Ask for Help... and Spread Happiness

Pushkin. We're in a first grade classroom in Beijing, China. It's about twenty years ago, ahead of the annual holidays. To mark the occasion, a teacher has brought and wrapped presents for her students. The gifts are stacked up in a corner ready to be handed out.

And if she's just stopped right there, it'll be a great story.

Ja Jan was one of those excited kids.

But she had all of us come to the front of a classroom and said, hey, why didn't you guys say nice things about each other? If someone calls your name and says something nice about you, you can go get a gift and sit down.

One by one, the kids started sharing kind words about their classmates.

It was great when it started. Someone's can sing really well. Someone is helpful to other teachers, and I'll applaud as with might turn with.

The flow of compliments soon slowed down and then petered out. Comely worried, Jaw's teacher asked, doesn't anyone have anything nice to say about the students who are still at the front of the class. No one spoke. Three gifts sat uncollected in the corner, and three kids stood rejected. At the front of the room, and I was.

One of them.

It was just a fleeting few minutes in Jav's life, but the events of that day cast a long shadow. Joh eventually graduated school, then headed to college, and began a new life outside China.

But the thing is, once I came to the United States, I started following like a path of almost like at least resistance.

Nearing his thirties, j'all felt like he was being held back from chasing his dreams and fulfilling his potential, and he traced some of that back to the fateful day many years ago, where he stood rejected in front of his classmates.

Pretty sure it didn't help.

You See, Jean needed all the confidence, self belief, and drive he could muster because he had a dream.

I've always wanted to be an entrepreneur. You know, I actually come from a family of teachers, but I didn't never want to be a teacher. I want to be entrepreneur because I was inspired by Bill Gates.

Becoming the next Bill Gates requires a willingness to put yourself out there. You've got to be prepared to tell potential investors and clients about your big plans and you've got to be prepared for them to laugh you out of the room. You have to knock on door after door after door, asking for support and backing until you get the answer you want. And Jaw just wasn't sure he could handle that.

I just felt like my fear of rejection was really holding me back.

Though now fully grown, Jaw still felt the pain of his six year old self.

And I was just miserable, to be honest, because I feel like I'm getting old. My wife was pregnant, and I just feel like I probably missed my mark to be this entrepreneur that I've always wanted to be.

So was shopping to admit defeat and give up on his dream and remain miserable on this path of least resistance.

Nope, So that's where I realized I got to overcome this fear of rejection.

Even if you didn't get dissed by your entire first grade classroom, you can probably still relate to Jah's lack of confidence. It's not just entrepreneurs who need to make themselves vulnerable to others. Whether it's in our careers or just in daily life, many of us have a hard time asking for the help we need because, like Jeah, we fear rejection. We may worry we'll get a big fat no from a friend or stranger, or we may just hate the idea of bothering busy people. We may

I was a former college football player, so asking for helps not the kind of thing I typically did very much.

This is Social Connection expert and Happiness Lab regular Nick Eppley lake Shaw. Nick grew up with a reluctance to ask for help.

It's pretty strong and capable, and I could do stuff, and that always made me fairly reluctant to ask others for help to do almost anything.

If you've heard Nick on other episodes of this season, you may recall that he studies the way our minds mess up when it comes to happier social connection. Recently, his lab has turned to the fears that he and so many of us have when it comes to asking for help.

And our research and that of many others in the field has been making it crystal clear that many of those fears are miscalibrated, that as they're exaggerated, we tend to underestimate how positively these interactions are going to go.

Nick's work begins from a premise that many researchers argue is a universal psychological truth. We enjoy doing nice stuff for other people.

I think feeling happy to have helped is a very real thing. You go do something kind for somebody else, you'll feel pretty darn good.

We usually notice how good it feels to help others when we're in the role of the helper. We forget that the same maxim holds for the people we ask to help us.

Notice that asking for help from somebody else gives an opportunity to do something kind for you. And by not asking for help, you are really missing out on an opportunity to make somebody else feel good.

We sometimes worry that our requests will be a burden on the person we approach, that they'll feel pressured to say yes, but Nick's research shows that that usually isn't the case, Especially when we have a relatively simple request, Calling upon another person for assistance can be a gift not just to ourselves but also to the person we ask.

So in some ways, it seems almost selfish to not ask other folks for help when they could give it to you easily, because you're denying I'M an opportunity to do something kind for you.

The problem is we you We usually don't see it that way, and when we fail to ask for help, we don't get to witness the happiness boost it gives us or the person giving us assistance, and so we continue to believe that seeking help is an imposition rather than a wonderful way to bond and make everyone happier.

