Written by Dave Turin • Reviewed by Laura Meyer
June 2, 2022
Being confident enough to ask for help…doesn’t really fit within the ‘tough’ American business world, but it can save you face, as well as time and money.
It can be pretty hard to say “I don’t know,” especially in construction. But when you’re confident enough to humble yourself, it can allow you to skip some of the mistakes you’ll make if you’re too cocky.
Humble yourself with confidence.
Dave Turin encourages his team to ask for what they need. “Don’t be a lone ranger, ask for help!” There are a lot of people who have made mistakes before who can help those who are just coming up.
If you don’t have a good handle on both confidence and humility, you just won’t fit in with the team. Confidence is precious—but overconfidence can be harmful to the team’s mission. An overconfident person may not ask for help, even when they need it. Worse, they may not listen to sound advice, because they think they know everything there is to know about their role.
A Cold, Expensive Lesson
“I’d been mining so long, I thought I was a pretty good miner. The minute you step outside of that, you get humbled in a hurry,” Dave recalls from his first trip to the Yukon.
“I could have saved us so much time and effort if I had been humbled enough to ask for help on how to gold mine in the Yukon…. the frozen North. I got a really expensive education in how to handle permafrost, and it cost us a lot of time and a lot of money.”
Dave says that if he’d been humble enough to ask for help, he could have learned how to mine in the Yukon the easy way, and saved his whole team a world of hurt.
Read the room.
Dave says, “Hey, no man is an island.” “I’ve been that, I’ve done that, I don’t want to do that anymore” You have to be willing to encourage, mentor, and confront people based on what they need.
Turin has noticed over the years that there are always people that need to be built up and encouraged to be more confident, and those that need to be humbled. “You have to know how to approach that person because you never want to rob someone of their confidence.”
In a nutshell, Dave advises that you be a decent person. Figure out what that looks like by getting to know the people on your team, so you can help them cultivate both confidence and humility—depending on where they are as an individual. The rewards will be felt by the whole team.
Check out Dave's next lesson, Being a Good Loser.
