“Stop pushing away the things you actually want” is an instruction without a subject. Pushing away what, by doing what? So take the version of it that has actually been measured, because there is one, and it is narrower and more useful than the phrase.
The clearest way to push something away is to not ask for it.
Sent into the street with a script
Francis Flynn and Vanessa Lake ran six studies on this, and the first one is beautifully plain. Participants were given a clipboard, a stack of two-page questionnaires and a tally sheet, and sent out to approach strangers. They could say only one thing: “Will you fill out a questionnaire?” They had to keep going until five people agreed.
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Half of them first predicted how many strangers they would have to approach. The average prediction was 20.5 people. The average number they actually approached was 10.5.
They were wrong by a factor of two, and not because predicting changed anything. The group that made no prediction needed the same number of approaches.
The second study swapped the contrived favor for two that a person might really need. Borrowing a stranger’s cell phone to make a call: participants predicted needing to ask 10.1 people to get three yeses, and actually asked 6.2. And then a heavier request, asking a stranger to walk them to the campus gym, which meant that whoever agreed had to abandon whatever they were doing and walk at least two blocks. Participants predicted they would have to ask 7.2 people before one agreed.
They asked 2.3. Seventy-nine percent of participants got it wrong in that direction, and this time an experimenter followed them and counted, rather than trusting the tally sheet.
A third study left the campus entirely and used a real request with real stakes: people asking others, some of whom they knew well, to give money to a charity on their behalf. Predicted compliance again fell significantly below what happened. Across the first three studies, the authors put the underestimation at as much as 50 percent.
The part that makes it more than a pep talk
It would be easy to stop there and conclude that people are nicer than you think. The remaining studies say something more specific and more useful than that.
Studies 4 and 5 manipulated perspective directly. Assign someone the help-seeker’s viewpoint and the underestimation appears. Assign them the potential helper’s viewpoint and it does not. So this is not a personality trait belonging to shy people. It is a property of the seat you are sitting in.
Study 6 went looking for what the two seats are thinking about, and found they are not thinking about the same thing at all.
The person doing the asking is running a calculation about effort. How long will this take them, how inconvenient is it, how much am I costing this person if they say yes. That is the sum a considerate person does, and it is why considerate people ask for less.
The person being asked is running a different calculation entirely. They are feeling the awkwardness of refusing. Saying no to a direct request, face to face, breaks a social rule, and it is uncomfortable in a way the asker is not thinking about, because the asker is busy adding up the inconvenience of yes.
The asker prices the cost of yes. The helper feels the cost of no. Neither is wrong about their own side, and the person who has to decide whether to ask is working from only half the arithmetic.
And the other side gets it wrong too
Which brings in a study from a different country and a different decade. Yan Li and Zhiwei Liu at Sichuan University of Science and Engineering put 240 people into three scenarios, published in August 2025: lifting a heavy suitcase onto a luggage rack, taking photographs for a stranger, walking a lost person to a bookstore. Each participant took either the helper’s role or the seeker’s.
Helpers consistently underestimated how the person they had helped actually felt. On the train scenario they predicted gratefulness at 4.65, where the people receiving the help reported 6.38. Satisfaction, 4.72 predicted against 6.35 reported. In the bookstore scenario the helpers guessed they would be rated 4.72 for competence, and the seekers gave them 6.38.
This is a scenario study rather than a field study, and the authors say so plainly: hypothetical situations may not capture the emotional richness of real ones, the participants are students, and the findings are culturally specific. They call for diary and field designs. It is the weaker of the two papers and it is doing a different job, measuring imagined feeling rather than counting yeses.
What it adds up to
Put the two together and something slightly comic appears. Both ends of the same exchange systematically undervalue it, in opposite directions.
The person who needs something believes they are about to impose, and is wrong by roughly half. The person who helps believes it mattered less than it did, and is wrong in the other direction. If you ask, and they say yes, and you walk away feeling you have used up some credit, and they walk away thinking it was nothing much, then two people have just misread the same thirty seconds.
Which reframes the thing the supplied phrase calls pushing away. The request that never gets made is usually not cowardice and not self-sabotage. It is an arithmetic error, made before anybody speaks, using a number that has been measured and is about twice too high.
What this does not say
It does not say people will say yes. It says the rate is higher than askers predict, which is a different sentence. Some of these were small favors from strangers on a campus, and the ones that were not, the charity request in the third study, still only tell you about that request.
Nothing here covers a large ask, a repeated ask, or an ask made to somebody who has already said no once. Nobody has measured those, and the reasonable assumption is that the arithmetic changes.
What survives is narrow and worth carrying anyway. Before you decide not to ask, notice that you are estimating the answer, that the estimate is the only thing stopping you, and that people in your position get it wrong in a known direction, for a reason that has nothing to do with you and everything to do with which side of the question you happen to be standing on.