4 Most Common Mistakes To Ask For Help

One of my colleagues has a friend who always makes requests like this. "Can you help me repaint the living room? Let's have a beer and chat! Hen party! " she may write. Or " Hey, can you pick me up from the auto shop? We haven't seen each other in 100 years! Let's arrange a mini-trip!". It's amazing that their friendship stands up to such requests.

In General, this is a bad way to get someone's support. People really like to do something good for others. But when you insist on how nice it will be for a person to help you, all the joy of helping disappears.

It is as if you are trying to control him, and you are being extremely arrogant — deciding for the other how he will feel.

You can mention some benefits to the helper, but not in a subtle way. Don't mix selfish reasons and altruism together: so your request will be too similar to manipulation. The researchers tested this with a single experiment

self-motivated: "Graduates report that donations to the University cause them positive emotions»;
with altruistic motivation: "A donation is your chance to change something in the lives of students and teachers»;
with mixed motivation: "You will get a lot of positive emotions. It's also your chance to change the lives of others."

And those who received a letter with mixed motivation were twice as likely to donate.

We often talk about what we need, as if it is some trifle that will take a minimum of effort for the other person.

"Can you bring these documents to the client? It's practically on your way home" or "will you add something to the database? It will only take you five minutes."

But by reducing our request in this way, we also reduce the value of the service.

As well as those pleasant feelings that could arise in a person in the process of helping. In addition, there is a risk that you have incorrectly calculated how much time it will take for a person to fulfill your request. Especially if you don't quite understand how it works.

For example, an old friend periodically writes to my editor asking me to look at his texts. It usually goes something like this: "I think the text is pretty clean. Can you read it quickly? This shouldn't take up much of your time!" She opens the attached file, and it turns out to be a 6,000-word scientific paper. And once it was a whole book.

I don't think people do that out of selfishness. It's just that we really don't always understand what the responsibilities of specialists from other industries include. As a result, we consider the other person's work to be simple and insignificant. But this attitude is unlikely to contribute to success.

Remember when I took that problem client away from you?
Remember that time I sat with your baby?
Remember how you always forgot your house keys and I had to come back and open the door for you?

It is better to refuse such phrases. In General, if a person needs to be reminded that they owe you something, most likely, they do not feel obligated at all. And talking about your past service will only put you both in an awkward position. It will seem that you are trying to control the other person (which is exactly what you are doing).

No one likes this treatment, but it is somehow inconvenient to refuse.

My editor found himself in just such a situation. She politely explained to a friend that he was asking her to do a job that would take about 40 hours, and offered to look at the chapters that he particularly doubted. In response, he reminded her that he had helped her with articles at the beginning of her career. It seems logical that now she should respond in kind.

But this is appropriate when the services are approximately the same. Helping with a few short articles is not the same as editing an entire book. In addition, you can remind about the past if you helped a person not so long ago. It is unlikely that someone will feel obligated to you 10 years later unless you saved their life.

There are many ways to thank people for their help, and we often do it wrong.

We get too hung up on how we feel and forget about the other person. Scientists noticed this by observing

Some noted the positive qualities of the partner — for example, they said: "You are so responsible", "You always try your best to help", "you are very good at it". Others mentioned only about themselves: "It helped me relax", "It made me very happy", "I now have something to brag about at work".

As a result, scientists have identified two different types of gratitude: "praising another" and "rejoicing for herself".

The first type recognizes the value of the person who helped us, and the second type describes how much better we got from the help we received. At the end of the experiment, participants who provided help themselves rated how empathetic their partner was, as well as how satisfied they were now. Those who were praised felt happier overall and were more disposed to the partner.

This is worth thinking about. We are naturally egocentric in our view of the world — we think and talk about ourselves first. And when we get help, we naturally want to tell you how it made us feel.

It seems to us that this is what the other person wants to hear because they helped us to become happier. But this is not quite true.

Yes, he wanted you to feel better. But the desire to help someone is also closely related to self‑esteem. People do this because they want to be good and be respected. They want to see themselves in a positive light, and this is difficult to do if you only talk about your feelings. So focus not on yourself, but on the person who helped you.