Asking for help
There’s a slow and steady shift in our global community towards the idea that it’s ok to ask for help, and nowhere is this more needed than in stoical, stiff-upper-lip Britain. Traditionally, we haven’t been good at getting support and guidance when we needed it. At the root of this is a toxic belief: that if we are good at something, we should be good at it without any support. Men are more impacted by this belief because of outdated ideas of masculinity that we’re often taught in childhood: you should be the strong, independent man who proves their worth by being resourceful and successful. But both women and men are affected by these old-fashioned ideas.
As soon as you step foot into the personal development world, you notice a completely different set of beliefs. People who are interested in escaping the old patterns and cycles of their lives, who want to develop a continual capacity for success and who seem to genuinely enjoy their lives, tend to know certain things about themselves. They know who they are, what they need, where they’re going and what they need to heal and leave behind. They have learned a wide range of strategies to tackle the challenge they face and to overcome them in creative ways that aren’t energetically draining.
They acquired all this knowledge and skill by dropping the belief that they are supposed to know everything without ever being told, or that they are meant to solve every problem alone. For some of us (and I am totally guilty of this myself), it’s a painful process to drop ego and pride and learn to ask for help.
Once you’ve accepted that help is a good thing, that it doesn’t make you a bad person or a failure to ask for help, it’s a matter of finding the right people for the job.
One of my major breakthroughs lately has been the discovery of Audible. Ever since I studied for my degree, I’ve struggled to read non-fiction. It just doesn’t stick. So finding a big collection of book that are actually read to me has been amazing. I train at the gym or walk along the seafront while I listen to every personal development book I can get my hands on. There is always more to learn!
So I was recently listening to a book called How to Be F#cking Awesome by Dan Meredith while I was racking up miles on the cross trainer. Now Dan is about as far from the Deep Coaching paradigm as it’s possible to be. He’s in-your-face, has looks for immediate practical solutions (perhaps at the expense of deeper understanding) and likes to swear about fifteen times in each paragraph. He also wrote his book in three and half days. If only I could manage this!
That day on the cross trainer I heard Dan say (I’m paraphrasing here): “If you’re a 22-year-old Life Coach, you can f#ck off. If I’m going to pay for a Life Coach, I expect him to be rich, well-dressed, with a gorgeous wife, happy kids and a lifestyle I’d kill for.”
Ok Dan, you’ve just told us a lot about your priorities in life! But aside from that, there’s an important point here: find the right kind of support for the changes that you want to make.
Sometimes I’m contacted by new clients and they’re looking at setting up a new business. One of the first things I say to them is, I’m not a business coach. I have supported a lot of people who were establishing new ventures and I work well with entrepreneurs, but there are coaches out there who specifically work with the practical steps in setting up a business. Brighton has lots of them. So if that is your only goal, that would be the place you would go.
Equally if you wanted to improve your relationship, or if you were specifically interested in working on your understanding and responses to love, intimacy and sex then there are professionals who have committed their lives to helping clients with that.
We coaches and therapists are people who have chosen this as a lifestyle because this is our calling. All of our experiences, our natural way of thinking, all the training we’ve had, has lead us to deliver one niche, one specific kind of learning. We are experts in helping you to understand something, or achieve something, or create something, or leave something behind. So make sure you find the right person for you.
Deep Coaching is my offering. I do all of the standard Life Coaching stuff (goal setting, achievements, confidence-building, transforming the shape of your life). But my niche is deep understanding. In my experience, the more deeply and fully we understand something, the easier and more gracefully we can choose what to do about it. I work with my clients to understand why they do the things they do, why their lives are the way they are and why they haven’t been able to make that change that they really want to make. From this deeper place, we set meaningful goals that are transformational on many levels. It makes for very creative, very powerful and wide-ranging work. In one session we might talk about limiting beliefs, in another we might talk about the hurts that you’re continuing to play out in your actions, words and choices, and in another session we might touch onto things that are spiritual, ritualistic or mythological.
I’d encourage you to consider the challenges in your life from this perspective: what do you need to learn, or to become better at, in order to change your situation? Think about skills and experience that might free up the areas of your life that feel stuck. Try to step back from your challenges and see them as obstacles that you will definitely overcome and begin breaking them down into chunks, steps or tasks. If you want a new job, look at the job descriptions of the kind of things you’d like to be doing and work out what you need to fill in your CV. If you want to improve your relationship or start a new one, be open to the possibility that you might need to learn new ways to be intimate, or vulnerable, or a better way to communicate with someone you care about.
We can never have too many skills, and every time you learn a new skill or improve an old one, you’re investing in a better future for yourself. Looking at it this way can make it easier to begin asking for the help you need.