I can jujitsu that on them and say, Oh, that's so great that you helped me with that. And clearly the, your expert. So here, here's the next work stream that you said you could do that.
I clearly can't. It's yours now.
Camille Rapacz: Oh, now you're discouraging people from helping because I know I help the more work I get piled on me. Yeah. I
George Drapeau: want to discourage that person. You try to take, take my team's credit away from me for doing that. You're going to pay for it.
Otherwise, no, usually no.
Camille Rapacz: Usually no. But you do bring up a good point that I think we could talk about in a future episode, which is around giving the right level of credit to your team and then making sure you're getting the credit. You're self promoting as well when you're trying to work within a company.
I have personal stories around me not doing this well, so we could talk about that.
But, back to today's topic, number five of one of these causes for why we have negative reactions is that we're just fear of rejection. What if they say no when I ask for help? Or they just ghost me, which we also perceive to be no, as opposed to they're just busy.
So yes, this fear of rejection, we just might fear they aren't going to want to help us. Yeah.
The last one I'm imagining this is a George reason: not wanting to overburden someone else. We think that they're too busy with their own stuff and I don't really want to burden them with having to help me.
I
George Drapeau: have two others. So first of all, fear of rejection. That's a good one. You know, for me, fear of rejection is usually a thing that I feel before I ask and never after I ask. It turns out when I ask somebody for something and they reject it, it's almost never a problem. I used to think about this the most in the context of dating.
Where I would find somebody I would like and maybe want to ask out, but wasn't sure she would say yes, but for whatever reason, if I got in a position where I asked her to do something and she said no, and I was like, it's fine. And I didn't feel particularly awkward afterward or anything. The actual fear of the rejection didn't hurt nearly as much as the fear of it.
Camille Rapacz: Usually, oh yeah, there's a whole thing around, the fear of a thing happening is worse than the thing happening itself. Yeah. We work it up to be this horrible thing, like we're fearing whatever it is, my fear of going to the dentist, my fear of asking this person for something, my fear of whatever it is, then after it's done, we're like, well, what was I so worried about?
So, it's very rare that the experience matches the fear we've built up. We can imagine much scarier things than what actually happens in real life. Yeah.
George Drapeau: Yeah. Okay. So the other two for me one is I'm not aware of how much it's costing the person to help me. So I'd like to know if I'm helping you to do this, is this a big deal for you?
Is this a small deal for you? How much am I really asking you? There's an economic value in my head for these things. And if I don't know the value I'm tentative about asking. If I knew how much it's going to cost you, I'm fine asking. I don't know why, but I have to be clear in my head about what's the cost to you of the thing that I'm asking you to do.
And I have a comment about that. Do you know what I'm saying?
Camille Rapacz: Yeah, this is, to me is kind of a more nuanced way of talking about this, not wanting to overburden someone else. You want to know what that burden is going to really be before you go and ask them, like, is this a big thing I'm asking them to do?
Is it a small thing to them? Yeah, I get that.
George Drapeau: The other thing, and I have talked about this with you, I don't know if it's on, I don't think it's on pod. We were talking about it personally in our extended family. My, when I was growing up, we grew up on a system of exchange of favors. Nothing happened in the family without a cost.
You couldn't just do a favor for somebody or ask a favor from a family member without them asking for something in return later. And I hate that. Like that's not unconditional. That's transactional. I don't want my family to be transactional for the most part. Yeah. And so I grew up being trained that if you ask somebody for something, you will be asked for something of equal or greater value later.
And you don't know what it's going to be, so you don't know what you're going to pay. It's like the mafia or something. I don't like that. Related to that, I realized that I was guilted sometimes when I would ask for things this is a deep psychological thing. I've seen counseling over this, but I learned that when I was younger and I would ask, Hey, could I do something?
Parents would sometimes reply with, why would you want to do that? Why wouldn't you just be with us instead or not do that? These questions that would come back to me for things that were reasonable as I'm not going to get into it in detail here, but basically guilt's being made to feel bad for asking.
Interesting. There's a psychic cost for doing that. Yeah. Well, the number one thing that blocks me from asking anybody for help about anything. It's totally irrational.
Camille Rapacz: All of this stuff that we talk about is mostly that gets in our way is just that we're irrational humans. Like that's kind of part of the problem that we have.
But I want to go back to you were talking about the, idea that there's this give and take, like if I ask you for help, then now I owe you something. Yeah. I put that into this bucket of number four, the fear of losing control. I don't want to lose control by now I'm beholden to someone else.
I have to owe this favor. you're saying it in this very specific way, though, which is what you could call out of its own thing, which is now I owe somebody something. And am I okay with owing this person? Some people are like, Hey, I'll do you a favor and you do me a favor. Like I don't have any problem owing you something, but also you would never treat it that way.
