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. 6 How hitting rock bottom pushes us to accept help
This episode is with Ton van Klaveren, a good Dutch friend, successful head of corporate sales, aspirational business owner and damn strong cyclist.
Highly driven and active, and a self-described impatient, somewhat private and fiercely independent person.
After a car crash, Ton suffered whiplash and was diagnosed with concussion. But only 8 days later did he start to feel the severe repercussions. Leaving him incapable of working, socialising and controlling his moods.
Some of the fascinating topics we cover are:
- His struggles to understand the effects of the injuries on his body, the debilitating symptoms and having no clarity as to how long it would take to recover.
- How he was forced to learn to be patient, vulnerable, and comfortable in his own company.
- It took him to be at his lowest and a feeling of being ‘broken’ to accept help from his wife. And that thus then became the turning point to start to get his life back.
- The dilemma of the need to rest yet keep doing things to get you a mental and mood boost.
- Sharing his story and anxieties helped the recovery process.
- The realisation that he couldn’t go through this by himself. And how asking a neighbour to go for a walk was a chance to be simply taken out of your own head an thoughts.
- Fight versus flight response to his situation
- The challenge presented by his difficult upbringing, going into survival mode and how it’s made it difficult to lean on others for help.
- The default characteristic of entrepreneurs and corporate culture to do everything themselves and not ask for help.
- Receiving compliments is as often harder than giving them. Yet this can be a start point for receiving help.
- Share your vulnerability with those close to you, so they can offer help and be part of your journey. So ultimately it can strengthen connections and relationships.
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/