Help!

If you resist asking for help, you'll ask in ways that make people resistant to helping.

Many of us are durable to this inner resistance we feel when someone who is first learning to ask for help starts asking in ways that aren't very pleasant or palatable, and we can give help without being reactive to the method. Some methods are harder than others to overcome.

For example, your friend who is whiny and apologetic when she needs help.
"I'm soooo sorry for asking I wish I didn't have to but I really really really need your help can you please xyz today?"

This way of asking for help may tick off parts of you that feel extraction and demand from someone else's assertion of their great need. But you are durable to this and you overcome the part of you resistant to helping, because you desire to help, you desire to serve your friend, and you know that it's hard for her to EVER ask for help. You're just proud she did it at all!

But what about the person who comes to you and says
"Why do you never do the dishes?"

This way of asking for help is built of the assumption that help is not available and also love is not available and the best I can hope for is getting an apology or some accountability from this person about how there's never any help or love for me here. It's VERY hard to overcome the resistance to this method of asking for help.

"I need someone to clean this kitchen or I am going to freak out!"

This way of asking for help has waited for an emergency and then rules with the threat of the emergency. Maybe you can overcome your resistance, maybe you're motivated by your fear of this threat, maybe the thing will get done, but have you been offered an opportunity to generously give?

When we think asking for help is a burden on others, we present it as a burden on others, creating in their systems the resistance we fear.

What are the strategies of recruiting help and service that don't lean on our personal depletion, our explosive overwhelm, our assumptions that others don't want to help? What are the ways of ease and harmony, the ways that create interdependent flow rather than resistance?

Find out tomorrow on the Village Principles Masterclass.