39. How to Ask for Help (When Being Resourceful Isn’t Enough)
Episode 39
Today, we dive into the art of asking for help — without being too dependent on others or driving yourself bananas trying to do it all solo. Finding that sweet spot is key in both school and work.
Tune in to learn:
Why it’s essential to try solving problems on your own first
How to recognize when it’s time to reach out for help
Strategies for asking the right questions to get the help you actually need
How to accept the help you receive, even if it’s not exactly what you anticipated
🎙️Other Episodes + Resources Mentioned
Episode 38 → How to Be a Resourceful Person Who Figures Things Out
✏️ FREE DOWNLOADS:
→ Daily Timeblock Planner (pdf)
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The following transcript was autogenerated and may contain some interesting and silly errors. But in the name of efficiency and productivity, I am choosing not to spend my time fixing them. :)
39 How to Ask for Help (When Being Resourceful Isn't Enough)
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[00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to episode 39 of the Learn and Work Smarter podcast. The topic of today's episode is developing the skill of asking for help. This is also called self-advocacy and believe it or not, the ability to ask for help in a way that leads you to getting the actual help that you need is a skill.
And we say this all the time here on the podcast, but what is the cool thing about skills?
You can learn them. And the reason why I'm creating an episode around self-advocacy and asking for help is that every single one of us, no matter how capable or skilled we are, is going to be in the position of needing to ask for help, whether at school or work, we need to know how to ask for help in a way that's actually helpful.
Now in last week's episode, episode 38, that was called how to be resourceful. And that episode was a step-by-step tutorial, essentially, of how to figure [00:01:00] things out on your own.
And I know it is a natural question to be wondering right now, like, well, Katie, why, why would we want to do this when we could just ask someone else for the answer? Okay, I get that. You might be wondering that, but sometimes it's our actual job to know how to do something.
It is not always professional or a good look to be asking others questions when the answers are literally out there. That makes us look like we are a low-effort employee or a low-effort student.
And it's frankly, not a quality that is going to serve us.
But at the end of that episode, episode 38, I gave the caveat that no matter how resourceful you are, no matter how closely you follow the strategies I shared in that episode, we're all gonna need to ask for help at some point.
Some things are truly unforgettable by ourselves. And so this episode is in a way, an extension of episode 38, because being resourceful. [00:02:00] and trying to figure things out on your own that is step one. We need to do that first.
And oftentimes by going through the motions and consulting our resources, we do figure it out on our own.
But other times we do need to ask a boss or a manager or a professor for help. And that is where a new set of strategies and skills come in.
This is step two, and this is what we are talking about today.
All right. Let's start with the fundamental principle of asking for help. And the most important key is to have a clearly defined need. The more specific we can be about [00:03:00] what we need, the better we'll be helped.
If you listened to episode 38, and you might recognize that this sounds an awful lot like identify your wall.
Okay. That's how I described it. That's the way I describe this idea of taking some time to figure out exactly where our understanding breaks down or our skillset is not adequate. All right. So instead of telling our sociology teacher I need help on this paper, we narrow down what we actually need.
Do we need help defining our thesis? Do you need help identifying source materials? Do you need help developing a counter-argument? Do we not even understand the essay prompt? Right. The more specific we are with identifying our need, the more helpful, our teacher can be.
Now, and before we even set up a time, I'm going to talk about that in a minute, with the teacher, we should have isolated our exact issue and written down our specific question- I say on a piece of paper. We take our time. We sit and think, what do I really need help with?
In the workforce, let's say that you're, [00:04:00] you are a teacher, and you're a general education high school teacher. And for the first time you have a student in your class with autism spectrum disorder, who is non-verbal. All right and your dilemma is that you're unsure how to teach this student given their neurodivergence and the fact that he is non-verbal. Okay.
So you go to the steps that I taught in episode 38 about being resourceful and I'm, I'm teaching that here. And you Google it. You look at your notes that you took from graduate school. You watch a YouTube video, but you are still unclear about the best practice here.
At this point, you know, that you need to consult the director of special education services, right?
