Are you a strong independent woman out there trying to make a dreams come true? Do you feel like you have to do everything on your own? The truth is that you don’t and trying to do everything alone will actually be holding you back. One of the things that successful understand is that whilst giving is important it is also important to receive and therefore you need to ask. In this post, I’m going to be sharing three things that successful people ask other people for so you can start asking too.
Successful people ask for help
For some people asking for help doesn’t come naturally. They feel that asking people is making yourself a burden on another person. However, think about how much you love to help people. Asking people to help is giving them to the opportunity to help. And if they can’t help you then can turn your request down. The fact is all of us are great and some things and not so great at others. Successful people learn to leverage their strengths and then find solutions to address their weaknesses.
Successful people ask for personal recommendations and introductions
Your network plays a vital role in your overall levels of success and successful people know the value of leveraging their network to grow an even stronger network.
There are two main ways of using your network. You can ask for a personal recommendation. Maybe you are looking for a solicitor, accountant, coach etc. Rather than googling you can ask your network and get a firsthand recommendation that you can truly trust.
The next step is to ask to be introduced to the person. Being introduced to people is powerful, especially if you are worried that an unsolicited email/letter/call will not get answered or responded to.
You can also actively ask people to introduce you to others. For example, using LinkedIn you could realise that you have a 2nd-degree connection with someone you would really like to connect with so reach out to the connection you have in common and ask them to introduce you.
Successful people ask for feedback
In order to be successful, you have to be constantly learning and improving. This requires you to constantly be gathering and analysing information. Now an area that some people don’t want to analyse is themselves. However, a successful person knows they need to be constantly improving themselves and you can do some of that work yourself, but you also need to get information from others. Ask friends, family, colleagues, bosses, peers, clients – basically everyone. This can be informal from casually dropping questions into conversations to an informal process of getting people to fill in surveys or have a meeting with you.
The main thing is to make other people feel comfortable being honest with you and also to act on that feedback. No one is perfect so don’t get down about negative feedback. Instead, assess whether addressing that feedback will be good for your progress and if so work out how you will respond and change as a result of this constructive criticism.
