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 12 David Smith, Paralympian's passion to help others and live a life with purpose
This conversation tells the story of how a Paralympian gold medallist’s grit and self-reliance gave way to vulnerability, self-awareness, accepting and offering help and a greater sense of purpose.
David was a promising national level student athlete, but in 2010 he was diagnosed with a rare tumour in his spinal cord. He then went on to represent Great Britain at rowing and win gold at the London Olympics in 2012. However in 2106, one of the multiple spinal surgeries he had to endure that year left him paralaysed from the neck down on one side.
We discuss how dealing with depression and overcoming suicidal thoughts has given him a greater sense of purpose, and brought out his altruistic personality, passion to learn, help others and make a difference in the world.
Some other themes we cover are:
- It's hard in today's world when we're bombarded with so much noise, to get to the core of who we are, what we value the most, what are our non-negotiables, and live in alignment with that.
- The benefit of nature, animals and a change of environment to help yourself.
- Mental health challenges of performance athletes who experience post Olympics depression, yet it seems it less impacts the coaches and support team
- How Victor Frankl’s stimulus-space-response framework can guide our perhaps unwanted immediate reactions to situations. if we can work on that stimulus, space response and smile more often, we change the vibration of our life and everyone around us.
- The difference between UK and Jamaican culture around greetings and expressing of love and blessings.
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/