We only get feedback from the things we choose to do, and we don't get feedback from the things we choose to avoid, And in an imperfect world like that, we're going to get a systematically distorted view of how these social interactions are going to go that naturally confirms our belief.

To test just how deeply ingrained these false beliefs are, Nick designed a simple experiment. He set up a photo op at a popular spot on campus. But the camera he put out there wasn't a modern smartphone. It was a vintage Polaroid instant camera. And that choice was key because old school polaroids aren't built to let you take selfies.

So in the old days, if you wanted somebody to take a picture of you as a you got to go up and ask them to do it.

Subjects had to find a stranger to assist them, But before they approached anyone, the subjects were asked how annoyed they thought the stranger would be by being stopped, and how positive their mood would be afterwards. Nick later compared these predictions to what the strangers actually said about taking the polaroids, and.

We found that people tended to underestimate how positively others respond, how willing they would be to help, how happy they would feel helping after they actually did. It was a more positive experience for the person you asked for help than people expected.

Nick subjects also grossly overestimated how inconvenience the photo takers would feel. Their guesses were six times higher than what the helpers themselves later reported six times higher. Our predictions of how other people will react to our helping requests are way way off.

They were likely to want to try to help you, and given that they were perceiving it as an act of kindness, given that you'd ask for it, they'll feel good when they actually help you out.

Results like these prompted Nick to rethink his own resistance to asking for help.

Here in Chicago sometimes snows in the winter, but if I couldn't plow my drive I was often reluctant to have a neighbor come and shovel my driveway. And then our work, in part, made it clear to me that the neighbor would probably feel pretty good being able to do that for me, And so I now will ask him if he could do that if I can't, if I can't shovel it, and it's created lots of good conversations between us where I get a chance to thank

Asking for help to take a quick photo, or for a friendly neighbor to lend you a hand shoveling snow are great places to start. But aspiring entrepreneur Jajong was in a hurry. He wanted to supercharge his fight against his crippling fear of rejection, so the approach he took was rather a extreme. He decided to ask people for some pretty fantastic favors.

I saw this big guy. He looked like a security guard of some sort, and he was sitting behind a desk. And I said, okay, I'm going to ask him. Then I said, just inching toward him, I just slowed down. I was like, this is so scary, but my heart was calending. I was sweating.

Well hear how all this turned out? When the Happiness Lab returns in a moment want to be entrepreneur Jan Jong wanted to beat his fear of rejection, so he began where a lot of us do when we're ready for a big behavior change. He did a Google.

Search Google has not real Yoda.

After a few clicks, Jean stumbled on a website that would change his life forever. Rejection Therapy dot com, a site that teaches a practice known as exposure therapy. Let's say you want to get over your phobia of heights. Exposure therapy would tell you to confront that fear by visiting locations a little bit above ground level and then over time climbing higher and higher, so that, through gradual exposure,

I was like, this is the best idea I've ever heard.

The site recommended a month long challenge, thirty days of rejection, and I.

Didn't want to do thirty days because I was like, you know, I want to go hardcore. Let me overdose on rejection and see what happens. So I did the one hundred days of rejection, and rather.

Than performing these challenges privately, Jaque decided he needed to film all his interactions and to share them with the entire world.

I know if I do this by myself, I probably get a couple of rejections.

This is quit.

But if I declare that to the world, and I would think people will hold me accountable. So I can't just quit that easily. So that's what I did, all right. This is my first try.

Day one of John's rejection marathon started pretty spectacularly.

I'm going to try to borrow one hundred dollars from a stranger.

Jah picked a security guard sitting by a desk in the marble filled lobby of a nice mall.

Excuse me, do you think I'm borrow a hundred dollars from you?

The security guard looked confused, like he couldn't quite believe what he was hearing.

No, no, why, all right? No, okay, sorry, thanks.

Jew didn't wait around to answer the security guards question.

I just ran as fast as I could.

Jaw was downhearted. He assumed the interaction had gone terribly, that the guard had badly rejected him. But all that changed once he watched the footage.

I was like this NFL scout looking at a game film, you know, analyzing myself.

Jaw was shocked by what he saw, and not by the guard's reaction, but by his own.

I looked so scared, and I was like, oh wow, I didn't know he was a security or someone. I don't know. He just sits there. He looks like a security guard. I thought he might pull off a gun or just yell at me or something.

Watching the video revealed that Shaw had nothing to be scared of. He didn't get the hundred bucks, but the guard was nice. He even gave Jaw a window of opportunity. He asked Jaw why, like, why did he need the hundred bucks?

