How to Ask for Help – Sometimes You Have To Let Others Feel Good

Do you like helping others?

Are you one of those people that jumps at the chance to help your friends whenever they need a hand?

If not, no worries, usually that just stems from not wanting to go out of your comfort zone and that’s a topic for another day.

Today let’s just focus on how good it feels when we help out our friends and family…those who sincerely appreciate our efforts. (Yes, I’m totally aware of how frustrating it can be when you are constantly being asked for help by someone who doesn’t appreciate your efforts – but again, that’s a discussion for another day.)

Let’s stay focused here! 😉

Let’s paint the picture here: your friend is having a really rough time. Maybe she’s going through a tough divorce and has no place to live, no income, no clothes or food for her kids. Oh yes, you do know someone like that right?

Good.

(No, not good that someone is going through that, good that you can appreciate the need for help…and that you have the desire to help make life good again for her.)

Okay, now think about it….

How does if feel when you are a part of making her world a better place?

• Maybe you can offer free daycare for her while she gets back on her feet.

• Maybe you are a secret angel, one who simply drops off some much needed groceries at her door.

• Maybe you put in a good reference for her helping her to land that new job that will help her pay the bills, not to mention the lawyer’s fees!

The point here is that is FEELS GOOD to help someone else in need.

And guess what?

It’s a selfish feeling!

Oh don’t worry….it’s not a BAD feeling…it’s just a self-satisfying one…and that’s a VERY GOOD thing!

Why?

Because besides making a positive change in our world, you are creating the desire to….

Do it again, and again and AGAIN! 😀

And it’s TOTALLY okay to want to help others because it makes you feel good!

So, no, you do not have to feel guilty about that.

It’s how we operate. And if we know that we operate that way then we can make sure that we use that wonderful feeling to create more good.

Hey, think about it…if it felt bad to help someone else…then we wouldn’t want to do it again, right?

Oh be honest, we would avoid it like the plague!

So what we want to do is use this feeling to start showing our kids how wonderful it feels to help others.

Why?

So they help others! 😉

Okay, but this article is about ‘asking for help’ NOT about helping others, huh?

Yes, that’s right but in order to understand how to ask for help you need to understand how we work. Why we want to help help. Then you will know how to ask for help in a way that actually gets you the help you’re wanting.

And get this….

By asking for help…you’re actually giving someone else the opportunity to feel good about themselves!

Bet you never thought of it like this before did you?

I know I sure never did!

I was raised to always be the one helping, never to ask cause that would be putting others out. That would not be a good thing.

And yet, there I was helping others!

Were they putting me out?

NO!

They just needed some help and as a nice side-effect it made me feel good to be that help.

When I realized this it opened a whole new world for me.

I always saw asking for help as begging.

But that’s not the case.

Begging is asking for help but not expecting to give anything in return.

So what do you have to give in return if you ask for help?

Oh, it’s so much simpler than you might imagine…

A smile, a hug, a sincere show of gratitude…that you truly appreciate the one who is helping you.

You need to make them feel good about helping you!

It could be simply offering future help whenever they need it. It quite literally could be anything!

Now, I’m NOT an expert yet at asking, trust me…this is NOT an easy switch for me but I’ve learned that the best lessons are most often the toughest ones!

Last year, I ended up in a 3 week coma due to pneumonia gone wrong. (Ended up getting ARDS – acute respiratory distress syndrome – something that most people never survive. I got lucky.)

During that time, my partner was out of a job and I was clearly not able to work. Trust me, even after I came out of the coma it took many months of rehab just to do simple things like go to the bathroom by myself. A definite life lesson for sure!

But again, that’s a story for another day.

The reason I mention it here is because during that time a friend of ours started a funding campaign to help us pay our bills while I recovered and my partner got a new job.

Oh it’s easy to ask for help when you’re in a coma!

But when you wake up, boy or boy, do you feel both incredibly grateful for the help and also like you’re the biggest burden on the planet.

But nobody else saw me that way.

They just wanted me to get better, and were grateful that I actually survived the ordeal.

So it was a long year of learning to not only accept help but ask for it on occasion too. But I still had my limits. I couldn’t possibly ask for financial help! That would be too much!

