What Happens When You Ask For Help

 We all know the joke about men not asking for help with directions.

Have you heard the one about the woman who tries to do everything "her way" and then says her husband doesn't help her? The punchline is: "he wasn't doing it right."

Except, it's not a joke. It's what people do.

If we wanted to accept social generalizations about the binary sexes, we could keep saying that men try to figure things out or do things alone rather than ask for and receive help and women...well, they do the same thing.

When we step back and stop generalizing, we realize most human beings do this. 

But why? Why do we do this?

Because certain things happen when we ask for help and those things may not feel very comfortable. We want to avoid discomfort so we don’t ask for help.

Last week I spent some time with a friend of mine who is struggling. He’s at a similar point where I was a few years ago and so I felt tremendous compassion for him. I wanted to HELP because I know how he’s feeling.

And I mostly wanted to help because I know how hard it is for him to ask for help, based on experiences he’s had throughout the course of his life. Like him, I’ve had experiences where I tried asking for help and really needed it and when it didn’t come, that made me stop asking.

I either didn’t get the help I needed or the help came with strings attached that felt so uncomfortable, I regretted asking in the first place.

Those things still happen, to be honest, which is why I am much less inclined to ask for help. And it’s also why I was really intentional to offer my help and then listen to my friend as he bravely asked for the help he needed.

It was a deeply moving few days for me, as I navigated a lot of feelings related to this—how he had helped me in the past on so many occasions, how it felt to need help when I was struggling and how people didn’t take notice, how it felt to reach out and have it ignored and now, feeling a tremendous desire to help as many people as I can and then wondering if I’m helping at all.

The good news is, my friend asked me for help and I felt so grateful to be able to provide it. I didn’t set parameters on it, I didn’t attach strings: he asked and I did it. I tried to do what I wish others had done or would do for me. When he asked for help, he gave me the opportunity to return the favor. He helped ME by asking for help.

From my experience being a coach for 11 years and being a person for 3x that many years, helping and being helped is a complex process. It’s a give and take between the conscious and unconscious motivations and interests and experiences of two or more people.

From so many years of practicing awareness of this and many new habits, I notice how often people help without being asked when all someone really needs is someone to listen. Or they help in ways they think are right instead what the person needs.

Sometimes the help we need is a good listener.

Sometimes we need an opportunity.

Sometimes we need some money.

Sometimes we need to be left alone.

Sometimes we need encouragement.

Sometimes we need candor.

Sometimes we need Love.

Often, people will try to help in the ways they wanted or needed it. They project that need onto others, and miss the actual opportunity to help in a meaningful way.

They may need help themselves but resist it so they help others the point of exhaustion.

They might offer unsolicited advice, thinking they’re helping.

They might avoid telling the truth, thinking they’re helping.

They might meddle, thinking they’re helping.

They might enable, thinking they’re helping.

What happens when we ask for help is the act of being vulnerable. We open ourselves to outcomes we have no control over. We ask and we think we look stupid for asking. That person thought we had it all together and now they think we don't. That image we stood behind felt so safe and now people might think we are a fraud or a failure. Our current social media maelstrom makes this worse by the day. We all like to look like we are juggling 10 balls perfectly, right? YEAH! What a feeling of power and control. Holy crap, the seduction of that facade is so tempting. It’s something to navigate, for sure. And so we do the dance between wanting some help but avoiding our lack of control over how or if it comes. It’s a cha-cha-cha.

I know so much about so many things, when I ask for help, I don’t really need advice. I often just need a listening ear as I talk through something. I live alone, it’s hard to be in the echo chamber of my own thoughts. But a good, unbiased listener is a hard thing to find these days, because people are so keyed up about not having control (I mean, life feels hard lately for everyone) that they jump right in trying to fix or solve me and whatever I’m ruminating about.

And I won’t lie, I try to be patient but it’s a struggle. I want my intelligence to be honored and respected. I don’t want to be pitied. I want the person to first think of how long I’ve been doing what I’ve been doing before jumping in with a suggestion I don’t need. I don’t want to feel less than for merely thinking through my options and deliberating. I don’t want to be seen as weak for having a low day or existential moment.

And I think of that as I listen to my clients. I strive to be the unbiased listener they need but lack in their lives.

I think of that when I listen, in general.

We all need help with something in our lives. Something we want to change or something that is hard.

We may like to think we can do everything ourselves, especially if we are particularly good at DIY-ing other things in life or if we've tried to ask for help before and have been hurt in some way. Shit happens when we ask for help, it's totally true. I tried to ask for help from someone who is this big social media expert and he completely flaked on me. You know what I learned from that? This guy had nothing to tell me that I don't already know and that was the lesson I needed.

Whatever the result, pleasant or not, we learn something by asking for help. We learn how to ask, who to ask and when to ask.

Finding the ability to ask for help and seek it from people or places who are ready, willing and able to provide it is an essential skill to living a healthy, happy life. It's an art, a practice, not an exact science.

It CERTAINLY is impacted by your past experiences asking for and receiving help.

It will take patience and work to push past fear and keep trying.

What I want, what I really want, is someone to just sit there while I help myself out of a hole. And if I need a hand up, I want someone to hear me and say, “sure! You got here. Here’s my hand.”

So that’s what happened.

That’s what I offered my friend. My time and my ears and the hand when he asked.