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. 5 How to be independent AND accept help at the same time
This episode is with Daniel Kramer, a 24 year old cousin, fellow podcaster, keen sportsman and someone who’s relentlessly curious to find ways to improve himself.
Born with only 40% vision in one eye and then diagnosed with ADHD, his story and approach to life is truly extraordinary.
Some of the inspiring and thought-provoking topics we cover are:
- Having to accept constant help at hand from a young age, and the challenge then to craft his own independence as he grew older.
- At aged 14 being forced to lie flat dead still for 2 weeks after eye surgery the feeling of being lonely and helpless encouraged him to accept his situation
- How this has meant he’s adopted a philosophy of Life events happen for me and not to me
- Benefit of learning from others and letting them help you the feel good factor they experience from doing so
- Showing gratitude when accepting help
- In US asking for help is seen as weak and yet by simply lowering your ego can be seen as strong
- Our accept-help blockers often come from our default to help out everyone else first versus ourselves
- It’s not selfish to priorities yourself first, since you gain the energy and self-love to be better placed to help others
- Being selfish is when you don’t share your success, lessons learned, achievements, and are always looking for something in return
- Creating an accepting and asking for help culture will help the mental health of society
- We don’t know what’s behind the perfect picture on social media - to not judge and perhaps reach out to offer help
- Pat yourself on the back when you accept even the small offers of help to start to make habitual changes in your life
- Biggest way to pay someone back who has helped you is to help someone else
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/