How to Ask for Help

At work, I have the ability to send emails as myself and also to send emails as a colleague that I correspond with daily. This was established maybe a year or so ago. It’s not the first time I’ve had this set-up in a job, but it’s the first time I ran into one particular problem with it. 

If I were to reply all (as myself) on an email thread with myself, this person, and others, they (the person I had access to) would drop off the email and I would have to manually add them back in before pressing send. It was tedious and silly and once I realized this was happening, I had to mentally keep this small note in the back of my mind. Don’t forget to add them back! 

A few months ago, after almost forgetting to add this colleague back in on an important thread, I put a note on my task list—figure out why this is happening and fix it. But I wasn’t sure how to explain what was happening and so each week, I deprioritized that to-do and each week, I manually added them back into email chains. 

Finally, one morning with a little free brain space, I Googled, “what to do when I have another email and then I reply all and then this email isn’t there anymore.” As I pressed enter, I was sure that this wasn’t clear. That this was some impossibility. That I was destined to double check my email “To” fields for the rest of my life. 

The answer was immediate and simple. It took under five clicks to go into settings and import and something about the second account as an alias. I tested it immediately and was shocked by how obvious it was. The outsized relief I felt knowing I’d never have to think about this again was palpable. 

Disclaimer: Not all problems can be solved with a Google search. But this was a tech problem so I found a tech solution. If it’s a health problem, it needs a health solution. A people problem? A people solution? 

For months, I let a, frankly, annoying task take up space in my brain because I didn’t ask for help. I didn’t ask for help because I wasn’t sure I knew how to explain the problem and I think in my not-super-tech-savvy brain, I didn’t think there would be an easy solution. I didn’t know how to ask for the help I needed.

Of course, then, this moves beyond workplace aliases. How often do we sit in silence because we do not know how to ask for the support, the care, and the love that we need? Often the help we need is more complex than email configurations. But are we sure of that? 

So convinced was I that this email thing would require a phone call to our outsourced I.T. team. That I’d have to do something complex and annoying and something my patience and workload didn’t seem to be making space for. But the second it was handled and done, everything got easier. 

Let yourself ask for help and let yourself be surprised when things get easier. You are allowed to live a life that is gentle. You do not need to perpetually be running uphill. 

How do we ask for help? One word at a time. 

Not everything has a simple answer. But nothing gets answered without an ask.