And to do so you'd want to narrow down exactly what you are stuck on. Okay, so he's nonverbal. All right. But that doesn't mean he's incapable of receptive language, so, okay. You're not worried about modifying, you know, classroom instruction because he can receive. Okay. And, and he can write. So you're not unclear about modifying written assignments.
That is not the issue. But then after, you [00:05:00] know, some thinking, you realize that you're super unclear, super stuck about how to modify your presentation requirement for your non-verbal student. Great. Okay. So that is what you bring to your director of special education. If you asked your director, Hey, I need help with this student.
Right. And you might get a bunch of tips, but none of them are going to be relevant to your actual issue.
But if you approach the director with the question, hi, I need some help figuring out how to modify my presentation assignments for uh, yeah, assignments for a student who is non verbal, then you will get the exact answer that you are looking for.
The next step in asking for help in a way that demonstrates skill and effort and professionalism is to set up a meeting with the person you've identified as being the one to provide you the help. If you're a student, it is pretty easy to identify who this person is. It's most likely a professor a teacher, maybe in some cases, an academic advisor. But if you are in the [00:06:00] professional space, the answer of who to go to for help is not always that clear-cut.
Gotta be honest. In some cases it could be a colleague who maybe you've identified as having more experience or skill in the area that you struggling in, it could be an immediate supervisor. Maybe it is the HR department if it's related to, I don't know, like a human resources issue.
Each workplace has its own hierarchy and politics and implicit or explicit rules about who you can access on the power ladder. And you have to make sure that you're not reaching up higher than would make management happy.
Okay. That's a skill right there too.
But once you identify who the person is who has the potential to help you, it's a good practice to give that person advanced notice that you are seeking help and would like to set up a time to meet.
Depending on who this person is, that might need to be a more formal meeting, but even if it's just a colleague whose position is like, Lateral [00:07:00] to yours, it's still a good practice not to ambush them in the hallway with like help me now. Right.
It's and it's important to remember that our coworkers have jobs to do too. And if we're looking for some of their time, we need to be respectful of how they operate their schedules and manage their own time. So, whether you're reaching out in an email or a phone call to set up a meeting,
or you find them at their desk and you're like, Hey, could we meet sometime this week? You want to give them some idea of what kind of help you're looking for. Okay. You don't have to like lay it all out on them, but give them some context. Imagine if someone came up to you and said, hi, I need your help.
Can we meet tomorrow?
I don't know about you, but my mind would be reeling with a million different, you know, ideas of what type of help. They're looking for, I'd be thinking, do they need help at home? Do they need help with their kids? Do they need help with their marriage to, they need help with their work?
Are they looking for a recipe? Do they need help with their aging parents? Do they need me to cat-sit for them? Right. Like, [00:08:00] “I need help” is way too vague.
So the skill of asking for help in a way that gets you exactly what you need involves communicating to the person who's helping you what kind of help you're looking for?
It's best if you give them a brief idea of what kind of help that you'll be needing at your future meeting.
You don't need to, like I said, go into details. If you are writing an email, you could just say something like, Hey, I'm looking for help um, on my Romeo and Juliet essay. Okay. I'm looking for help on the onboarding process for international clients, right. Nothing too specific, but just enough to give them an idea.
The next step is when you meet with the person whose help you're seeking, whether that's in person, maybe it's on the phone.
Maybe it's a zoom meeting, whatever, it could be an email, right. Regardless, you have to be exceptionally specific with what kind of help you're looking for.
This is where you articulate your clearly defined need, which hopefully you took the time to figure out. [00:09:00] And I'm going to use the same expression that I have used a few times now already. But this is your wall. Okay.
You're like, okay, Katie, we get it. But it's, this is important. This is the exact place where your understanding of our problem breaks down or perhaps your skill set is inadequate. We don't just approach our professor with, I need help on a Romeo and Juliet essay. Instead, you write a rough draft, you bring that to the meeting. You've done some thinking ahead of time to identify that your wall is your analysis of the quotes that you chose. Right. You don't think that you have I don't know, maybe it's sufficient analysis and you keep repeating yourself. So your very specific question to your professor is “can you help me find a way to analyze my quotes more profoundly?”