I felt like I didn’t deserve the help. 🙁

That if I couldn’t earn the money myself then I clearly didn’t deserve it.

UNTIL….

(Doesn’t life have a fun way of making you go out of your comfort zone?)

YUP, that’s what happened to me. 😉

My daughter only sees in 2D. One of her eyes, although completely healthy didn’t connect with her brain and so she’s never seen in 3D and until now, that was simply the way it was going to be.

But two weeks ago, our optometrist called to say that his new vision therapy was ready and that my daughter was the perfect candidate. He was sure that he could link her brain to her eye and gain full 3 dimensional vision.

That meant not only NOT tripping over everything…
(oh trust me, she falls A LOT!) …but it would help correct the dyslexia as well!

WOW!

Oh yeah and it would only cost $5000!

YIKES!

Having just recovered from quite literally being incapacitated (still recovering) and just getting on our feet again financially (able to keep our home and feed our kiddos) here was the opportunity to bring a tremendous gift to my daughter that I had absolutely NO WAY of paying for!

What to do?

The hardest thing of all….

ASK FOR HELP!

NOT my favourite choice of events. 🙁

But it was my daughter’s future, what to do, what to do.

Suck it up sunshine and ask for help!

Yup, so that’s what I did…tail firmly tucked between my legs and head hanging down in shame I first spoke to the doctor and told him I simply couldn’t afford to pay for the therapy.

He asked me how much I could afford, and I told him at the moment NOTHING but that I was willing to go out of my comfort zone and ask my friends and family to help me raise the money for my daughter’s therapy.

He was so taken by our story, and could see that my daughter was determined to do all the hard work that would be required of her (40 weeks of intensive eye therapy – 1 hour a week at the clinic and 20-30min/day, every single day for 40 weeks) that he decided to give us a tremendous gift and give us a 50% discount!

Incredible!

But still …. $2500!

Not something we could afford on our own.

Soooooooo….

Looking back at the funding campaign that our friend had set up for us last year when I was in a coma, I decided to bit my lip and set one up for my daughter.

You can see the incredible results here:

OMG!

You HAVE to go and check out the results…absolutely UNBELIEVABLE!

The first day we raised half of the money needed…in just one day!

Why?

Because our friends and family know us as the ones who always jump in and help whenever we are needed and they want to be a part of my daughter’s success!

Humbling?

You betcha!

Overwhelming?

Absolutely!

I wanted to share this with you so you would know that if you need help it IS OKAY to ask for help!

That by doing so you are actually allowing someone else to feel good about themselves.

And you know you won’t take advantage of it because you really do truly appreciate the help. You can’t help not to! Receiving help is tremendously difficult, especially to our egos, but we have to remind ourselves that by helping us, we are actually helping others.

What a concept!

I learned this from Amanda Palmer in her book, “The Art of Asking”. I never fully understood how important it is to ask until I read her book, which was given to me by my dear friend when I needed to hear it most. Thank-you.

“Ask and you shall receive”…and so will the helper!

Love to you all.

Please do make sure you teach your child how to ask for help. It’s an important skill. They need to learn when and how to ask.

To be truly grateful and not to resist asking for help just because they’re afraid or their egos will get hurt. There is a bigger value at hand. (and yes, you may get some who do not understand and are mean, but they will outweigh those who gain so much by your very personal request.)

Cheers…Amanda van der Gulik…Excited Life Enthusiast! ;o)

P.S. Have you ever needed to ask for help but just didn’t know how to or even worse, felt you didn’t deserve it? Yup, that’s how I felt but I’m learning to overcome my ego and just ask knowing that in the asking is the giving! Let me know in the comments below what your own experiences have been with both asking and helping. Which one felt better?

P. P. S. Did you find this article helpful? If so, then please help me empower more kids, teens and their families by leaving me your own comments below and clicking the ‘like’ button and ‘sharing’ it with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. Thank-you for helping me empower more Healthy Wealth Mentality kiddos. We need them! 😀

“Together we can raise kids and teens who are money savvy and get to follow their dreams because they know how to handle and value their money…and not come back crawling home to mom and dad to get them out of financial trouble!”