The fate of your happiness is determined by asking for help

How can we become happier? Many people have ideas like: live in the moment, be grateful, follow your passion, and give help to others. I’m particularly drawn to that last one: give help to others.

While it can be easy to do, giving help to others can sometimes feel like a one-way street. Whether you’re giving a piece of advice or giving directions to someone who looks lost, not everyone is open and willing to hear your unsolicited help or advice.

What if asking for help, not just giving help, could actually make you happier?

Why We Don’t Ask For Help

We’ve all been in a situation where we should have asked for help and simply did not.

Depending on our life experiences, it can be challenging to ask someone for help, even for very mundane requests. It’s not just a matter of being introverted or shy: even confident and outgoing people have a hard time asking for help.

Why is it so hard? Is it our ego, pride, fear of vulnerability? It turns out that our evolutionary fear of rejection can play a role.

Social psychologist Heidi Grant studies the science of motivation and reports that we all possess an evolutionary fear of being rejected by our social group. When facing rejection (real or perceived), the brain creates a signal similar to pain in an attempt to get us to adjust our behavior to avoid rejection by our “pack” or social group. Our evolution is working against us because today, we need to engage with many different tribes of people daily.

Asking for help means admitting you don’t know something, which can trigger that evolutionary fear of pack rejection. So we pretend we know things and we don’t ask for help.

Psychologist Vanessa Bohns has good news for us, though, because she reports that the difficulty level of asking for help is sort of an illusion we create for ourselves — she found that people dramatically underestimate the amount of help they’ll receive when they ask.

It’s OK Not to Know Everything

Believe it or not, it’s totally OK not to know things.

Let me say that again: it’s totally OK not to know things.

Saying “I don’t know” is the best thing you can do to understand where you stand with your knowledge, what you still need to learn, and when you need help from others. Not knowing does not make you a bad person; in fact, it just makes you human.

My Story

I grew up introverted, shy, nerdy, and intellectual and learned to figure things out on my own most of the time. These traits caught the attention of my teachers and tutors who helped me take accelerated classes and skip the seventh grade.

When I skipped a grade, I had to deal with feelings of abandonment from my former classmates, as well as a new tribe of 8th graders who wanted to know what I was doing in their grade. It was a tough time for me emotionally, but I did benefit academically and educators kept advancing me.

With the help of a business coach two decades later, I realized that my inability to ask for help originated from this time of my life. I realized that all the people who helped me skip seventh grade gave me their help when I DID NOT ask for it. The result? I learned to resent the idea of other people helping me and it took years to break down that emotional shield.

Asking For Help

So what does asking for help have to do with happiness?

I can honestly tell you that I started asking for real help only in the past few years. I began to realize there was some rewiring I needed to do to become happier and learn to trust others. I learned that I needed to accept the fact that I could not know everything. I needed to flip that switch in my brain and start asking for help. I started practicing mindfulness around the discomfort of saying “I don’t know” and working through that discomfort. Though it will take ongoing practice to override my brain’s default signals, the effect on my happiness was almost instantaneous.

As the owner of a business, learning to ask for help meant learning to properly delegate at work and home. I stopped worrying about everything being perfect and came to terms with mistakes that people might make if I delegated. We’re all only human, after all. I also share my mindfulness practice with colleagues so that we can all work together on changing our default reactions.

When I learned to delegate better, others around me realized that they could ask me for help as well. This two-way communication channel enabled us to better understand each other’s perspective and build more amazing things together.

At Sharp Hue, we like to say “Get work done. Go home happy.”, and I found that asking for help and building trust with my team made that a lot easier to do.

The Takeaway

As I mentioned, it takes practice asking for help — especially if you’re the type of person who is used to learning things on your own and solving your own problems. But think about the downside to never ask for help: you could be missing out on amazing experiences, relationships, and solutions.

Giving help brings all of us great joy, but when we learn it’s perfectly OK to ask for help, we can truly multiply our happiness.

Want to learn more about Sharp Hue? Contact us today.