The Gift of Help: For yourself & each other
How do we encourage more of us to accept help when it’s offered, and ask for help when they need it?
As I deal with the challenge of living with a lymphoma and chemotherapy, I’ve encountered some life-changing lessons about the gift of help. The transformative realisation that accepting help is a gift since you give the chance for the help giver to experience joy, pride and/or the feel good factor of supporting someone they care about.
So I’m now on a mission to transform us all from a world of help rejectors to help receivers. So we can all revel in the Gift of Help.
This first season features conversations with people who share their inspiring health journey stories of how they’ve overcome cancer, concussion, ankle reconstructions, blindness. We discuss their raw and honest experience of asking for and accepting help and how this has changed and supported them. And then importantly we reveal some ways that they find useful to get over mental blocks to accept and ask for help.
The Gift of Help: For yourself & each other
Ep. 1 How a cancer diagnosis & becoming a help receiver changed my life
In this first episode, recorded in September, I talk about my own health journey story with a good friend of mine. We cover a lot of fascinating and revealing topics.
- The surprising way I first dealt with my diagnosis of a lymphoma and rare auto immune disease.
- The tsunami of help offers I received during this first few days in the hospital
- Some funny but then also harsh reality check instances of being forced to ask for help.
- The light bulb moment of how I first fully appreciated this concept of the mutual gift of help.
- The fascinating idea that: by being vulnerable is actually being brave, and selfish can actually be selfless.
- How a tragic loss during my childhood may have influenced the instinct to be self-reliant created these barriers to accepting help.
At the end we come up with some powerful ideas and practical tips on how I’m getting over these mental blocks, ones that can be helpful for anyone.
I hope this conversation helps you as much as it did me.
And that you may share it with a friend, family member or work colleague who may benefit from it too.
You can contact me on:
Email: ashley@thegiftofhelp.org
Facebook: Ashley Usiskin
Instagram: @gift_of_accepting_help_podcast
Linked: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashleyusiskin/