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 10 How Osher Günsberg has successfully overcome his battle with anxiety & addiction
In this episode, I chat with Osher Günsberg, Australian award-winning TV presenter, author, podcast host, writer, and mental health advocate.
Osher talks openly about his self destructive early career years as a roadie, then radio DJ and TV host, including colourful and sometimes frightening stories of hitting rock bottom. And how it was these moments that forced him, together with support of friends and colleagues, to let go of his independence and ego to then accept and ask for help.
Some of the themes we cover are:
- The triggers to start to accept help can happen when your coping strategies are completely dwarfed by the amount of stress in your day-to-day life.
- Not accepting the help and support from professionals to deal with depression and anxiety, resulted in wasting 7 years of his life.
- Power of exercise as a regulator for mental health. Pushing yourself to the limit helps to remove the worries in your head.
- It's not survival of the fittest, it's survival of the friendliest, since our brains are wired to be rewarded when we assist and help others.
- Practising a selfless culture of doing things for others, of being of service to others in your professional environment can improve the quality of work.
- People are often all too happy to receive that "got time for a chat" call to help them get out of their brains and everyday worries.
- How different cultures significantly influence our attitude to help. Specifically in contrast to the West, how in Fijian culture it would be an affront to not accept help.
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/