Why is it so hard for us to ask for help?

Leanna Laskey McGrath  0:08  

Welcome to the executive coach for moms podcast where we support women who are attempting to find balance and joy, while simultaneously leading people at work and at home. I'm your host Leanna Laskey McGrath, former tech exec turned full time mom, recovering perfectionist and workaholic, and certified executive coach.

Leanna Laskey McGrath  0:30  

Hi, everyone, welcome back to the show. Thanks so much for being here. Hopefully, we are thawing out a little bit from the last week or so of freezing freezing cold, especially if you're in the Northeast like me, it's been a chilly one. So hopefully it's it's warming up by now, for many of us. If you tuned in last week, I talked about shoulding ourselves, and how we spend a lot of time thinking about what we should do, thinking about how we should be. And not that that's a good or a bad thing. Just interesting to notice. And so today, I want to take that a little step further because it was really ironic. After I recorded last week's episode, like right after I recorded it, I jumped into a counseling session with my therapist. And I actually had planned to talk with her about this podcast episode I listened to, because I listen to podcasts all the time. And one of my favorite podcasts is We Can Do Hard Things. And I listened to this episode where Amanda, there's three of them Glennon, Abby and Amanda and Amanda is me. She's an Enneagram type three, very type A high achiever. She's a lawyer, obviously, I'm not a lawyer, but she's a mom. But the way that she thinks and approaches things is very, I relate very much. And I think that many of my listeners here can relate as well. 

Leanna Laskey McGrath  2:16  

And so she talks about how she finds it so difficult to ask for help, because she expects herself to be a competent person, and self sufficient and independent, and asking for help would show vulnerability or mean something about her mean that she's not capable of that level of self sufficiency that she holds herself to. And furthermore, that inability to ask for help is kind of a blocker to true authentic connection. That's the summary of my takeaways. I will link the episode in the show notes and highly recommend giving it a listen. Because it was really helpful episode for me. Obviously, it impacted me because I talked about it in therapy, and I'm talking about it here on the podcast as well. 

Leanna Laskey McGrath  3:14  

So I thought more about this and talked to my therapist about it. And so we were raised to really value independence and self sufficiency. And these things were rewarded, right. Like when we did something independently, when we were a child, we were praised. We were rewarded, we learned that being competent, got us love and positive attention, often rewards and praise. And it also helped us to avoid negative attention and punishment that we might have seen other people getting, who were being more needy or less competent and less self sufficient. And I want to be clear that independence and self sufficiency are great qualities, there's nothing inherently wrong with them, they really are probably a large part of the formula that got us to where we wanted to be in our lives. We really need it to be independent and self sufficient in order for us to get to where we are in our careers. And in our lives today. And in our very black and white, all or nothing high achieving brains, that are very, very good at recognizing actions that lead to the results we want in our lives, our tendency is often to take it all the way to the extreme. So we want to be relentlessly self sufficient, and completely independent. And it means that we start to hold ourselves to that standard. And we continue through our actions over the course of our lives, reinforcing that part of ourselves. And then believing that we have to maintain that, we have to be completely self sufficient and independent in every way. And any deviation from that any need for someone else to help feels like a threat to our competence. And almost to our identity as an independent woman, our brain tends to perceive threats of any kind in the same way. So our brain is very good at identifying threats, but not very good at discerning them. So it thinks that like a lion trying to attack us is the same kind of threat as someone viewing us as incompetent. And it feels very, very scary and threatening for either of those things to happen to us. I mean, I've never been chased by a lion, but I'm guessing, probably pretty scary. 

Leanna Laskey McGrath  6:01  

But this is the reason why. If you've ever been with a partner, or had a friend that you were kind of leaning on as a high achiever, it can sometimes almost feel like resentment toward that person for needing them. And obviously, we know, it's not their fault. But it's like we're mad at ourselves for needing somebody else because we believe that that goes against who we are or who we should be. And then we feel almost resentful toward that person. So I think there's a cost to it, there's a very real cost to this independence and self sufficiency and holding ourselves to that expectation. I think that the cost is connection to other people that true authentic connection. And it's hard to imagine that the very thing that we take so much pride in, that is such a huge part of our identities, actually does have a cost. And that's a really hard and painful realization. And it's also a hard and painful realization, whenever we recognize that we actually do need help sometimes. I think when we have children, we need people a lot more than whenever we were on our own. And sometimes that can be really, really hard for us to admit or acknowledge that we can't do it all by ourselves that we need help sometimes. But it actually blocks our connection to other people. 

