The Art of Asking for Help

Learning what asking for help means and why it matters is something I find myself explaining over and over. There's this misconception that asking for help is seen as a weakness. You should be able to do it all by yourself, which I feel strongly about being false. I admire Arnold Schwarzenegger and his book "Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life" is one of the many mediums where he shares that he's not a self-made man. He had the support and help from many people around him. He has been successful in a mind-blowing amount of different fields also because he surrounded himself with the right people, the ones who could support him, push him, and help him when needed.

This is why I find it silly that interns get stuck for way too long without reaching out for help. I make it a mission to let them, and anyone new to the team, know that they should lean on the team itself to learn and get unstuck. It is our goal as a group to empower one another to succeed in the mission ahead of us. I often lead by example partly because I actually need the help, but also to show that even people who have been in the industry for a while still need the help and support of others.

There are often a few things I recommend to manage asking for help:

• Make an effort first: test the boundaries of your knowledge and embrace the struggle, that's when you learn the most. Don't be afraid of a problem before even trying.
• Time-boxing: cut out a specific amount of time for a problem and do frequent "self-check-ins". For example, give yourself a few hours, have you made any progress? Can you think of a different approach? If after your time-box has expired you can't answer yes to these questions, it might be time to get some support.
• Communicate early: let your manager know you're exploring unknown waters and that you're going to time-box yourself to at least give it a go. This opens up the conversation to check in with one another to make sure you made progress, and if you haven't, it won't be a surprise and you can get the support you need before spending endless days on it.

Asking for help is not a failure (and we could talk about the power of failure another time). I once spent weeks on an issue thinking I was missing something obvious, or I just couldn't hack it. When I reached the point of no progress, I let my manager know. Both he and the Director spent an hour with me on this issue, and they were both equally lost. This was reassuring in a way, I just didn't realize how complex what I was tackling was and just thought I was an idiot. Chatting about it though prompted a few new venues and I eventually figured it out. I'm glad I chatted with both, it helped me think about the problem differently and while they were not able to hand me the solution, they showed support and allowed my brain to open new doors!

To this day, when I pick up a ticket that I'm clueless about I announce that "I might need some help, but I'll give it a go!". I appreciate when someone is being open and direct like this, this is a GOOD sign, not a bad one. You're showing initiative and will to explore things you're unfamiliar with.

Thoughts

Asking for help is not a weakness or a failure. As you grow you'll learn to know yourself more and will be able to express better and better judgement on the right time to ask for help. Keep the communication open with your manager. I wish I had this mindset during my college years. I always thought that asking for help, or raising my hand when something the professor covered wasn't clear was a sign of weakness. What I did was spend countless hours banging my head against hard topics until they clicked. What I didn't understand was that most of those professors were quite happy to help, that's kind of what they are there for! The goal was for me to learn not to prove that I could do it all by myself. What brought me joy was also being able to save others countless hours by sharing what I learned. Just a month ago I was thinking about this in one of my thoughts Don't Be a Knowledge Hoarder.