Six Simple Resilience Practices - Week Three: Make Requests

Doug Silsbee continues to shed light on what resilience really means and how we can achieve it.
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Make Requests

I have coached many successful entrepreneurs and executives who struggle with their tendency to over-commit. These are people with rewarding jobs who love what they do, but who get exhausted and lose touch with themselves and their non-professional relationships, sometimes at tremendous personal cost.
Often, people like this (and I include myself!) don't see the places where others could help. We have built strong identities as Doers or Problem-solvers that perpetuate our tendency to over-commit.
A key resilience strategy is to be in the business of making requests. I often work in depth with coaching clients around this important competency, which many successful people do poorly! 

Requesting includes, but is much larger than, simply delegating tasks to others. When we make a request, it can be a request for a specific action, for a hamburger at a restaurant, for information, for someone else to take on part of what we're doing, or a move into a different kind of relationship. We make the request by identifying what we need and when we need it. Then, we engage in a conversation with someone else about the request, such that this person can understand and deliver what we need.As a resilience strategy, making requests is fundamental.
·       In order to formulate a request we have to look at ourselves in our situation and discern what we need within it. That's a significant move, and untangles us from the sometimes overwhelming nature of complex situations in which we can't find any suitable course of action.
·       Staying in action is central to resilience; making a request is a form of action. Whether or not the other person commits to delivering on our request, the act of requesting engages us with others and mobilizes energy, the antidotes to stuckness and overwhelm.
·       Third, the result of a request, made clearly and fulfilled by the person we asked, is that we now have support, a hamburger, a service, or something else that we have identified as a need. 
Work with this for a week. Note, during the course of the day, when you make requests. Bring more intentionality into this process, recognizing that the request itself is a powerful act. Several times a day, take the time to clarify what you need in a situation, and formulate a specific request that you can make of someone, which, if fulfilled, will be helpful to you. Then, make the request and see what happens.

 



Doug Silsbee, PCC
Presence-Based Leadership Development
828-254-2021
http://dougsilsbee.com
3717 Bend of Ivy Rd.
Marshall, NC 28753