Leanna Laskey McGrath  7:39  

What Amanda talked about in the podcast episode was that she shared a story about how a friend was in need, her husband was having this scary heart surgery out of state. And her friend went to different people and said, Here's what I need from you. And she was very specific. And she said that her friend and her husband are both like Type AAA plus. And so she kind of organized everything and said she needed these things from other people. And Amanda talked about her experience in that as the helper, she talks about how she did not feel burdened by it. Like we always tend to expect other people will feel if we ask them for help, she actually felt connected to this person, more connected than she ever had before. She felt like she had been invited into this sacred space. And she described it as like, basically like the stuff that life is made of like the good stuff, you know, being able to be there for another person, and support them. And just really being invited into that space was really an honor for her. And it was an interesting way to think about it. Because I don't know, anytime I think about asking someone for help. Number one, I don't want to burden them. And number two, I don't want them to think that I can't do it myself. And I don't want to believe that I can't do it myself. It's very, very hard. I have a very, very hard time asking for help. And I know that's true for many of my clients as well.

Leanna Laskey McGrath  9:22  

But what we're doing is we're robbing people of that opportunity to be connected to us and to kind of fulfill that sacred duty of helping other people that makes us feel good. I mean, we know that we feel so good when we help somebody else. And so asking for help gives another person an opportunity to have that same kind of experience. 

Leanna Laskey McGrath  9:48  

So I mentioned connection. And anytime I think about vulnerability, authenticity connection, I think of Brene Brown. If you're not a fan of Brene Brown, I highly recommend all of her work her books, her podcasts. And she was on the Tim Ferriss show a while back. And there's a great one minute YouTube clip that I'm going to paraphrase, but definitely recommend going and checking it out where she talks about what is midlife. And she describes it as that when we are children growing up in this world, we devise survival strategies for navigating the world. And, you know, we go through traumas, big T, little T traumas. And so we put on this armor to protect us and keep us safe. And that gets us to a certain point, and at some point in midlife, and midlife can be defined by any number, I don't think it's a specific number, but somewhere in the middle of our lives, we recognize that the armor is too heavy, and that it's not actually protecting us any more that we don't need it in the same way that we did when we were kids and when we were younger, but instead of protecting us, it's actually keeping us from being seen and known by others. And so she describes midlife not as a crisis, but as a slow, brutal unraveling of this armor that we eventually need to shed if we want to live a life, a wholehearted life, she talks about a lot in her books, a life where we are true to ourselves and connected to other people. And she says that everything that we thought protected us with that armor is actually keeping us from being the partners, the parents and the people that we want to be.

Leanna Laskey McGrath  11:55  

That clip really hits hard for me. And I think it relates to what I'm talking about here in terms of asking for help and having that self identity of being independent, and not needing anyone. And again, it's I think it's okay for us to recognize that something that worked in the past, maybe doesn't work in the same way anymore for us. Marshall Goldsmith has a book called What Got You Here Won't Get You There. And I think that it's important for us to not feel tethered to our old ways of being and our old ways of doing things just because they worked. Just because they worked at one stage in our lives, doesn't mean that they're going to work forever. We know this in our companies just because and whenever we are, if we've scaled a company, you know that whenever it's a smaller company, you need different tactics and strategies to employ, than you do at the larger stages. And when you get to be a very large company, it's very different. It did work at a certain point, but it doesn't necessarily work it at a later point in the company's growth. And I think similar to our lives and our human experiences, something that worked for us at one point in our lives isn't going to work for us in the future. 

Leanna Laskey McGrath  13:28  

And I think that there's a process of deciding do I want to shed that completely. Or maybe just like put it down for a little bit, my therapist talks a lot about putting it down and knowing that it's there, and we can always come back to it. But I think of it as like evolving, evolving how we use that skill. I think that the skills needed to be self sufficient and independent and not need someone else's help are transferable skills that we can use. But we might just decide to employ them differently, and to reevaluate that part of our identity. Because holding on to that, and needing to be seen as self sufficient, has a cost that has a real cost where we are blocking our connection from other people. And we're not allowing ourselves to be seen, and we're not allowing other people in to our worlds. 

Leanna Laskey McGrath  14:26  

And so this is something that I personally struggle with. And I know so many of us do. I would love to hear from you. If you do I think some of the questions that I've been pondering since I talked about this last week in counseling is like why does it feel so threatening and scary to need another person to ask for help? And I know on some level what that answer is, but I think digging deeper into that and then what kind of person do I want to be if I'm not unwaveringly self sufficient if I recognize that I need to not only need to, but also want to lean on other people and connect with other people and kind of bring them into my world to help me when I need help too rather than only being willing to help somebody else without allowing them to help me.

Leanna Laskey McGrath  15:29  

So those are some of the things that I'm working on. Obviously, life's a journey and our personal growth and development is a journey. It's not linear. And there's always something new to be working on. So this is what I'm working on right now. Hope that resonates with you. I'd love to hear if it did, and I hope you all have a great week. Thank you so much for tuning in. Bye.

Leanna Laskey McGrath  16:00  

Thanks so much for tuning in to the executive coach for moms podcast. Please like, subscribe or follow the show so you'll be notified when the next episode is available. I hope you'll join me again next time. Take care.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai