Where to Start Getting Help

Have you ever found yourself thinking “I just need some help!!” Only to have someone ask, “what can I do to help you,” and you don’t even know where to start? Or you realize that for everything you wish they could do, there’s a huge backlog of things that they would need to understand first? Or maybe the list is so long, it seems hopeless?

Maybe you’ve even tried to get help - a virtual assistant, or unlucky family member...only to find yourself anything BUT helped! Your workload increased, fitting in the time and tasks that “getting someone up-to-speed” entails...and then ending up having to do it yourself anyway!

Can't Find the Right Person

Maybe you’ve tried to get help, only to realize someone doesn’t have the right MIX of skills to do something. A client of mine had this problem. They needed “help with their blog,” so they started looking for help! The first person they found was GREAT at writing. So awesome. Could take an idea they had, spin it into something smoother, and improve the idea in the process. But when it came to finding their way around a website (much less, loading it into the blog), they were hopeless. In the end, it was magical to have someone who could write...but they ended up with the same problem they started with...blogs would pile up and wilt before they were able to get them scheduled.

So then they found someone who was a web designer. Surely that person could help them with their blog! You may have guessed it, but the web designer too had limitations. They sure could get the blog articles loaded up nicely into the website...but even basic line editing escaped them. In this case, blogs piled up for a completely different reason (they were waiting to be edited), and yet they were in the same boat.

And then my client learned how to be easy to help. Use their secrets to become utterly helpable, and you’ll see your productivity - and the ease with which you get things done - drastically increase.

The 6 Secrets to being Utterly Helpable

1. Stop looking for a clone.

Someone doesn’t need to think like you, share your experience, and appreciate everything you appreciate in order to help you. They don’t need to be you in order to be who you need! Someone doesn't need to be "You 2.0" in order to help you become You 2.0.

2. Distinguish between the different pieces of the puzzle.

The more you pare down the work you need help with into individual elements, the more options you have for possible helpers. If you need an experienced writer with a background in Egyptian history who is comfortable with WordPress and Google-certified in SEO...you’d be the luckiest person in the world to have even one prospective helper. But what if you got good at isolating the elements that require help from the historian, find the right point in the project to bring in the writer, and select a service that supplies the most up-to-date practices to your project when it’s ready to greet the public? The list of historians might still be small, relative to the number of other industries...but it’s decidedly larger than the list of historians who are good at Search Engine Optimization. 😀

It may be a dramatic example, but we all do this. We want someone who has this absolutely magical mix of exactly what we want...or we decide that we can’t really trust them to do things right. It’s not the case. If you divide the pieces of what you need up, you can have help from someone who has only a fraction of the skills and experience that the project calls for...and they will do a much better job at their piece than a jack-of-all-trades would do.

3. Understand the sequence of what needs to be done.

Momentum. It’s what helps you feel your forward progress in such a way that your forward progress increases! It’s valuable to us when we work on our own, but it becomes vital when we’re working with others! The biggest momentum stopper is bottlenecking based on sequence. When you have one person waiting around on another person, or God-forbid, waiting on you...If you know what happens first, and have a clear pathway, then you can engage and accelerate on that path aided by the help of others.

4. Consistently communicate.

Once you find someone to help lift your load, staying in effective communication with them is essential. if they can’t reach you, it undercuts their trust in you and stalls their momentum. The worst mistake I ever made when I was first learning to work with a team of contractors was falling into a black hole of non-communication. I’d be great for a couple weeks, quick responses, and then BAM. Morgan was MIA. It made for a miserable working relationship for my poor team.

5. Initiate feedback.

Let them know in the beginning that you will provide feedback so that they can continue to settle in to the teamwork relationship you’re forming. AND FOLLOW THROUGH. If you say you’ll give feedback, give feedback. You’ll find that if you get good and consistent at giving feedback, it’ll drastically improve the confidence of the person working with you. Correcting them in their work (in a non-emotional way) saves them from the endless uncertainty if they’re doing things quite right. The only way they can know they’re going in the right direction and giving you what you need is if you tell them when they’re doing well, and ask for the changes you need.

6. Be humble.

As unique as you are, you are definitely not the first person to need/think/try or want whatever-it-is you’re asking someone to do for you. You don’t need status reports because “you’re OCD;” you need a status report because it will help you stay on track. You don’t want to try an unconventional method because you’re “weird,” or “crazy.” You want to do it that way because it seems like a good idea to you. By choosing to talk about your preferences this way, it is teaching the people in your life that you don’t want to be pinned down, that you have a mysterious, unpredictable way of dealing with the world. It may make you feel special...but it makes you hard to help, and adds unnecessary stress to the job of the person working with you. Be unique on your own time; your team members deserve predictable. It’s often this desire to be “so unique” that leads us to creating uber-complicated job descriptions and un-definable roles. Sometimes we complexify our workloads...because if “anyone” could do it, does that mean my work isn’t difficult? Meaningful? Unique? Be careful. This can be a sense of self-importance that devalues the person helping you, and makes their lives harder.

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