Why do such amazing things happen when we ask for help?
Something powerful happens when you ask for help.
What I’ve seen, over all the years I’ve been with people in the first few days after they’ve asked for help – help sorting out their financial lives, and their lives in general – is that asking for help is often a clear turning point.
Something shifts. Something opens up. The ice-blocked rivers of their life crack and start to flow again.
Often this is about the specifics of what the request for help entails. They ask for help with planning out their financial future, we give them some systems they can follow. It’s pretty clear cut.
But often it has nothing to do with the specifics of the request.
You ask for help with your money, and your kid’s grades start improving. You ask for help with your finances, and your parents become oddly encouraging of everything you do. You ask for help, and at work, your boss moves you over to a role that’s a lot less stressful.
There’s something in the asking itself. There’s a power there that’s able to come through.
If I had to speculate, I think there’s power in getting specific about what you need. When you do that – when you boil your overwhelm and anxiety down into a few key requests, it creates an openness around those specific areas, and it creates an invitation for the universe to directly engage in those areas.
I think if you cry out to the universe, “I am just generally overwhelmed right now”, the universe doesn’t really know what to do with that.
The other important thing that happens, I reckon, is that you adopt a posture of receiving.
There’s a humility required when you ask for help. You are acknowledging that there’s a part of your life that you can’t manage alone. And you are acknowledging that you are willing to receive help right now.
You might think that you’re always willing to receive help, but you probably aren’t. We often need to just get through things on our own. That requires us to be tough. It requires a certain rigidity.
And that’s great for those times when you can’t ask for help. When you need to just do it on your own.
But often you don’t need to do it on your own. And unless you have asked for help – unless you have softened into a psychic posture consistent with receiving – then I don’t think anything is going to come.
And so when we ask for help with specific things, there’s a real power in it. We’re empowering life around us, and we’re readying ourselves to receive.
So that’s an interesting question then, isn’t it?
Are you able and ready to receive help? What exactly do you need help with?
Name it. Ask for it.
You might be surprised at what happens.
DB