Anyway? I could have said many things. I could have negotiated with him. I could have said, if you can do a hundred, can do five, you know he can do one. I could explained that was overcoming our fair rejection. I just ran. So I said, Okay, next time, no matter what happens, I am going to stay engaged. So I'm not going to run. That's the thing. I'm not going to run.

One day two of his one hundred days of rejection, Jaw headed to his favorite burger joint, Five Guys Burgers and Fries. He purchased a cheeseburger and ate it, and then returned to the counter for the big.

Ask, Yes, burger, Could I get a burger reveal?

Could he have a burger refill? That is another cheeseburger totally for free?

Okay, all right, I'd like you guys a lot more, even have a burger ripping on him.

The cashier said no. But this time Jell didn't run away and.

I started negotiating. I started to stay calm and actually explained myself. And when that left, I didn't feel us bad like I feel way better than the first day.

Jah was rejected. Five guys does not offer burger refills, even if you ask politely, But the no Jah received from the cashier yet again came with more kindness and humor than he expected.

Day two was the success on to day three.

By day three, Jea already felt like he was heading for a rejection gold medal.

I'm driving to a Krispy Kreme.

So his next ask took his odd requests to Olympic level heights of ridiculousness.

I'm going to ask them to make me some specialized donuts.

Joh one of the folks at Krispy Kreme to make him a set of five donuts interlocked in the shape of the famous Olympic rings.

Well, there's no way they're gonna say yes to that, you know, And I would just come in and make a joke and get read jacked in and hopefully not be too scared.

Yeah.

The employee, Jackie Brawn, got a pen and paper and asked joh to help her sketch out the design. She didn't look angry or confused. She kind of seemed to relish the challenge.

And fifteen minutes later she brought me out a box of donuts that looked like Olympic rings. That is really good. That's really good. Yeah, man, you'll make me really happy today.

Jackie didn't even charge Jot for the donuts. It's on me, she told him with a big beaming smile.

So when I was walking out at that donut shop, I was like, Wow, how many yeses have I missed my life? Because I was expecting a no. So that was a magic moment for me.

Pleased with his success, John went home and posted the Day three video, but it didn't get the handful of us he was expecting. Millions of people watched that donut clip. It got so much attention that his Olympic ring donut story wound up on daytime television shows.

I think Krispy Kreme stock actually went up that day. God, there's like a marketer's dream, right, ask them for uh donuts that looked like Olympic rings and I was like, no way, they're going to say yes. They couldn't say no to me. They were like, yeah, how can I make this? And when I left there, I just had tears in my eyes because I just couldn't believe. This world is much nicer than I thought. It's much kinder than I thought.

Joe's donut success was a turning point for him. It convinced him that he could successfully ask for just about anything, and Shaw really did ask for rather strange things. He asked to become a mannequin in a department store, to give the safety announcement on an airplane, to slide down the pole at a fire station, and defeed a lion at the zoo.

There you go, Hold on, hold on, It's okay.

The videos that followed were as hilarious as they were popular, like when he asked for a haircut from a dog groomer.

Can you see me like a German shepherd like tabetan mastiff or or child chow or something.

Joe's video is eventually tracted the attention of a certain psychologist, and.

I thought, this is fascinating, right, this is an extreme version of what I did.

Psychologist Nick Epley's research had already shown that people are more willing to help us out than we think, that they react more positively than we expect to simple requests like taking a quick polaroid photo. But watching Jaw's YouTube videos, Nick realized people may also agree to far more complicated requests.

I mean, it's off the charts what he asked.

People to do.

Nick carefully analyzed Jav's videos, counting exactly how often his pleas for help got rejected.

And it turns out less often than he's accepted that most of the time, a little over fifty percent of the time, to these crazy requests, the person does it.

Nick also watched to see the reactions of the strangers that Jah approached. Did the donut makers and flight attendants and zoo keepers get mad and yell at him and tell them to go away? Or were they genuinely trying to be kind and accommodating nix'onnalysis was striking. In the vast majority of interactions, people reacted completely positively. Jaw's extreme experiment and rejection therapy is a great example of two

Break on dividing my life into BD and AD Before donuts and after donuts, It was a watershed moment for me because he opened up this whole new.

World to me A decade after asking a Krispy Kreme employee to build him the Olympic Ring Up Donuts. Jean now runs the very company that inspired him, Rejection Therapy dot Com. He's also an in demand speaker and the author of Rejection Proof How I Beat Fear and became invincible through one hundred days of rejection.

