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. 7 Those who help others often struggle to help themselves
This episode is with Ursula Tomlinson, a wonderfully generous retired paediatric oncologist nurse I met recently on a personal development program.
Born into a large family, and as the eldest she learned to be highly independent, self reliant and from a young age instinctively wanting to spend a lifetime helping others. Drawing on this experience she has a fascinating insight on not only offering help as a nurse but also asking for help for herself. And is honest about her own blockers towards accepting help from others.
There so many gems to highlight, some include:
- Being a kid in a classroom of 70 in the 1960’s, asking for help would be seen as slowing the lesson down.
- Asking for help is often mistakenly seen as stupid or overly bothering people
- The distinctive influences of northern vs southern European cultures and male vs females approach to asking for help.
- Her teacher giving tasks that they couldn’t finish, forced them to ask others for help. And this made them realise that you can’t know everything and you can't do everything by yourself.
- Culturally, it's easier for women to depend on each other, and how this more naturally encourages a sense of teamwork in female sports.
- As a nurse, you can’t get through a shift alone - and that you know you’d always get the help when you asked for it. Help other others/patients help each other …. but not necessarily yourself!
- The importance of the help me help you culture in paediatric care - what do I need to know to help you // Parents saying thank you for asking.
- The power and importance of a specific and empathetic offer of help to make it so much easier to accept. And the significance of doing so without expecting any thanks.
- How saying ’ My pleasure’ instead of no problem to those who express thanks for someone’s help - highlights beautifully the wonderful buzz the offerer feels. And this may encourage the receiver to more readily accept help in the future.
- Selfish altruism - help yourself by helping others
- Offering and accepting help bonds a community.
- Put the specific request for help out there, and it’s likely there will be someone who’d be happy to offer - like a match making service
- The mental block to asking for help can come from thinking no one will offer and the anticipated feeling of disappointment and/or rejection. So to avoid it, we don’t ask.
- The power of phrasing an offer of help by saying ‘nothing would make me happier than letting me do this for you.”
- In these current times, we’ll need each others help a lot more moving forward, and how this will make us better listen to, and help, not only each other but also ourselves.
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/