You would never say, Hey, I want to call in that favor. I don't have a ledger. Yeah. We wouldn't do that. We aren't keeping track. Exactly, we don't have a ledger, but this is the fear is that. Oh, what if that person does have a ledger, and maybe I don't know them well enough to know, or I have some inkling, but so, yes, I think that's definitely part of it.
And then your guilt one, making you feel guilty for even asking is such an interesting one because I think, how does that work in like a work environment? Does it cause you to hesitate to ask somebody like a colleague at work for help? Would that enter into that kind of a conversation or is it mostly around non work?
George Drapeau: It's a deep psychological condition of mine now. And so it's below the level of evaluation. It's just an emotional blocker like it's a trigger. The asking for help is a trigger for all that past that brings up.
It is not context specific. It is not situational. It is universal. This brings me to the comment I was going to make. I can't remember if we've talked about this particular thing on the, on the pod before, but last year when I ran for school board, one of the things I had to do was go and ask people to vote for me, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of times.
The me going door to door and learning how to ask people to vote for me was uncomfortable. At first, but then it got beaten out of me because I had to, and I had to do it within 20 seconds, and I got good at it. The fear of asking it's just gone.
That was one of the best things about running for the school board is it's trained me to be better about asking quick things for help and stating my ask quickly and getting it out of the way. And then just being ready for whatever response, which could be anywhere from, sure, I'll help you to, I'm already helping somebody else. I'm not going to help you or don't bother me.
But more than that, asking people, will you come and walk with me? Or will you come and sign my petition? Or more than that, not just sign my petition, but will you go and get 50 signatures for me?
You know, that, I mean, having to do that repeatedly, just doing it. It was painful the first month out of a two and a half month campaign, compressed campaign, but the rest of the time I stopped worrying about it. I didn't have time to worry about it. I had too much stuff to do. That was very useful.
Camille Rapacz: That's interesting. There is something that you build up this muscle around the more that you do it, the easier it can be.
George Drapeau: Yes. And I'm here to tell you audience that if you want to get better at asking for help, one way you can get better at asking for help is just practice asking for help.
I would say, run for an office it really is a great way to get over this kind of thing because it's the worst. You're put in front of strangers and you have no idea what their reaction will be. Their only thing you're doing is asking them to help. You're trying to offer value, but really you've only got time to ask them for the help really.
And you're going to do it a bunch of times. You will get better out of it. It's like phobia training . Yeah,
Camille Rapacz: exactly. Although I'm never going to get over my fear of spiders by dunking myself in spiders. That's not going to happen. Yeah. Okay. so you're going to the what do we do about it?
Yes. That is one thing we could do about it. We're going to get to that in a minute. But I want to talk about the helper for just a minute. And again, we're going to talk more about how to be a better helper in another episode. Okay. But I think it's important when you're thinking about how to be a better receiver of help or asking for help is to remember what's going on with the helper.
So ideally what's happening is the helper is feeling a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction. And it's a boost for their morale and it makes them feel motivated. It's all good things for the helper. So we hesitate to ask people for help when it's actually such a gift for the person who gets to help.
Yeah, absolutely. But the thing to know, that's how we should ask,
The trick with this is that those great feelings that a helper will have, it's really only happens when there's very little resistance from the learner or the person receiving the help.
Yeah. If resistance does occur, sometimes the helper will make it worse. This will enhance the person being helped. It will just enhance their resistance. So what could happen is that if you're met with some defensiveness, the person trying to help could just pressure you more like, no, no, no, I really want to help you.
And the more that you're defensive, the more they try to lean in and help. So that's a dynamic that we want to avoid.
So the other thing that can happen is that the helper sometimes can offer ideas prematurely before the person, the receiver is ready and not know it. . You might do it and not realize that's what you're doing. This is the example of, I was just coming to talk about my problems. I wasn't ready to hear your ideas to help me and fix it.
I just wanted to vent. What also could happen is the helper might just walk away and dismiss the receiver and just leave you feeling worse. They don't even want to engage with me because I dismissed them and now they've walked away from me and everybody feels bad. Those are things that the helper could do without thinking about it if they get rejected, if the person that they're trying to help rejects their help. Yeah.
Let's talk about what we do as learners, as receivers. So I'm thinking about this. If you're the person being helped, then sometimes I like to think of them as the person learning.
So I'm trying to learn. I'm trying to receive some help. Okay. What's the one thing that you can do? Well, the thing that you mentioned already is a great one. I did not have that on my list, which is just ask a bunch. The place I went to with what to do about this is really to focus on building your self-awareness. Awesome.