I didn't plan this. I didn't plan this seem to go viral and someday I'll write a book, someday I'll do a blog. You know, someday I will give a Ted talk or Beyond Lauras Angels show. I've never planned all that. All I did was like I'm gonna do something.

And the viral videos Jah made are now used by clinicians to help patients with social anxiety. They may seem extreme, but Jaw says they can still teach us important lessons that we can apply in everyday settings.

His first takeaway is people are actually much nicer than we think. People are actually very open, especially if you oftome wacky stuff.

A second lesson is that your fears that people will angrily reject you or think less of you if you ask for assistance are likely to be very, very misplaced. Jaw is living proof that you'll hear no far less than you expect.

When I started, I thought I was going to get one hundred rejections, you know, maybe like I got some yes as if you get really lucky. But as it turned out, sometimes just by asking you get it yes.

But to get to that yes, Jaw says, we also need the courage to expose our vulnerabilities and to ignore any worries we may have about seeming needy.

I don't want to bother other people, and you know I want to be independent, right.

And the research backs this up. Psychologists have long found evidence for what's known as the beautiful mess effect. We assume that people will avoid us if we seem needy or dependent on help, but it's actually just the opposite. People like us better when we show weakness or express emotional vulnerability or seek their help. Being messy makes us seem more open and relatable.

You're really good friends to ask for help. They ask for a pig, they ask for help, and they're vulnerable to each other. If you give and take, that really built relationships. In fact, sometimes the fact that you're asking shows that Okay, I'm asking you because I need you, and that's really increases the bond you have with each other.

But Connecting with potential helpers also requires changing the negative mindset the many of us have about soliciting assistance. Your at tension while asking for help can make the whole interaction less comfortable for everyone. It's something that Jah learned early in his days of rejection therapy.

So I was expecting rejection, and all my focus is how I could deal with that rejection. I think couldn't even think the possibility that people will say yes to me. And if you don't bring this aggressive energy, you're not that tense. People actually relax when they talk to them to decrease that tension.

Jaw advises that you really do need to come to terms with the possibility of being rebuffed and to relax about it.

That's actually the key. If I'm coming in and if I'm open to rejection, then I'm fine. If I give the other person the freedom to say no to me, I give myself the freedom to ask whatever I want.

One way to do that, Shaw says is to explicitly admit that what you're asking for might not be doable, and that it's totally cool if the person can't help you, that you know they're not doing it. Just bite you or because they don't like you.

I say, Okay, I know I'm making a big request here. I know this is a little bit weird, and it's okay if you can't do it. If I put that thing what they're doubting up front, it actually put people at ease. He's saying that I can say no to this.

And if you're still feeling guilty about your request, Jaw suggests thinking back to how you felt when someone asked for help. Would you really be annoyed if the situation was reversed. Joe says he even thinks back to cases where he felt frustrated when good friends failed to call on him when they were in need.

I had a friend and he spent like almost a year looking for a job and he didn't ask friend help. It was really hard for him, and I was like, you could have told me earlier at that job. I know someone who who was hiring for that job. Why didn't you tell me earlier?

But Jaw has one final strategy that makes seem counterintuitive given his own experience. He recommends not going as hardcore as he did.

Go outside of the comfort zone a little bit. Don't go like way out. You don't have to come in and ask for one hundred dollars like I did. That was a big step. It's like an exercise, right if you never lifted weights, you don't want to come in and bench press like three hundred pounds. You're gonna get crushed. But go out of the comfort zone a little bit and just test the water and then gradually expand your comfort zone. You can start doing this again and again,

And Jaw should know because asking for what he needed publicly and fighting his fear of rejection didn't just change his life.

Jackie from Krispy Kreme right that the person said yes to me to make Olympic donuts, it changed her life too.

Jackie Brown also went viral for those Olympic donuts. A viewer of Jaw's video even made her a Facebook page entitled give Jackie a Krispy Kreme a raise. Thousand of people signed the petition thank you.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, I mean very very much.

She received a personal visit from the CEO of Krispy Kreme, and she now stars in training videos that are used by the entire corporation.

She become like a celebrity within her company, just all because she say yes. Sometimes saying yes is more fun than saying though.

And Joah thinks we'd all benefit from the fun of asking for help more often.

The rejection therapy has become a movement. It just feels my heart because I hope this movement can keep going and to help people overcome their fear.

So many of us are missing out on making new social connections or deepening our bonds with existing friends just because we don't want to ask for help or favors that. Maybe because we don't want to appear annoying or vulnerable, or because we fear the humiliation of our pleas being rejected. But the science shows that our worries about being pushy and needy are unfounded. People are way more happy to