Asking for Help is Not Unprofessional

I did my MBA and with all these people; and some of them were “more important” to me, and some “less important” to me. And I noticed that I had in my mind this idea that you got to keep in touch with people to ask them for something later. And after a little while, a few months after we finished, or even during my education, I noticed that the guys would just call me if they needed something. They didn’t have to keep in touch. They didn’t even have to be close to me as my colleagues or more friends. If they needed something, even two years later, that was relevant to my profession; they would write to me or call me. And I thought, “oh, well, that’s easy!”. And I thought, “oh, well, that didn’t waste any of my time over two years. They didn’t have to call to keep in touch. But when they needed me, they called me. That seems like a really reasonable way to do things”. So this is the first thing: if you need help, call the right person. People love to help, you love to help. Why wouldn’t they love to help? That’s the first thing. I even remember, with my husband, one day, we were… (one day I was married. I mean, for 10 years I was married), and we ran out of sugar. It was a weekend and you couldn’t buy it at the store. And I said, “we should ask the neighbor”. And he said, “I don’t know, are we that kind of neighbors with them?” And I said, “well, if we ask them for sugar, now they’ll know we’re that kind of neighbors; and then next week, they could ask us if they run out of something”. And that’s how we convinced ourselves that it was okay to ask for help. Because we wanted them to know they could ask us. So if you have to do silly mind-tricks like that, you could do that as well. The other thing is about the difference between men and women. So I spoke to that a little bit right now. It is true that men just have a much more professional way of thinking about professional relationships. It’s like, this is a professional relationship, I call when I need them not for chitchat. The other thing is women’s way of communicating; and women don’t communicate the same way that men do. And there are studies about this. You could be all feminist and whatever you want. I was raised super, like, men and women are the same. It is not true that we are the same; and we do not communicate the same. Anthony Robbins has this thing where he, teaching about men and women, he always calls on some guy, a single guy, always a single guy. And he says, okay, you’re driving in the car with a girlfriend and she goes, “do, do you need to stop for the bathroom?” What do you do? And the single guy always goes, “I go, you know, I’m fine”. And that’s the “wrong answer”, right? That’s the wrong answer! The correct answer is either, “oh, I could stop sooner. I don’t know, how do you feel?” Right? That’s the correct; and women don’t speak directly. Now, if we did speak directly, you could say it would be better. It’s better in a professional situation. That’s one of the things you need to adopt in your professional language. And we all do this. Again, this is connected to not wanting to hear “no”. If I don’t want to hear “no”, I might say, “yeah, I’m doing this course that’s coming up soon”, and hope the person goes, “oh, I’m interested in your course!”. Instead of saying, “I’d like you to register for my course. Would you be interested in registering for my course?” If you watch a sales person doing this, they’ll say, “is that something you’d be interested in?” That’s a really great phrase. By the way, if you’re talking to men, the magic word is, “could you help me?” Men want to help women. It is biologically set up that way. So, magic word is, “could you help me?” And again, this is something you can practice. You can practice asking for little favors for your friends. You can ask people on the street, “hey, could you just hold this for me; or watch my bicycle for a second?”. Practice asking for things. We have this thing that people say, that it’s better to give than receive. And in many ways that does feel better, but if everybody were always giving and not receiving the karma would be out of place again. Your “karma bucket” isn’t just about giving all the time. Your “karma bucket” gets out of balance if you don’t also receive. So that’s a “karma bucket”. So, asking for help is great. Hearing “no” is just “no”. Go to the next person. There’s more people out there to ask for that help. We live in a society today that is very dependent on money. There’s powers that be; want us to use money for things rather than people. We’re being brainwashed. And I could go into a long story about that. But things that we used to get for free, like childcare from our mom or our neighbors, we now pay for. Things that we used to get for free, like music, we just sat around and played for each other; we now pay for. This is not an accident. It’s not like just happened that way. Right now we’re going through a very difficult crisis in our economic systems. And one of the only things, in fact, the only thing that’s going to get us out of that is going back to asking each other for things; going back to having relationships. The governments and the big corporations would like us to have no relationships because then we can only function with money. So helping people is a form of relationship, asking people for help is a form of relationships; and building up your relationship is the only thing that’s going to get you through this crisis. I have no idea how we’re going to come out at the other end. But I do know that however rich your relationships are, that’s what you’ll get. And I also know that people like to give. Don’t worry about it. As long as you’re not being really greedy for yourself, don’t worry that “oh my gosh, I’m asking for help…”. It gives people permission to ask for help.