So we can all be better receivers of help, but to do it, we've got to be better at our own self awareness. This is the key. And so I've got a few questions here that you can ask yourself to help you build your self awareness around health. Okay. Ready? So here's the first one.
What do you need? That's a big question.
George Drapeau: Wait, what do you mean?
I mean, I'm asking for help. How is it that I somehow don't know what I need, Camille?
Camille Rapacz: Well, let me go into the details on that. So what do I need? Do I just need to be heard right now? Do I need somebody to just bounce ideas off of? I need like a thought partner. Do I need actual advice or guidance?
Try to ask for the kind of help you need.
Now this can be tricky because sometimes we're in maybe a heightened emotional state, or we're just start talking and before we know it the problem starts to come out and the person on the other side starts to help because that's what they think should happen.
So I'll have this happen to me when I'm partway through a conversation and I realize that's where I've gone. And then I'll stop myself and say, you know what? I just realized I started sharing. Here's what I need in this situation. I don't want you to give me an answer or try to solution with me.
Can you just hear me out? And as soon as I say that the person switches, I mean, I'm basically telling them how to help me, which is to just listen. So that's what I mean. What do I need? What kind, what do I want in terms of help? What kind of help do I want?
And if you don't know what kind of help you want, this is why we talk about building up your self awareness is to become more aware of what would be helpful for me right now? Just moving through the world saying, I don't know, is just going to be frustrating all the time.
And you can get better at this. So I have trained myself to get better at, as I'm having a conversation to say, well, what do I actually want in this conversation say, you know what, I just want to share this story, or I just want you to tell me your thoughts about this.
As you're working in a business, then you can match that to other levels of types of help that you want.
So do I want help from a coach? Do I want help from somebody who's just going to be a good listener? Do I need help from a superior, a boss? Do I need help from a consultant? So there's all these different types of help that you can get. And the more attuned you are, more self aware you are about what you need help with, then you can start to match it to the type of helper you would go to.
So I might not want to go to, one of my employees to coach me on something. That would be a mismatch. So just knowing what type of help you want. And I did a whole episode on this, by the way, it was one of my summer shorts episodes. So episode 51, I talk about how to get the right help in your business.
And I talk about the difference between a coach, consultants a mentor and a teacher. So you can go back and listen to that if you want to understand that more, but understanding that type of help is, it's helpful. So, and if you're resisting this help that we're giving you on the podcast, now's a good time to self assess.
Yeah. Absolutely.
So, number two, in doing this self awareness check is where do you resist most? So, I talked about in those, all those resistance areas that it could be very specific to a certain scenario. So, maybe you're more resistant around a specific topic. Maybe there's some topics you're great with and other topics you're like, I, I'm very resistant.
You can feel it. I start to resist people wanting to teach me about certain things. It could also be certain people. So some people will make you feel better when you ask for help than others do. You've probably had this experience when you're like, man, the help that I get from that person always feels a little maybe condescending or judgmental.
Like they just don't, it's just not helping very well. And then other people, you feel great after they've helped you. I imagine this is how your employees feel when they get help from you, George, they feel great.
So thinking about certain people, but also the environments. So sometimes there's environments where we're this can happen, say you're in a group environment, you might be in a big meeting and you're just not comfortable asking for help because you don't really know all the players.
Like all of the stuff we talked about might be coming up. Do I have enough trust with these people? okay feeling vulnerable in this space asking in front of this group? So it could just be the setting. Maybe you're not comfortable in a group setting, but in a smaller group of trusted people or in a one on one setting, you might feel more comfortable.
So these are all things you can look at and ask yourself and understand what are these different environments and scenarios where I might resist the most. Yeah. Okay. Then number three is to ask yourself, and this kind of gets to what you were saying, George, but in more of an assessment mode, which is every day, ask yourself, what am I struggling with?
And how can I benefit from some help? So what's my biggest struggle right now? And then imagine that you, you know, I can't solve this on my own. So what would the best form of help look like? And then try to go get it.
So today, do I just need a listener? Do I need a thought partner? Do I need a coach? Do I need help from my boss?
Do I need help from a colleague? What does it actually look like? And what do I need help with? What am I grappling with in the moment? If you try and practice that on a daily basis. It will help you be more self aware about where you need help, but also help you overcome.
Like you said, the more you practice it, the easier it gets.
George Drapeau: Yeah. This is really cool. I like this a lot.
Camille Rapacz: So those are my three questions you can ask as you're trying to do gets build some self awareness around that.
