Do you try to accomplish your goals on your own? Sort of a “rugged individualism” mentality that prevents you from asking for help?
If you never ask for help, you will certainly accomplish less in life. I’m not saying you need to throw your hands up and scream “Help Me!” every time you have a goal or every time you encounter a hurdle.
I starting thinking about this today, because I need your help. I think it will be easy for you to help me, but I’ll wait a few paragraphs to formally ask.
People fail to ask for help in accomplishing their goals for a number of reasons:
- Truly don’t need help. Sometimes this is true. We can do it ourselves.
- Pride – asking for help, in some circles, makes you appear weak.
- Hope that help will come without asking.
- More rewarding to do it yourself. There are some goals that just plain feel more powerful when completed purely on your own. Often, this is a false perception, but sometimes it’s true.
- Fear – this takes many shapes, including the fact that to ask for help, you have to tell people about your goal. That in itself is sometimes scary. “What I I fail, after telling everyone? I’ll be ruined! Ah me!” But it can also be fear of rejection: “What if I ask for help and the person says ‘no’?”
- Arrogance – sometimes we fail to ask for help because we believe we can do it on our own, when in reality we can’t.
How To Ask For Help With Your Goals
Asking for help on an important goal is different, in some ways, from a generic plea for assistance. It’s not asking for a favor. It’s asking for substantive contribution towards something really important to you. Here’s my checklist for asking for help with a major goal:
- Start with “I’ve set a goal for myself to do ________________. But I realize that there are parts of this that I can’t do alone. Can I tell you more about this because I would like your help with one area?”
- Be specific with how you want them to help.
- Don’t try to soften it by saying “I understand if you don’t want to” or “You don’t have to” or anything like that.
- If this is a truly important goal, and you sense that the asking for help will be difficult for you, then practice the asking and visualize it turning out the way you want.
- Say please. For example “Could you please email me every Tuesday morning to ask me how my run went?”
- Tell them exactly why you chose them and how their small assistance will make a big difference for you. For example “I know you are very organized, and I respect your opinion a lot, so knowing that you will be emailing me every Tuesday will be a major motivator for me to do my jog before I get that email from you!”
- Choose someone you trust. You need to trust them ethically and trust them from a skill-level, that they can actually perform the help.
- Choose someone who will also benefit, in some way, from the process.
So Now I’m Asking You For Help
Let’s see if I can follow my own advice…
I’ve set a goal to get to 1000 registered readers of this site by December 31. But it’s tough going and I can’t do it alone.
But you can help. See, you already must be enjoying this site right? So you are in a great position to tell others about it.
All I want you to do is email, right now, 5 people who you think might like the site. Don’t send them to this article though – this won’t be as valuable to them. Send them to another article you really like. And tell them to sign up.
To make this easy, I’ll include an example message below.
Getting more active readers will help you too – that means better discussions and more incentive for me to invest more time in quality articles that help you achieve amazing goals.
So can you please tell friends about this site?
Here what you can cut and paste to them:
……………..
Hi ________
I’ve been reading a cool site for goal setting. It’s called The Goal Triangle. I think you’ll especially like this article: http://goaltriangle.com/advanced-goal-setting/the-myth-of-the-balanced-life-success-comes-from-imbalance-not-balance/
If you like it, you should definitely register on the site – no spam or anything, just good articles once a week.
……………
Please send this, or something like it, to 5 people you know right now! I thank you in advance!
Darrin
