Asking for help is hard

You are smart and competent.

You work in an environment that values autonomy.

You value autonomy.

You feel like you should be able to do things yourself.

Humans are inherently social

We live in groups.

We work in groups.

We have complex divisions of labour.

We are dependent on others for many things

You probably don’t grow all of your own food, build your own house, find your own fuel to heat that house, get your water from a natural water source and purify it to make it safe to drink.

You are already part of a complex division of labour in which other people’s work supports your daily existence.

In your working life, someone else recruits the students, deals with the administrative issues around registering them and making sure that their studies will be recognized by others. Someone else has provided facilities for you to work in, with the appropriate technical equipment (even if that equipment is just a whiteboard at the front of the room).

Powerful cultural discourses value autonomy and independence

Despite these facts, there are powerful cultural narratives that value independence and autonomy.

These narratives tend to downplay or even obfuscate the extent to which we are interdependent.

These narratives have influenced your own core beliefs.

Your gremlins whisper them to you. They sometimes shout them when it looks like you are doing something that doesn’t fit.

You are not a dupe

Just because it’s cultural doesn’t make it easy to resist or change.

Culture is pretty damned powerful.

Don’t beat yourself up for valuing autonomy and independence.

Don’t think it should be easy to ask for help.

Start small

Experiment with asking for help.

Start with things that don’t get the gremlins too riled up. Tell them you are experimenting. You are going to try this and see how it goes.

Treat every ask as a learning experience. You are learning about how to ask for help. You are learning about what kinds of things you can ask for help with. You are learning about what kinds of things you are better off doing yourself.

You are a unique individual

The things you will find most helpful to get other people to do will not be the same as those your friend, your colleague, your mother, or your neighbour gets other people to do.

Don’t start with something that feels like you should be able to get help with because other people don’t seem to find it weird.

Start with something that you find relatively easy to let go. Something that you aren’t going to want to micro-manage if someone else is doing it for you. Something that needs to be done but you aren’t very invested in doing for yourself.

Take notes

If it helps, get a notebook where you can take notes.

Write down what your gremlins don’t like about particular help requests.

Write down what went well.

Write down what went badly.

Be specific. Remember, it might be that the person you asked for help wasn’t the right person, not that the task wasn’t the right one to delegate. Only experimentation will give you the answers.

You are a researcher. You can do this.

There are no deadlines.

The point of these experiments is to make your life less stressful.

You are trying to figure out how to do your job well and enjoy other things in life.

Your capacity is finite.

You are trying to figure out how to do more of the stuff that you really value and also get enough rest, eat well, etc.

Good luck.