How to Ask for Help
Contributed by Max Pour — Speak Up for Kids Student Intern, driven by a love for music and endurance sports, and committed to a future in communication and motivational speaking.
Overview
Learning how to effectively ask for help is critical. Each person needs assistance at one point or another as they take on new challenges and can’t move through life by themselves. To begin asking for that help, it all starts with your audience!
Asking The Right Person
When you need help, there are many different people to reach out to depending on how much you trust that person and what the situation may entail.
A peer: Peers often understand your perspective because they share similar experiences and challenges, making them ideal for offering advice, practicing skills, or simply lending a listening ear.
A trusted foster parent: May be most reliable for social struggles, could have experienced identical circumstances or have helped out your siblings before.
A professor: May be most helpful to understand a difficult concept in a school subject.
Context
You must firstly give the person you’re approaching some accurate context. If they aren’t provided information beforehand, they’ll have no idea what efforts you have already made to solve your issue or how it came up. Think about it: would you prefer the problem takes less time to cover up or more?
If you’d like it to go by quicker, giving them those relevant background details allows them to see the full picture and where you’re at. If you need help, that person needs to know exactly what you have done already or what you’re being challenged by.
Specificity
Specificity is exactly what you need. This part connects to context, as both are to assist the helper with what it is that you have to work on. Specificity is like getting down to the core of an apple, as that’s when you know you have eaten it clean. It’s equivalent to laying out the question in a simple manner by making clear the particular problem and the desired result.
Some may ask for help with an essay merely to finish it as quickly as possible. However, others may genuinely care for an outstanding grade on their paper, which becomes a drastically different situation. That needs to be made clear to whoever is assisting you.
How To Actually Ask
Ways to request aid can be phrased differently. Firstly, offer that meaningful context. Then, pose any of the following questions
“Do you have some time to help me with —?”
“Is there any chance you could assist me with —?”
“Would you please be able to lend a hand with —?”
It’s important that you approach the trusted individual with polite manners, or else they may reject you before you have the chance to ask them. A smile in addition to asking them for help with any of these forms of questions could definitely boost your probability of receiving assistance from them.
Expressing Appreciation
After you successfully acquired guidance, the process isn’t over just yet. You never know when you’ll need aid again in the future, so you should showcase some pure gratitude to the person that devoted their attention to your needs. A few ways to do this are…
A simple “thank you”
“I really appreciate your time”
“You were perfect and helped me with exactly what I needed!”
Even if their attempts to solve the issue were ineffective, they sacrificed a part of their day to work towards fixing your problem. If you choose not to be appreciative, they may treat you differently or begin to ignore you as you don’t seem to value their hard efforts. In addition, it may harm your positive relationship with them and cause information to spread centered around your character, which you never want!
Final Thoughts
Asking for help is all just a matter of feeling comfortable and confident to do so. If you believe it’ll make you look foolish, then you’ll make it more difficult for yourself to reach out. But, if you follow the tips that were provided, then you will be set and in great hands!
