I fail to ask for things that I want. I’m not sure if the bottleneck is the wanting, the asking, or feeling like it’d be overly burdensome for other people if I ask. I’m running an experiment for the next two weeks to gather more data.

The goal is to teach my nervous system three things: hard asks can be asked; hard asks get a yes more often than I expect; and getting a no to an ask doesn’t destroy the universe.

Rules #

• Before asking, I log the want, the probability I’ll get a yes, and whether it feels hard. Afterward, I log whether I asked and what happened. Me getting what I want is a yes; everything else is a no.
• I run the experiment for 14 days.
• After 14 days, I report total wants, hard wants, wants expressed as asks, hard wants asked, and my expected and actual yeses.

Predictions #

• I get more yeses than I expect. \(Y>E\), where \(Y\) is the number of yeses and \(E\) is the sum over the probabilities of the asks, about 90%; \(Y-E>3\), about 40%.
• I’ll ask for at least half the wants I mark as hard. 50%.

Felt rating and continuation #

Because the goal is to make asking for hard things feel less difficult, I keep track of how hard it feels to ask for hard things. Right now, it’s about a 9 out of 10. If it doesn’t drop to a 7 by the end of the experiment, I continue the experiment.