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. 2 Embracing your own "Team Help"
In this episode, I chat with Tom Bagnall. A successful business owner from the UK, marathon runner and father of two young kids living in Amsterdam
At the beginning of the pandemic he was diagnosed with a stubborn Stage 3 melanoma cancer. He talks about his brutal journey of 7 months of 138 sessions of radiotherapy and immunotherapy and the feeling of helplessness that triggered the need to welcome help into his life.
Some themes we cover are:
- How Team Tom naturally came together to be his help and support network. This provided help on tap from people who simply didn’t take no for an answer.
- His surprising reaction to once being given the all clear, of feeling a big anti-climax, then anger about why me and then a few weeks later once the professional support stopped, quite severely anxious and depressed. And it was during this time and not during the treatment, when he most needed help.
- Tom talks very honestly about how a good friend help him get over his mental block of being a therapy-cynic to eventually seeking and benefitting from life-changing counselling and professional help.
- How his instinct now is to offer help gives him energy, and has made it easier to ask for and accept help.
- We learn how Tom has taken these lessons and used them in way he hadn’t expected.
- We talk about a hypothesis as to why middle-aged men are hard-wired to be resistant to asking for help due to the legacy from our 20s when we need to show we've got our shit together - to be seen as the alpha male and the best potential father for your kids!
- And finally we reveal some hacks about offering help to make it easier to accept.
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/