Ask for what you want!
If you’re wondering why you just don’t seem to get what you want — whether it’s at home with your family, as a student or in your career — it might very well be because you don’t feel you can ask for it. That’s not weakness; it’s socialization. If you understand this, you can begin to change your beliefs about asking — with the result that you’ll feel happier, less depressed, and more satisfied with life, relationships, school and work. Feeling entitled to ask for what you want is not a small thing. This post is intended to help you move in that direction.
I was talking my friend Dr. Meyer, a scientist with a long and successful career (and my professorial consultant for www.mycoachfran.com). As a child, Dr. Meyer had decided that he was not going to live in poverty, and from the moment of that decision, he actively worked to create the life he wanted for himself. In the process of describing that path to me, he talked about writing a paper when he was nineteen on a certain topic related to DNA. He began to be very interested in a very specific research question. Here’s what then happened:
1. He decided that he wanted to be involved in the research.
2. He asked his instructors who in the United States was doing the research.
3. They told him.
4. He contacted those people and let them know he wanted to work with them.
Ralph glossed over this story because it wasn’t really what he wanted to talk about; he had another point he was trying to make. But I stopped him cold.
“What made you think anyone would care that you wanted to work on this? As a student it never would have occurred to me that anyone would care,” I said, a little incredulous at the perceived audacity of a kid who approaches the big guys in his field and says that he wants in.
“It never occurred to me that they wouldn’t,” he said, looking confused, as though I had asked him to explain something that was self evident.
I explained to him that he had just encapsulated the difference between his upbringing as a boy and mine as a girl.
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