Asking for Help, Will It Make You Weak?

As reasonable humans, we are responsible for our emotional experience. We try to demonstrate that we possess the knowledge and understanding to perform correctly in our work and our profession. Commonly, we work in activities that often produce individual experiences, especially when we do web development and coding. In truth, these more solitary activities are foundations for the more prominent work that comes down the road for us. However, we do not always have the solution for our actions or situations. Sometimes, we need to ask for help.

Learning to ask for help can be tough. Not only can asking for help feel like admitting weakness (even though it isn’t), it also requires you to define what “help” or “support” means to you. You can’t expect others to read your mind and know what’s going to help you. We rely on social structures to help guide us and meet our needs and goals. We were not designed by God to be solitary and work alone, even when we try to do it.

Working Together

As a former senior project manager, I discovered in my years of practice that to be successful you don’t have to know precisely everything related to your project. You need to know where to find the help to put your project on track and get the outcomes and goals you planned with your team. Yes, your team! We cannot work alone on our essential projects. We should look for the adequate help to be successful leaders in our career. By doing this, we learn more than we would be doing it by ourselves. Asking for help will not make us weak. It will make us better humans, mentors, and leaders.

When we deny our gifts and strengths, we also deny that we have areas of weakness. We can’t be amazing at everything because that’s just not how we’re designed and created by God. But we can improve if we’re realistic about where we fall short. One thing I’ve learned is that acknowledging my strengths allows me to recognize my weaknesses. In identifying those defects, I can pinpoint where and how I need help.

So, why, as individuals, do we insist that our success is only valid if we achieve our goals without any aid?

Our mind tells us “everyone else is handling it,” and “I should be able to do this alone.” Wrong! We think that asking for help is an admission of failure or weakness, rather than a recognition that we are humans interdependent upon each other. Sometimes, we need to receive support, just like anyone else.

In the tech world, there are thousands of tools that people will tell you to use. How are you supposed to know where to start? There are a lot of frameworks, programming languages, API’s, and other coding environments that as web developers and programmers we can dominate precisely. We will try to demonstrate that we can perform in XYZ language; but at the end, we will need to look for help in our search engine or make a right or left turn and ask our coworker for help. That doesn’t mean we are weak. That means that we have focused too hard on a solution that is not performing, and a fresh mind will probably give us an idea that we may have overlooked.

The Importance of Asking For Help

Asking for help is essential for growth in our lives, and it will help us to be less weak each day. This also applies to our personal lives, work environment, and professional advance. Many of us worry that achieving our goal with assistance means we won’t feel the same sense of accomplishment we would feel if we did it alone. We discount our success when we see it as group collaboration, instead of taking pride in the piece of the puzzle we contributed.

A leader is one that works hand-to-hand with others to grow their ideas. Working hand-to-hand means helping each other towards a common goal. In programming and coding, it is the same. To be a good programmer and expert in your area, you need to ask for help from other programmers with more years of experience. You need to look and find mentors that will motivate you to grow and improve in your area of passion.

It’s virtually impossible to advance without assistance from others. Cross-functional teams, agile project management techniques, as well as matrixed and increasingly collaborative office cultures, require cooperation and support from all the employees in the corporation. Our performance and career progression depend on seeking out the advice, referrals, and resources we need to accomplish our goals.

Overcoming Our Ego

It is clear that for some of us asking for help is not easy. There is merit in striking out on our own and learning to improve our areas of weakness. We all have gifts and strengths, and we focus on enhancing and operating within them. But we need to leave room for others to step into our lives and contribute in a meaningful manner.

In the same way, when you put effort into helping someone, and that individual doesn’t follow through, we feel disappointed and even weak. For that reason, we have to first act on the help or advice others offer to us because people love helping. Helping strengthens social ties and makes helpers feel good about themselves.

Feel free to try something new, too, and don’t be afraid of it failing. Learning how to ask others for help is like building any skill. Asking for help may always be a work-in-progress. By failing, you’re learning and improving. Consider asking for help as a blessing to you that will be a blessing to others when they come to you for help. So, asking for help, will it make you weak? I don’t think so!!!