Are you asking for help? (S3 E3)

Why is it so hard to ask for help? And what do we lose when we don’t ask?

We’re unpacking it all in today’s episode!

I would love to hear from YOU! Sound off in the comments: Is there something you need help with? Something you can gather up the courage to ask someone, “Hey, can you help me please?”

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Music by Alex_MakeMusic from Pixabay

The Loves to Chat Podcast is hosted by Keela Fowler.

Email me at lovestochat@gmail.com 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

My name is King Allen, and this is the Loves and Chat Podcast. On the Loves and Chat Podcast, we're gonna be talking about the hopes and dreams we have for little wives as kids, and how we'll turn them out as adults in the wives we currently live tonight. There's a lot of unexpected things that happen. Excitement, joy, contention, grief, hardship, and woman. Then we're gonna talk about this room of life that we have ourselves in, and how we can walk alongside each other into a little less alone. What change will be hopefully in our case? What state is saying? How many little life that we want? What the common challenges that we face? We'll find it all here together on this podcast. You're ready to have some company as you go on the grocery run, wash the dishes, commute to work if you still do that. Wherever you find yourself, let's chat. It starts with the moment where I recognize that I can't find the location of something, or I'm unsure of a policy. I run into a roadblock, troubleshooting an issue, or I want to make sure I'm not the one person who sticks out because I didn't know the proper procedure. This moment is not about standing out. It's about demonstrating that I fit in. I have a question, and that equates to a situation I truly do not want to face. I need help. Instantly I start to feel warm, sweaty, and completely insecure. Because that one question that resulted in the realization that I need help leads to a slew of other questions I'm not ready to battle. Should I ask for help? What does it mean that I can't handle this on my own? Who do I ask for help? Am I really going to ask for help? What will they think of me that I don't know the answer to this? Am I just an idiot? Can't I figure this out myself? And right there, there it is. I've talked myself right into doing it myself and right out of asking for help. I've started digging a hole for myself and I don't even recognize it as it's happening. It's like starting to mop the kitchen floor from the center of the room and then realizing you don't have a path out of the kitchen without stepping all over your freshly mopped tiles without making a mess. Now you're stuck, and you're probably going to stay stuck for a while. Or you're going to create quite a mess trying to get yourself out of being stuck. In my effort to be self-sufficient, I'm bound to make the path towards the answer or solution to my need for help take exponentially longer than it ever should have if I just opened my mouth and said, Hey, can you help me please? Can you relate? Are these words hitting a little too close to home? Don't worry. As you know, I expose my nonsense for the simple reason that we need to relate to each other on this stuff. You're not alone. But wow, what a mess we can create. Somewhere in our quest for independence and autonomy, we've become really good at relying on ourselves and really bad at asking for help. I think there's some common reasons that this has happened. My first guess is that most of us are trying to avoid something, and it's not what you think. For anyone who grew up with a parent who was super involved in anything, you may equate help with chores, or better yet, with work. Okay, let me back up and explain. When I say a parent who is super involved, I'm talking about the parents who sign up or volunteer to lead. They're the head of the PTO, they coach your soccer team, they're the class parent. And what this equates to is a constant real-world example in your household of there's always work to be done. And you've probably either rebelled against that in your adulthood or embraced it. I find myself constantly trying to balance between those two. And anyone who is a friend of mine and also been on a committee with me can probably speak to this. So let me give you an example. My parents are involved people. They know how to relax and have fun, don't get me wrong. But they do their part. They participate, they volunteer, they help out. And this is the important distinction. What I'm about to dig into and explain is not what I mean when I talk later about how we need to be better at asking for help. I will clarify that more in a bit. What I'm talking about right now is what I'll classify as being involved. Being involved in your community, in your kids' lives, in a committee. So, yes, my parents were involved people growing up. My dad coached me in soccer and basketball. My mom organized the cookies for the Girl Scout cookie sale for my troupe. Both of my parents were involved in the Booster Club, and they helped organize and sell t-shirts and sweatshirts for our sports teams in high school. They're both part of their alumni organization, and that's just a few of the ways that they were involved. Now, this set a beautiful example for us kids. You work hard, you contribute, you do your part. Many hands make light work. However, in real time, we saw what came with it. Boxes on top of boxes of cookies or t-shirts piled up in our family room, weekends spent running here and there, going to games early and staying late. It took time, energy, and effort. And like sometimes it was just exhausting. Again, who can relate? Inevitably, we all grew up and made choices about how we would do it differently when it was our turn. I mean, listen, Kevin McAllister said it perfectly in the first Home Alone movie. When I grow up and get married, I'm living alone. You're on to something there, Kevin. So some of us grew up and decided we are not going to be involved people. It's too much. We're going to be relaxed people. We're going to be staying our lane people. We're going to be don't bother me, I won't bother you people. And that ultimately shifted the equation to I won't ask you for help. Don't ask me for help. Rutro. See, that that right there is where we messed up. Because we mistakenly equated helping someone else with work. There's a difference between being asked to work for someone else and being asked for help. Here's my formula to help differentiate between the two. Help equals, I can't do this alone. Work equals, I don't feel like doing this, so I'm going to farm it out to someone else. I think we naturally offer help to people when we see a need. For example, our friend might be throwing a party and we recognize that setup is going to take a lot of work. So we offer to come over early so that we can help put out some tablecloths, maybe put chips in a bowl, open the door for the first few guests who arrive while your friend is still pulling appetizers out of the oven. That kind of thing. It feels like a no-brainer. You're happy to do it, and you don't keep score. And that last part to me is the key point. You're not keeping score because you were happy to do it. Because it wasn't such a dream. And you're probably just happy to have that time together. If your friend had asked you to come over and help rather than you offering, you probably would have easily said yes. So now the latter category is what we're trying to avoid being on the receiving end of. And it's typically from someone we don't