An OverAchiever’s Guide to Asking For Help - Part 1
It was 4 days until her group project was due and my daughter was freaking out. She was working on an assignment for her video production class. She had elected herself director of the project and she felt the weight of that responsibility.
The whole group had done the scripting, the planning, the filming, and now they were in the final stages of editing. As the deadline inched closer, I watched my daughter’s movements get increasingly frenzied. Her eyes would dart around, and she’d count on her fingers as she tried to think of pockets of time she could steal to do more editing.
I tried to help coach her through those tense days by teaching her about the 3 “D’s” to hit a deadline. When you’ve got a deadline approaching and you’ve bitten off more than you can chew, the 3 D’s can help you get there without sacrificing everything. They are:
Delete
What extras can I get rid of at this point?
Downplay
What things are good enough even if they aren’t exactly perfect?
Delegate
Who can I ask to help me reach this deadline?
In exasperation, my daughter said, “I’ve already cut out some scenes because we don’t have time to even think about adding them in and I’ve decided to keep one scene where someone did the sound for me, and I hate it but at least it works.”
“Ok,” I said, “Sounds like you have gotten 2 of the 3 D’s in. How about delegating? Isn’t this a group project? What’s the rest of your group doing?”
At first, I wondered if her group was slacking (because I knew that experience from school well enough) but there were plenty of friends that were willing to help.
So why wasn’t she leaning on them more? And why was delegating the absolute last option she wanted to talk about?
This is a common issue for overachievers. We stink at asking for help.
For the next 3 weeks, I’m going to unpack how we can get better at recruiting others to our causes so that we stop trying to do it all alone and instead reach our goals at higher levels and in a more sustainable way.
Our first step is to figure out why we get ourselves into this mess in the first place and how we need to shift our thinking about asking for help.
Here are some of the excuses my daughter gave for not wanting to delegate. See if they sound familiar:
- “No one else cares as much as I do about getting it done.”
- “No one else is capable of getting it done at the level I want it done.”
- “I did ask someone, but they did it wrong and now I have to redo it.”
- “There’s not enough time to get more help– it’ll go faster if I just do it myself.”
- “The one person I trust to do it well said he’d help, but I haven’t heard back from him yet.”
- “Everyone else is busy. I don’t want to bother them.”
Can you feel the stress? I sure can!
Look, I get it. We all want to be seen as competent and capable. Often this means we’ll take on more and more things to prove that we are. When we take this desire and douse it with an intense level motivation, you get an overachiever who’s overextending… all by themselves.
However, motivation alone is not enough to sustain high-performance.
Over the years, I have found many different ways to spark motivation and keep it high. What wasn’t handed to me as easily, however, was how to notice when motivation was turning into overdrive and pushing me into overextension. To my surprise, I found an answer to this in my negotiation class at Harvard.
Negotiation researchers were trying to figure out why some people during auctions and negotiations are willing to pay more for an item than it is worth. (aka, they are willing to overextend their resources to their own detriment.)
After several case studies and a few experiments, the researchers found that when 4 factors are present, bidders could find themselves in a state of “competitive arousal” and when they were in this state, they were up to twice as likely to spend more money on an item than it was worth. Even more interesting is that researchers noticed that those in “competitive arousal” changed their goals from “I want to get a good deal on this” to “I want to win… and I’m willing to win at all costs.”
The first 3 of the of the 4 factors made a lot of sense to me as they are often used to get people into a healthy competitive spirit. The first 3 are:
1. A spotlight– we want to perform our best when we are being watched
2. Time Pressure – the closer we get to a deadline the more amped up we become
3. Time Investment – the more time and energy we have spent on something the less likely we are to walk away from it (even if walking away is the more rational choice)
These things are regularly part of any achiever’s life. Often, we use them to feed our motivation for achieving hard things. My daughter, for instance, was feeling all 3 intensely during her group project and these things will come up time and again in her academic and professional life. However, with just 3 factors present, we can still be in a fairly rational state and tackle the demands of life without overbidding on the price of that success.
The 4th factor, however, was the factor that the researchers found by accident and it was the one that really sent bidders over the edge. It’s also the one I initially dismissed as irrelevant to my life as an achiever.
Factor 4 is the presence of a single rival.
In a negotiation scenario, this makes sense to me. If you’re bidding against 5 other people and the price climbs too high, you are more likely to step away and let some other person handle the bidding. If you are bidding against just one other person, however, it becomes less about the price of the item and more about the thrill of beating out that one person… and the price can climb and climb without you realizing it.
After initially hearing this, I thought, “Well, I don’t have a nemesis. I’ll be able to keep my competitiveness in check. I’ll be fine!” That is until I realized that when I’m in overdrive, I treat myself as my own rival. I am the competition to beat. And with the other 3 factors present in my life as often as they are, when I see myself as the enemy, I time and again overbid on the price of my achievements.
And I was watching this happen with my daughter.
If I look at her list of reasons for not wanting to delegate from a rivalry perspective – meaning she’s treating herself as an enemy to overcome--this is what I hear:
“I don’t know how to explain my vision, but I need to show I’m capable, so I’ll do the work myself.”
“I don’t know how to qualify the skills of others, but I need to show I’m capable, so I’ll do the work myself.”
“I don’t want to make other people uncomfortable, but I need to show I’m capable, so I’ll do the work myself.”
“I don’t know how to hold others accountable, but I need to show I’m capable, so I’ll do the work myself.”
“This deserves to be done well, and I need to prove that I’m capable and that I care, so I’ll do the work myself.”
When I hold an achievement too close to my own chest, I am the only one to beat. If we have dispersed the achievement across several other helpers, we will be able to more rationally approach how much effort will be wise for this achievement – and we’ll be far less likely to overpay on the cost of that achievement.
So, the next time you find yourself hesitating to ask for help, ask yourself, “Am I being my own rival?” If the achievement really matters that much, don’t make yourself the enemy. Instead, champion yourself by building a team to help and pull that team in early.
In my next article, I’ll tackle surprising things we can ask for help with and how to identify those who may be able to supply that help.
Thanks for reading with me today, I hope you find moments to champion yourself this week.
