Author: admin

Asking for help isn’t an admission of defeat. It isn’t a sign that we’re failure. It doesn’t mean we are weak.

Asking for help is what professional people do when they reach the edge of their endurance, their experience or their creativity.

We all reach our edges at some point in our lives and as they say in baseball ‘no one bats a thousand.’ This means that there isn’t a slugger alive who hasn’t been hit out at some point in their career. The difference between winners and losers is that the losers are often winners who run out of steam, whereas the real winners are the ones who sense they are losing and stop to ask for help.

The actual asking is simplicity itself. We can find a close friend and ask for their support, or we can go out for lunch and share options and ideas. I asked for help once by sending out a tweet and within an hour someone who knew someone had tweeted back and linked us up. Rattling our network is always a sound option and often the trick is simply to ask ‘who do you know who…’ and let the world do the rest.

You have my permission to ask for help and you can know that it’s ok to be resourceful. It’s what professional adults do.

We are great …and greater still when we take care of ourselves and ask for help.

Next week: PJ Day Hooray!

I like Transactional Analysis. Very much. It’s full of useful tools and models to help me better understand myself and how I communicate with colleagues, clients and friends.

I find it accessible. And practical. And searching.

Increasingly clients ask for TA content in coaching micro-teaches and for workshops, because it’s full of useful behaviours to ponder, smile at and deploy.

If you’d like to learn more about yourself, or unpick a knotty people-issue then you’re welcome to say hello. Or, you could take a look at:

Working It Out At Work, by Julie Hay

…which is a well written and useful introduction to TA. I particularly like the exercises at the back and many clients have found it a good way to get to grips with TA in an organisational context.

Other books are available of course and this one is a good place to start.

Next week: How To Ask For Help