4 Mistakes that make when they ask for help
1. Telling the other person how much they would enjoy helping:
Some people ask for help in a way that makes it clear how much you'll enjoy providing it, for example: “Could you help me paint the living room? It will be so much fun to chat and drink juice while we work.”
Or, "Can you pick me up at the bus stop and bring me home? Long time no see; let's make this a fun trip.” People only act in that manner because they are close friends.
Never try to persuade someone that helping you will be rewarding. While it is always a pleasure to help, reminding people of this stops them from feeling that pleasure.
This is due to the fact that it will appear as though you are controlling them and preventing them from making their own decisions. Furthermore, you have no right to dictate how they should feel because this is something that they must determine for themselves.
It's acceptable to discuss the advantages of indirectly contributing, but you must be careful not to concentrate on this and avoid confusing your own interests with those of others, as this will expose your attempts at manipulation.
In one study, former students from about 1,000 colleges who had not previously donated to their school were emailed with one of three messages by fundraisers.
The first message is written in a self-serving manner: "Former students say: Giving makes them feel good." "Giving is your opportunity to make a difference in the lives of students, faculty, and staff," says the second message.
The third message is written in a combination of the two previous forms, and the researchers discovered that while the selfish and altruistic messages both had similar efficacy, the donation response rate of the recipient of the third message was cut in half.
2. Describing the help you ask for as if it were a small favor
Talking about the assistance you require as a small service and emphasizing that it won't be a hassle are common mistakes. For example, some people might ask, "Can you hand these contracts to the client?” They may claim that you can easily drop them off on the way home, or they may assure you that it won't take much time, saying, "Can you update the database? It won't take more than five minutes.”
However, when we undervalue our request, we also undervalue the value of the other person's help, the pleasant emotions that help may arouse, and the risk that we will not accurately estimate the scope of the service we are asking for, particularly if it requires the person to perform a task that we do not understand.
For example, the editor might sometimes get an email from a friend asking him to look at his writing and make the email look small, like, "I think it's error-free, but maybe you could proofread it quickly? It shouldn't be too long." When the editor opens the file, he discovers it contains a massive academic book.
If you have previously requested assistance in this manner, it is not because you are selfish; You simply don't realize what you're doing wrong, and you don't know how many hours of work that service requires, but you're inadvertently showing the other person that you believe the work they're doing is easy, quick, trivial, and not tiring, which isn't a good way to ask for assistance.
Whether it's IT, HR, sales, or marketing, you probably work with people whose jobs you don't fully understand every day. If this is the case, don't assume that the next time you ask for help, it will be quick.
3. Reminding people that they owe you
- “Do you remember when I took on your challenging client issue?”
- "Do you remember that day when I looked after your child?"
- “Do you remember the time you lost your house key and I had to return home to help you open the door?”
Since asking for help can be difficult, we may be tempted to point out how we have previously helped the person from whom we ask for help, but this can be embarrassing.
If we use the example from above, the editor may want to decline the work when they receive the book in their inbox but may feel that they cannot decline completely.
So they might text their friend and explain politely that their application needed about 40 hours of work and ask them if there was one particular chapter they were worried about proofreading.
Then their friend would remind them that they had helped them in the past by proofreading their articles for them, which might make sense. This is due to the friend doing them a favor, which they are required to return because they have been friends for a long time.
While reciprocity increases the likelihood that someone will offer to assist, it also gives the impression that you are in control of them, which eliminates any opportunity for helping-related pleasure. Reciprocity requires that the acts of help are roughly equal, as checking out some of the 500 articles is very different from editing a 50,000-word historical thesis.
The two acts must be close together in terms of time, so unless you have done the person a huge favor, like saving their life, they will not feel that they owe you anything after 10 years.
When you ask someone to return the favor, try to use one of the three types of reciprocity identified by psychologists: personal, relational, or group.
For example, an editor might happily work on articles for his carpenter neighbor who wants his articles published in the magazine because he has helped them so many times. Personal reciprocity is demonstrated here. They also edit his partner’s articles, demonstrating relationship reciprocity. Proofreading a cousin's friend's college application despite knowing nothing about them is an example of group reciprocity.
Bottom line, if you have to remind someone that they owe you, they probably don't, and reminding them that they owe you a favor makes the other person feel as if you're trying to control them, which is exactly what you're doing, and that's neither generous nor kind.
It sends out positive feelings, similar to eating pizza with a friend, and when it comes time to pay, they tell you that you must pay a larger portion of the total because you ate more. This gives the impression that you are recording everything, which is a bad thing in relationships.
4. Discussing how much you would benefit from their help
We are all aware that we should express our gratitude and appreciation for other's help, but many of us make critical mistakes in doing so. We focus on how we feel, such as how happy we are and how much we benefited from the assistance, rather than on the person who provided it.
According to University of North Carolina researchers Sarah Algoe, Laura Kurtz, and Nicole Hilaire, there are two types of gratitude. The first type is called "praise the other," which refers to complimenting and praising the assistance provider's positive characteristics and abilities as well as their personality. The second type, known as "personal benefit," refers to how much the aid recipient personally benefited from it.
In a study, it was found that couples often showed their appreciation for one another by complimenting or receiving personal benefits from each other. Here are some examples of expressions:
- Praise the other: “You are very responsible,” “You do your best,” and “You are really good at it.”
- Personal benefit: “I was able to relax because of what you did.” “I was so proud of you in front of everyone at work because of what you did.” “I felt so happy because of what you did.”
The people who helped rated how grateful the person they helped was, how happy they were after they had expressed their gratitude, and how much they loved them then.
The researchers found that the praise-based gratitude style was significantly associated with positive and loving responses and emotions, in contrast to the personal benefit gratitude style.
This is something worth thinking about because most of us make mistakes in the way we express gratitude. Humans are inherently selfish, and we tend to talk about ourselves even when we should be thinking and talking about others.
So when we get help, we want to talk about how we feel, and we assume that this is what the person who provided it wants to hear and that they contributed to our happiness, but this assumption is not correct.
Of course, the person who helped you wants you to be happy, but the motivation to help is closely linked to the identity and self-esteem of the person helping you. We help because we want to be good people, live up to our goals and values, and be admired.
People want to see themselves positively when they help others, and that will not happen when you only talk about yourself as if everything is about you when it should be about them.
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