Are you any good at asking for help? I have to admit that I’m not! I always think that I can do things for myself, and I don’t want to bother other people.
However just this week it was brought home to me that sometimes we should ask for help, especially as small business owners with a lot on our plates.
The task I was trying to accomplish was easy enough on the face of it. My business coach, the cape-wearing Kapow! Queen Sheena Whyatt had suggested it would be a good idea for me to set up a Calendly link. I’ve always shied away from electronic calendars as I like to see everything written down in front of me, but I had to admit that a certain amount of time was being wasted by going back and forth to sort out appointments, so I agreed to give it ago.
Well, after a whole morning I STILL couldn’t get it to work. I use a Macbook and I appeared to have two Apple IDs which was confusing matters to start with. I eventually got past that, and then Zoom wouldn’t connect. After a while that was resolved and I happily started setting up my availability in Calendly, then I noticed that it wasn’t syncing with my iCalendar. I was just about ready to throw the computer out of the window when I had a brainwave – why not ask for some help!
I am part of a lovely community called The Creative Collective which is a networking and support group for people in creative industries. We have a very active WhatsApp group (that to be honest is pretty hard to keep up with), and I posted a message in there asking if anyone had any experience of setting up Calendly on a Mac. Almost immediately I received a reply from Joe Gallant (gallant by name and gallant by nature) and he offered to jump on a call with me and see what he could do. In a matter of minutes he had solved my problem. I changed email addresses a couple of years ago and some things have been set up with the old one, and some with the new one. The new email address it turns out is linked to my Google Calendar, not my iCal, so all I needed to do was point Calendly to the right calendar and bingo it worked!
In all I must have wasted 4 hours of my time trying to sort this problem out for myself, whereas what I should have done as soon as I hit a snag was ask ASK FOR HELP!
I’ve started getting help in another way recently too. I always try and reach out to a couple of new people every day in businesses I would like to work with. However, I’ve been really busy lately and this task has been somewhat neglected. I was recently contacted on LinkedIn by a lady from a social enterprise called iWorker. They match people in developed countries with workers in developing countries or countries hit by war, who can help with various tasks such as lead generation. I am now working with Sharon in Kenya who is researching companies for me that I can then reach out to. She is super-efficient and much quicker at it than me!
All this just goes to show that in the main we should concentrate on the things we are good at and ask for help with the tasks we’re not so good at. It will save us a lot of time in the long run and make us more productive as business owners.