In her book titled Rising Strong, Brené Brown demonstrates how asking for help is a critical part of emotional resilience, an insight she arrived at after interrogating her discomfort with seeing people begging. There are those of us for whom the work that needs to be done is learning to ask for less help and lean more on ourselves, but for many of, asking for help when we need is what we find most challenging.
This theme comes up repeatedly in sessions with the women we coach. The difficulty is either with asking for help or receiving it when it is offered, both when it comes to their careers and outside of them.
Surprisingly (or not), these same women offer and give help easily and often go beyond the call of duty. We ask, amongst others, the following two questions to understand the underlying nuance.
1. What story do you tell yourself to justify your resistance to asking for help?
2. What do you gain from offering help to others?
“I don’t want to be a burden”. Some version of this comes up consistently in response to the first question. Other reasons include not wanting to seem weak or as failing to take accountability. In response to the second, women cite everything from being of service to others and showing up for loved ones, to feelings of usefulness, validation, being needed and affirmed.
So, the story goes something like this:
I may also see the vulnerability, the strength, the desperation, the real need etc. but what I do not see when others ask for help is burden. Hence, the issue is not that the value of help is not understood, but a sense that this value is not available or accessible to them.
The aha moments in the coaching sessions arise when this tension is unpacked through a series of emergent, sometimes challenging, questions specific to each woman.
Questions about what aspects of their humanity are being denied and why. Questions about the difference between the people they do receive help from and who they do not. Questions about what is lost when help is rejected.
For some women, this is all the catalyst they need, for others it is the start of a journey punctuated by brave baby steps.
Ultimately, the intention is to get to the heart of the resistance and in so doing pave a way for the women we coach to lean on others with greater ease. Sometimes, the best way to be of service to others, is to allow them to be of service to us.
MORERO 