When the answer is no

Suppose you ask a colleague to cover your Friday shift. She says "sorry, I can't, I'm taking my mum to the hospital". You say "no problem at all!" a little too brightly, feel your face go warm, and spend the afternoon resolving never to do that again.

Sooner or later you'll get a no, and how you read it matters. The habit's reading is "I shouldn't have asked". I'd like to offer a more accurate one.

A no is nearly always information about the other person's week. She has a hospital appointment. He's broke this month. They're more tired than they look. Check this against your own memory. Think of the last time you turned someone down. I'd bet you didn't think less of them for asking. More likely you felt slightly bad, and hoped they'd ask again some time so you could say yes.

There's research on the second request as well. Daniel Newark and colleagues found that askers expect someone who has refused them once to refuse again, and that they underestimate how often that person agrees the next time. The researchers' explanation is that refusing someone twice is more uncomfortable than refusing them once, so a person who has turned you down is readier to help with the next thing than you'd guess. Meanwhile the asker has filed them under "unhelpful" and never goes back.

There's another way to look at it. In chapter 10 you left room for a no on purpose. If people have room, some of them will use it, and that shows the arrangement is working. If nobody around you ever felt able to refuse you, you couldn't trust their yeses either. A few honest refusals are the price of being able to believe the acceptances.

In practice, keep your reply short and mean it. "No problem, thanks for telling me straight." Then ask someone else. It helps to have a second person in mind before you ask the first, so that a no sends you to the next name and not back to doing it alone. And don't take one refusal as a verdict on asking in general. It's one result. You've been running on untested forecasts for years, and you need a lot more than one result to replace them.

Now the harder cases. Some people do respond badly to a request. They sigh and make a performance of it. They help, and then mention it for years. They tell other people. They treat your need as a weakness to store up. If you grew up with someone like this, you know it's real, and I won't pretend that everyone is kind.

What you can conclude from a response like that is something about that person. It tells you little about the next person you might ask. Most of us know a few people who are safe to ask and one or two who aren't, and it's sensible to sort them. It's also worth sorting by kind of help. Some people will drive across town with a toolbox and go stiff if you mention a feeling. Others will listen for an hour and never turn up with the van. Ask each for what they're good at.

Sometimes the answer is yes and the help comes out wrong. You wanted a second pair of hands and you got a lecture on how you should have done it. You wanted to be listened to and you got five solutions. Often this is because you didn't say what kind of help you were after, and they guessed. You can say it at the start. "I don't need fixing, I just need you to listen for ten minutes." Or the reverse. "I don't need sympathy, I need an idea."

If one person who shares your life refuses most reasonable requests, such as a partner who won't take on any of the housework, then the problem isn't the way you ask. That calls for a direct conversation about fairness, with examples, and perhaps a counsellor if it doesn't move. And if your requests are met with rage, threats or punishment, that's outside the scope of a book about habits. A domestic abuse helpline can talk it through with you in confidence.