have such an affinity for. Or better yet, is always looking for someone else to do their dirty work. I don't think any of us have any interest in doing someone else's work. We've been a part of enough group projects where your grades dependent upon the end product that you collectively come up with. And when one person doesn't pull their weight, the rest of the group has to do extra. They have to do extra just to get the grade that they should be able to achieve if that one person had simply pulled their weight. We want no parts of that. We've done that. We don't need to do it now. And so that feeling is what we end up trying to avoid, putting upon someone else. Many of us don't like to ask for help because we're trying to avoid something. We don't want to bother you or put you out, so then we overthink how busy your schedule must be and how little time you have to give, and we talk ourselves out of asking you for help because we don't want to inconvenience you. And then the other thing that we're trying to avoid putting on somebody else, or putting on ourselves, quite frankly, is the scariest one. We don't want to owe people. I don't want to owe you one. But would that be so bad to owe someone a favor who is willing to do one for you? Maybe we need to just do a better job of asking people that we like and respect for help. Because their ask is gonna be comparable to yours. Help can be reciprocal without keeping score. And the moment that you start to recognize you've been tallying up the amount of times you help someone and they haven't helped you, y'all, that's when it's time to stop. We should all be more discerning when it comes to people taking advantage of us. Because that's not help. So when it comes to actual help, when it comes to help, typically the people who are really good at giving it are not so good at asking for it. Y'all, I am speaking from my personal experience as somebody who struggles to ask for help. But if you think about the times that you often find yourself helping someone else, they didn't need to ask you. You just offered. You were happy to do it. You recognized the need and you did a quick evaluation of your time and your energy, and you reached the resolution of I can help with this. I can bring ease to this person's situation, and I'm happy to do it. In preparing for this episode, I started to jot down some recent times that friends and colleagues asked for help. And you know what happened? I smiled at the memories. I was so thankful and honored that they asked me that in their time of need, they thought, I think Keila would be willing to help. Because I was. And each of those times it deepened my connection with that person. We became better friends. We built trust. We both learned that we could lean on each other. We miss out on that when we don't ask. When we really think about it. Isn't that what our best relationships are built on? Being there for each other, supporting each other, lending a helping hand. Listen, it's just time for the truth bomb. I think it ultimately comes down to one true thing. Vulnerability. That is what we're actually trying to avoid in all of this. Being vulnerable. Earlier, I talked about my parents being involved people, right? People who jump in, who give a helping hand, who do their part. And I think that that sits in a really important category of having a heart for service. And I think that that is a generous, beautiful thing that needs to always be considered. I think it's an important class of individuals that need to be protected at all costs because they are often the most frequently tapped people when there's additional work to be done. And often they are the ones who end up getting burnt out. You probably know these people. Those of you listening to this podcast and it's resonating with you, you are probably one of these people because you naturally have a heart for service. So you are naturally inclined to volunteer, to step in, to offer your time and your energy. And if you are not careful, you may find that people will willingly drain you of all of your resources, and that can sometimes build up resentment. So we need to be careful about that. We need to be careful about not overutilizing those people, and we, as people who feel that way, who are just have a heart for service, who are just willing to get in there, that we put up some boundaries, that we use the word no as a complete sentence, and that we also protect our time and our energy so that we can be more discerning about the things we say yes to, and then can really enjoy the ways in which we help people out in that regard. I just want to clear that up because I know some of you are like, but I actually like to just join a committee. I like to be able to plan things out, to help out, to jump in, and that is beautiful and necessary. It's also important to, like I said, not get burnt out and not build up resentment because people are taking advantage of you. Because it can happen, it will happen, it's happened in the past, and it can happen again. So I gave you a moment to step away from the big word that I just put out there, but we gotta talk about it. We gotta like really get comfortable about vulnerability because that is what we are trying to avoid in asking other people for help. We are trying to avoid being vulnerable, but we have to be vulnerable enough to admit that we need help, that we can't do it alone, that we aren't as strong or capable or independent as we'd like to be. And that's just so true for all of us. Because we're not supposed to make it alone. We all need help sometimes. But asking for help, it can sometimes feel like we're admitting a deep dark secret, when in reality, it has nothing to do with the loud obnoxious voices in our head telling us, you know, you can really find another way. You're simply not trying hard enough. Hush. We can talk ourselves into thinking we can do any and everything by ourselves, but that's an unrealistic standard, and it's simply untrue. Moving heavy furniture, you're going to need some help with that. Planning a surprise party for a friend and 50 plus people to come, you're going to need some help with that. Transitioning from an Android to an iPhone, I'm sorry to break it to you, you're going to need some help with that. Getting a ride when your car battery dies. You're going to need some help with that. Learning policies and procedures at a new job. Yes, I'm also talking to myself. You're going to need some help with that. We deserve ease, assistance, a smooth path forward towards what we're trying to accomplish. And we can get there with a little help from our friends. We just have to be brave enough to ask for it. So now I ask you, is there something you need help with? Something you can gather up the courage to ask someone, hey, can you help me please? Sound off in the comments. Or email me directly at lovestochhat at gmail.com. Maybe the first step for you is writing it down and sharing it with me just to gather a little courage so that you can then copy and paste that question into a text to a friend or a family member. I'm happy to be your first practice run. That's it for today. I'll chat with you all in the next one. Thank you so much for listening to the Loves to Chat podcast. Make sure you share this with your friends, your family, via social media, or word of mouth. Either way, I appreciate you sharing this out, listening every week, and leaving me your comments. You can listen to Loves to Chat on whatever podcast layer you prefer, and you can reach out to me at lovestochat at gmail.com. I'll see you in the next one.