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 11 How embracing help supported Matt to beat colon cancer during Covid
I chat with Matt Black, a chartered surveyor from London, father of two and colon cancer survivor.
Matt now campaigns to encourage everyone, especially head-in-the-sand middle-aged men, to regularly check themselves and be aware of the early warning signs.
We talk about the frightening and lonely experience of being diagnosed and urgently operated at 2am during the early days of Covid. And then in the days after his life saving surgery, having mixed emotions about being grateful for dodging a bullet, but also the unenviable challenge of having no in person contact with his wife, and those close to him. And the toll it took on them as well as him.
It’s a revealing and raw story of how Matt, and his family experienced help during those unprecedented lockdown times. And how it’s the partners and close family of patients that also need help during these critical times, and how they too can often be resistant to accepting and asking for help.
Other themes we discuss include:
- Talking openly about your challenges and emotions massively helps not only yourself but also can make it easier for others to do the same. And others to help you.
- If your partner tells you there's something wrong with you, listen, accept what they're saying and go and deal with it.
- It's self-preservation to reach out and look for and accept help.
- Even if you’re uncomfortable or don’t know what to say to someone who’s sick or grieving, a reach out to say thinking of you makes a huge difference.
- Most people want want to help and do so with the best intention. And it's 2-way - you benefit from it,, and the person offering help benefits from it as well.
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/