One of my other tips for this is that you can do some daily or weekly journal practice on this where you're just journaling on: what are my obstacles and where do I need help? As just a way to improve your own self awareness around where you could be asking for help. So maybe you're not used to asking for help a lot, or for me, the challenge will come up where I just, I have my own business. And so it's just me.
So who am I going to ask for help? Who do I go to? I don't have a team. I don't have a boss. I don't have somebody that's just my natural go to in my business. So I've had to kind of create this network and it can feel less comfortable to ask them for help because gosh, I think they're probably busy too.
And I'm not sure if they're even the right person who can help me with this. So being able to really assess what are my obstacles and where should I go for help becomes really important for me cause I have to go search for it. But I think it's helpful for anybody if you're struggling with how do I go get help with what I'm trying to work on?
George Drapeau: I love that idea.
Camille Rapacz: So here's my bonus for when you're receiving help. Tell the person helping you exactly how they were helpful. If you receive good help from somebody, say thank you. Not just thank you for helping, but thank you for helping, and this is how it was helpful. Thank you for being such a great listener, or thank you for helping me think outside the box, or thank you for helping me feel competent and capable, even as I struggled with this problem.
So if somebody does it really well, tell them, because they might not be themselves, self aware of how good they are at what they're doing.
And you want them to continue doing that for you and for other people. So giving that feedback is important. That's awesome. I love that.
. So we started this with George, you saying you're not good at asking for help. What's one thing that you want to try and do that might make you better at asking for help?
George Drapeau: I've done a lot of work on this. It really was revelatory to do this school board thing last year. That really put me years ahead, that one thing. I mean, my life is different now, a year later after doing this. All these things make sense to me.
The main one that I've done is just have practiced more. I love the self awareness. Again, reflection, you know, understanding myself about where is this coming from is helpful for me. That has been helpful for me.
By the way being afraid of asking for help is one of the root causes of being bad at delegating because they're related. So you have to realize as a leader, you can't be afraid of asking for help if you're going to delegate.
And if that's not, if that's not your approach to delegation, if your delegate way of delegation is just pushing people around and do fix that first, I would also say that I think I'm pretty good at this part.
But I think everybody should keep in mind that asking for help is actually a form of self empowerment. When you ask for help, you're either getting more leverage, or you're going to get better at something. Those are great.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. And again, I mean, we've talked about the growth mindset before and it's going to keep coming up cause it's my favorite thing to focus on if you're going to improve anything. And that's what we're talking about. This asking for help is how you really embrace and cultivate a growth mindset, getting better at knowing how to do it well, how to work through your resistance to it, all of those things.
And knowing where you resist, whether it's like you said, delegating. Or, working with peers or hiring help or, asking your boss or a senior person for help. You need all of those, by the way, you don't need just help from one area in your life. You need help at all of those levels in your life.
And so understanding the dynamics of the relationships and how it's affecting them. I think if just being aware of that as you go into it can help you be better at asking for help and also understanding, like you said, all the benefits of doing that.
I can't emphasize enough how much when you ask for help, the helper is getting so much out of it.
So much out of it. So, you know, we joked about like, it's a gift to them. It really is. And again, don't tell them like, I have a gift for you that George's advice is not great on that. But. Yeah. It is really a gift to them. Like if somebody wants my help, I just feel so honored and privileged and, it's a great thing.
So just keep that in mind when you're thinking about asking for help and you're hesitant to do it. Remember that it is always a positive for them. Yes, indeed.
On the few instances it's not, they will probably very quickly tell you and then you just move on to the next person because they're going to be one out of 100.
Indeed.
Well, that's all I have on the being the receiver of help. I think in another episode, maybe the next episode. We'll see. We will talk about what to do if you're want to be better at giving help and how do you work with people who are resisting help?
And this is something I'd come up against all the time, even though people hire me to be their coach or their consultants, they can still resist me. Even though they've asked me to come help them, there will still be moments of resistance within this agreement that I'm here to help you.
So we will talk about some of the ways that you can do this better.
That's all I have for this week. And this is really helpful. Thank you. Yeah. You're so welcome. I hope that it helps you in a way. Though, I do think that you're having to do the campaign was probably, man, you're right.
If everybody could have to do that, that would be something. Asking for help on a regular basis. Yeah.
You guys know what to do. If you want to tell us what you think, leave us a voicemail, go to the belief shift. com, little widget there where you can leave us a message. But also if you want to talk more about getting some help and you want to do it from somebody like me, who's a professional and helping out with all the things business like you can book a free consultation and go to camillerapacz.com/bookacall. All those links will be in the show notes. So that's all I have for you today.
George Drapeau: Awesome. Great talking
Camille Rapacz: with you, Camille. You too. And thanks everybody for tuning in and we will be back in your ears next week.
