While no one request is guaranteed to change the course of your career, business, relationships, or life, any single request can. Requests have the potential to make a profound difference to the quality of your life and your ability to achieve the success you want. Sure, just because you ask for something doesn’t guarantee that you will get it. But not asking for it does guarantee you won’t! Would you really prefer the certainty of having your needs unmet over the possibility of having them met? Surely not?!
As someone dedicated to helping people fulfill their full spectrum of needs, I often find myself surprised at how few people actually ask for what they really want and how even fewer ask for it in ways that maximize the chances of getting it. So I’m curious: Right now, as you read this article, what needs do you have that are going unmet and are causing you to feel resentful, frustrated and unappreciated because, whether you are conscious of it or not, you have not asked for what you really want?
Two ingredients of a powerful request
For a request to hold any water it needs to specify not just a “what” (what you would like to have occur that presently isn’t), but also a “when” (by when it needs to happen). These are the “conditions of satisfaction” by which you and others can assess whether a commitment has been properly fulfilled. Asking for something to be done “soon” or “when you have time” leaves the door wide open for unmet expectations, frustration and disappointment. It also doesn’t allow you to hold people accountable when they fail to do what you wanted.
You get what you tolerate
It’s a rule of life that you get what you tolerate—whether in your relationships, your career or your life. Making more and better requests will go a long way toward eliminating the “tolerations” in your life. It may be making a request of your husband or children to take on an extra responsibility on the home front; your boss, partner or colleague to change the way they are communicating with you on projects; your employee to honor an existing commitment or even of your cleaning lady to stop hiding the remote control in obscure places!
Complaining about your problems never solves them; whining about unmet needs never fulfills them. People aren’t mind readers and assuming others should automatically know what you want or need is a surefire recipe for resentment.
