For all sorts of different reasons recently, I have been thinking about asking for things. Maybe it’s an English trait, but I grew up believing I shouldn’t ask, I should just wait until someone offered something to me, whether at the table, at my birthday or when I hoped for praise at school. I’m an off-the-scale introvert so I took to this “rule” very happily. In many ways, being self-effacing and non-demanding like this is a good quality, but as a blanket approach, it doesn’t work too well in the modern world.
Believe it or not, I have worked in sales, both for my own company and for other people. Understandably it was a miserable experience. Day after day, phone call after phone call of getting out of my comfort zone and asking. Perhaps this was asking just a little bit (or a lot!) too much of myself and I would never dream of opting for a sales position now!
Life in general still requires that we ask for things, though. Three years ago the Teenager needed a lot of help. School wasn’t working for him and he asked me if he could be home educated. I was sure we couldn’t do this, for lots of reasons. But I didn’t close my mind completely and started to do some research and asked advice from a friend who had home educated his own son. I really didn’t believe we could do this but I thought I owed it to my son to ask anyway. Long story short, a few weeks later I was writing to the school to tell them I was pulling him out, and now I have a happier, deeper thinking and healthier child than I did in early 2009. He has been back inside the school – notably to act as sound engineer for a production of Peter Pan – but we’ve done things our own way and it has been right for us.
I also remembered today a time when my brother and I wanted to arrange something complicated with a bank, to take place on a Saturday. We thought it would entail one or other of us driving for an hour and a half to get the money from one place to another. Then we said to each other what we would really like to happen, and I said “why don’t we just ask, you never know, they might do it”. And guess what? They did. We imagined the perfect scenario and asked the question, thinking it was almost impossible, and our wish was carried out.
More recently, in a professional situation, I was dealing with quite a difficult matter and, one evening, imagined an unconventional scenario that just might help things to run more smoothly. I checked it out with my supervisor and he suggested I give it a try, just ask. Well, I did ask and the reaction at first was surprise and reluctance. Then someone else got involved and suggested that my idea might not be too much trouble. So we went ahead with the unconventional approach and it worked out really well for everyone.
In each of these situations, at first I didn’t believe it was possible to get what I really wanted, and I did meet with some resistance along the way. But I asked anyway. It has been really helpful to remember that when we ask someone something we are giving them a choice. In the past, I would have thought “I can’t possibly ask him/her that; it would put them in a difficult position if they don’t want to do it”. Now I know that it’s not a difficult position because they can just say no. I have to know and accept that when I am asking for something I might get what I want but I also might not. But if I don’t ask at all I definitely won’t!
So my thought for the day is this: it might not be how clever you are, how good or nice you are, or how very hard you work; it might just be that you have to ask. I am going to see how I can apply this to other areas of my life and I would love to know how asking for the seemingly impossible has worked for you.