Great. Awesome. That means that your teacher will be able to give you that specific instruction.
If you approach them with, Hey, I need help on my essay, then you're not going to get the help you need. You're going to get some generic writing [00:10:00] instruction.
If you're a working professional and you're unclear about the company's policy for onboarding international clients. And let's say that you have set up a meeting with your supervisor. Awesome. Well, you'd want to come to your supervisor with a very clear question that's connected to the exact point that you're confused about.
So you would say something like, okay I have steps one through three figured out of this onboarding process, but the next step is unclear for me for international clients. I know that for non-international clients, we do this, but I'm thinking we do this for international clients. Am I correct?
if you were to approach your supervisor with some general complaint, that's like, I don't know how to onboard clients, not only are you appearing inadequate at your job description, but you're also not going to get the help that you actually need. And this all boils down to at your meeting with whoever it is that you're asking for help, show up to that meeting, knowing how to articulate your problem. I suggest trying to write it down. If you can't write it down, [00:11:00] then it's not clear enough to you.
Now the final step here is to be open to the help that you get. It is literally a professor's and a manager's job to help us and guide us and teach us. Because our bosses and our teachers do not want us to fail.
They don't want us to suffer. They want us to do our job. But different teachers and managers do have different philosophies about helping students and employees. And this just comes down to people having different teaching styles and managing styles. You might have a professor who gives you exactly what you need on the spot.
Going back to our Romeo and Juliet essay, right? You might have a professor who says, okay, well, let me give you this example in this example and show you this previous essay or whatever. And just walk you through every single step.
Or you might have a professor who instructs you to go back and, you know, look at your notes and they say, you know what?
Check out slide 29 of our class note presentation. That's where I give you analysis tips.
In both of these instances, you are receiving help. It just looks different. And I [00:12:00] encourage you to be open to that.
In the case of a professor saying, Hey, why don't you check out slide 29 or, you know, consult your notes or read the resource I posted in the, in the class portal, that is help. The professor is directing you to your resources.
Okay. Now, a caveat to this is that if for some reason you believe that your manager or your teacher has maybe misunderstood the issue that you're struggling with in that case, they might be answering your question in a way that's truly not helpful.
And in that case, you do want to speak up and say what I can clarify, right, what it is that you're struggling with. But what I'm saying is if they offer you help in a way that looks different than you were hoping for, I say, take the help that they're giving and see how far you can get with it.
Now, before we wrap up this episode, I want to take a little bit to talk about the fine line between asking for help and being resourceful between this episode and episode 38, about how to be resourceful and figure things out, I alluded to this fine [00:13:00] line a few times, but I do want to go a little bit deeper here. There truly is a fine line between using your resources, which might be a manager or a professor and you relying on someone else to put in the effort to get an answer that you can technically find somewhere yourself. And recognizing and identifying and interpreting this line is all part of the skill of resourcefulness.
And it's all part of the skill of being able to ask for help at work or in school.If you are new to advanced schooling or the professional space, or maybe you're just new to the idea that figuring things out is just part of what we do as humans than your instinct might be just to ask someone for help the moment you need it.
But again, the skill here is the ability to look at your situation and ask yourself, is this something that I can figure out on my own? Is there an answer out here that I just need to, you know, access my resources to find it.
Now if what you're stuck on is [00:14:00] anything that's process-based or how-to-based, those are usually the types of questions and you can find the answer to, without, you know, setting up a meeting with a supervisor and asking someone else. But if what you're struggling with is more of an issue of, I don't know, like ethically interpreting something or interpreting a sticky, sticky situation, analyzing something that's not so clear cut- basically anything other than a simple how to- well, then it might be the right choice to set up a meeting with a supervisor to bring your exact issue to that meeting, get the help you need, and then walk away with a plan.
All right, my friends. Let me remind you that every month on the learn and work smarter podcast, I do a listener question episode where I answer questions submitted by you. There is a form on the homepage of learnandworksmarter.com. You type your question into the form. It does ask your name, but I never read your name on the podcast and I don't read any identifying information either.
[00:15:00] Thank you for being with me here today and as always, never stop learning.
