ASKING FOR HELP WORKS

NOW WHAT?

This is so very true. If you simply repeat doing what does not now give you what you want, you will only keep getting what you are getting already, more of the same, that result you don’t like. In order to get something different, something hopefully better, you must steer your ship into uncharted territory. Might be scary - but how do you do that even though it is scary and even though you don’t know where to go or how to get there? Well, now you have an interesting problem.

You want something you do not have, and you do not know how to get it. So what’s the strategy for that? It cannot be trial and error, shoot a big gun and hope you hit what you want, because that will probably take a lot of time, waste a lot of resources unnecessarily and perhaps never get you what you want.

Here’s what to do. ASK FOR HELP. That’s right. It’s like the guy who spends all afternoon driving around looking for a street he’s not been on before when if he’d just stopped to ask someone for directions he’d have arrived at his destination in a few minutes. But he doesn’t because he’s reluctant to ask for help. What’s wrong with him? What keeps him from asking for help? Is it fear of feeling embarrassed, admitting he’s lost, what?

The answer to this conundrum is irrelevant; it really does not matter why he does not ask. What matters is how long does the guy wish to stay lost? And what if he never gets to his destination, what are the consequences of that outcome? If he really wants to get to his destination, sooner or later he will have to suck it up and ask for help.

It’s the same for each of us. When we are well and truly stuck, do not know what to do, we must ask for help. And helpful input is always out there somewhere. No matter what the issue, someone has faced something like it before and resolved it. Thirty some years of facilitating the Master-Mind Alliance^® has proved over and over again to me the truth of this fact. There are very few completely unsolvable business problems.

No matter how weird or strange an issue or how pesky and seemingly unresolvable a problem, when a member presents it to the group for input - input flows - most of it helpful. Why does this work? Simple, the one thing you can never give yourself is clear perspective. That must come from outside the inner loop from people who see things you cannot see. That's how asking for help - and getting it - works.

And embarrassment, I’ve never have a seen a business owner crushed with embarrassment for asking what he or she thought was a silly question.

Everyone gets stuck sometimes. Asking for help from helpful people helps. Offering fresh perspective from outside - this is what the Master-Mind Alliance^® is all about.