Do you hesitate to ask for help?
From time to time, all of us need assistance with personal or business issues that impact our daily lives. What stops us for asking for the needed help? Is it fear, vanity, pride or just simple reluctance to ask for help? Within the ActiveRain network, we have the benefit of designated Ambassadors that have agreed to share their experience and expertise with other members. This spring is a good time for a fresh approach. Let’s resolve to ask for assistance, without hesitation, when we need it.
The following is a timely article by Alicia Forest. Alicia allows use of her article in blogs as long as her complete blurb is included.
Asking for Help: The Fastest Path to Business Success
By Alicia Forest, MBA
The Business Shifter™
I don't know why but some of us seem to be hard-wired to go it alone! I know that my tendency is to figure it out for myself before I will ask for help. Yet over the last few years, I've learned to embrace that asking for help is not a reflection on my inability to go it alone, but in fact a reflection of how much I think what I do and who I am is worthy of receiving help.
Here are 3 simple ways to ask for help in your business that will move you towards success with much more ease and grace:
1. Inner Circle Support
I'm blessed in that I have a husband who supports the work I do and the business I've been creating since its inception in 2001. Yet I know this is a hot button for a lot of entrepreneurs, that they don't feel they have the spousal or partner support they crave.
While I don't have THE answer to getting your significant other onboard, I did have a personal aha that I will share that may help a bit.
The bottom line is that it doesn't matter if your spouse, partner, parent or anyone else significant in your life thinks what you do matters. It only matters that YOU think it matters.
Logically, you know you can't change people, only your response to people. You may wish you felt more support than you do, but wishing won't make it so. What will change your feeling is if you change how you feel about what you perceive to be their lack of support. If you remember that it only matters that YOU know what you do matters, that will make all the difference.
2. Peer Support
Whether you invest in a group with leader or gather your best business friends together on a regular basis, give yourself the gift of peer support in some way. It's critical for ongoing help but even more important during those times when you're between private mentor support.
At an event I attended recently, I was surrounded by colleagues who had become friends over the years, and it was very clear to me that the support I was receiving from those friends was more important that the actual content I had come to learn. But if I hadn't reached out asking for that support, I wouldn't have had the critical shifts I needed to experience at this point in my business to move it forward.
3. Outside Support
Sometimes we need support for our business from places outside it altogether. Whether it's engaging in a favorite sport, hobby or activity, or meditating or journaling, taking time off and completely unplugging, or having a conversation with a supportive friend who doesn't have anything to do with what we do for work and just might have that unique perspective to shift ours that we need.
Where in your life can you ask for support that will help your business?
And that's the point - to ask for the support we need. Take it from a former lone ranger... once you start asking and stay open to receiving, miracles can happen.
Designing a business that you love around the life you want is one of the pillars on which I stand and teach. Learn how to do this for YOUR business (and life) at my annual Online Business Breakthrough Workshop HERE.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this here...
© 2013 Alicia Forest International | All rights reserved.
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Alicia Forest, MBA mentors women entrepreneurs on how to build a priority-based, highly profitable business, in less than part-time hours. Get her FREE series on how you can do this too at http://aliciaforest.com
Lily, Kentlands, Spring Flowers IMG_0883
Photograph by Roy Kelley using a Canon PowerShot G11 camera.
Roy and Dolores Kelley Photographs
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