235 | Think Asking for Help Is Weak? Here’s Why That Belief Is Holding Back Your Resilience and Trauma Recovery

Show Notes:

What if one of the bravest things you could do in your recovery isn’t fighting alone—but simply asking for help?

Many survivors of injury or trauma feel ashamed or hesitant to ask for support, believing it’s a burden or a sign of weakness. In this powerful episode, Michael challenges that harmful narrative and offers a compassionate roadmap for shifting how we view and receive help.

Takeaways:

• Discover the mindset shift that transforms asking for help into a courageous act of connection.
• Learn practical tips to ask for support clearly and confidently—from your closest inner circle.
• Understand why accepting help can be a gift not just to you, but to the person offering it.

Take a deep breath in and unlock a new, empowering perspective on support that can accelerate your healing and make your recovery journey less isolating.

Transcript:  In this episode, you’ll discover one of the bravest things you can do during your recovery.

Hey there, it’s Michael. Welcome to Whole again. A show about helping survivors of physical injury and trauma reclaim their strength and resilience. Through the wisdom of Kazuki, one of my favorite books is The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, and it was turned into a short animated film, I believe in 2022.

And there’s a scene when the boy asked the horse, what’s the bravest thing? The horse is done or the bravest thing that he said, and the horse says, simply help. And when you ask for help, it’s an action. It says, I’m not quitting. And in today’s episode, you’ll discover how to ask for help and how to accept help as you go through your recovery from injury, illness, or trauma.

Here on whole, again, we use the Japanese art farm and philosophy known as Kintsugi as a metaphor. It teaches us that when things break, as we might, we can be put back together. Our scar lines can be filled with gold or highlighted in gold. But the thing is, we can’t mend or heal on our own. Even with Kasu, there are multiple hands that are part of the repair process.

It’s communal, not solo. So the beauty of the gold that highlights the scars, well, it needed help to get there, and we need help as well to recover. After all, I believe in the saying together we go far. But we need to shift the narrative around asking for help. Shift it from a belief that it’s a sign of weakness, but rather it’s an invitation to connect.

It’s a statement, much like that horse said in the book, that we’re not quitting now before my accident, that I call. I wasn’t great at asking for help. I bought into the narrative that asking for help was a sign of weakness. After all, we gotta pull ourselves up by the bootstraps and make it on our own, especially in America.

So I would rarely ask for help, but then. I had my accident, and even then, as I was at the lowest of my low points, I still didn’t want any help, even though I needed a ton of it. And I’d like to share a story. So I was at my third hospital. I was at the Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation in. A guy named Greg Duncan called, he was an executive at Pfizer, and the company that I was working for had a partnership with Pfizer.

Now I knew Greg and Greg knew me, but we didn’t know each other well. So when he called my hospital room, I was a little surprised that it was him. He called to share his concerns and to send some good energy my way, although I don’t think he actually talked in those terms. He also called to find out where we needed support as a family.

Keep in mind, our girls were under four years old at the time. Our youngest was seven months old. At the time of his call, we still didn’t have a lot of clarity. We didn’t know what path we were going down. We needed, I needed a ton of help. So when he asked, I told him, believe it or not, nah, we’re good. I don’t need help.

I didn’t wanna be a burden. I believe that myth that if you need help, you’re burdening someone else or you are weak. When I look back at that moment, I’m so grateful. I also think it’s really crazy how I was before my accident, but really grateful that he stayed on the line and said, listen, I’m not hanging up until you tell me at least one thing where we can support your family.

And I shared, well, we do need our lawn mode and we don’t really have a big lawn here, but it was getting a little bushy. So he sent over a crew that could mow our lawn. One less thing for my wife to do. And in that moment, there was a shift in my thinking that asking for help, or in this case receiving help wasn’t a sign of weakness, but really it was an act of connecting.

It was saying. I just need a little support because I’m not quitting. I’m gonna continue as I like to say. I’m gonna keep pedaling and that one call, that one phone call by Greg changed so much of my recovery. It was the shift I needed to stay in the discomfort initially. The discomfort that comes when we ask for help or when we receive help.

Or accept Help. Help. And I made a commitment to stay in that discomfort until it became more comfortable. Now, today, which happens to be over 20 years ago, that I had that call with Greg, I’m much better at asking for help. In fact, I asked my whole community, the people who received my Ripple effect newsletter each week for a little help as I serve as Medical Sherpa, along with my sister to my dad, who is going through his recovery.

On his way to feeling whole again. He had an outpatient surgery that turned into an inpatient surgery with complications and a nine one one call and the emergency room. And as I record this, he’s still in the hospital, so the decision to be by his side and act as a medical sherpa, if you will, where his recovery was easy because.

It aligns with our values and our first principles as a family, but still it comes at a professional cost because I’ve worked on the latest update to our Pause, breathe, reflect app with something we call Microdose eq. For everyone who is on team iPhone to help them reclaim their power, reclaim their time.

Reduce their screen time so they have more time for other things. It works by blocking, distracting apps and websites so you can retain your focus and attention on things that matter most to you. So. I can’t be in a position to really broadcast this out, even though I’m talking about it right now, but I didn’t have, I don’t have the bandwidth to promote it like I thought I would before my dad’s complication.

So I asked my community for some help, and I wanna share with you in this episode ways that you can ask for help and also be okay with receiving help. Let’s take that one first. This is a bit of a mindset shift. We know that we love helping other people, at least I think you’re the type of person that would like to help other people.

It makes us feel good, right? It’s a way of connecting with that other person, and we don’t judge that other person. We don’t call our friend or our family member weak or less than, or a loser or anything else. We’re there to support them. And we help them and we can see the impact of our help. And that is a nice, warm fuzzy.

So when someone, for example, like Greg did to me back all those years ago, when they come to you and ask, how can I help you? I wanna help. And we say, nah, we’re good. We deny them that feeling that we feel when we can help other people. So when someone comes to you and says, I wanna help. Just know that you’re providing them a warm fuzzy that will have a positive impact on you as well as them.

Now, in terms of asking for help, my recommendation is to start with your inner circle so you can actually draw a little circle, and in this little circle you can place those closest to you. It could be your family members. It could be a really close colleague, it could be friends. It could be part of your medical team.

In that circle, it’s the most intimate connections you have, and you can draw circles around that inner circle. And as you go out, as these circles expand. There’s less of a connection, therefore there’s less trust. But you get an idea of who’s around you, all the different people that you could potentially ask for help.

But let’s start with your inner circle. People that you feel there’s trust, there you feel safe with, and then write down just one ask that you would have for each of those people. Now in your inner. It’s a limited number, so we’re probably talking about 2, 3, 4, 5, maybe 10 people. So what is something they could do that can offer you support and to add to this tip, try to be as specific as possible with your ask.

Often people think that other people will notice when they need help. That’s not the case. Or when we ask for help, it’s too generic so people don’t know what to do with it. So you select the people that you can go to right off the bat and try to be as specific as you can with them. Here’s tip number two.

There’s no need to say, sorry. There’s no need to make this a transaction of, you’ll scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. Just ask for help without saying sorry. So we don’t say, I’m so sorry to bug you. I’m so sorry to burden you, but can you help me with X, Y, or Z? Instead, you can say, I need a little support right now.

Can you help me with X, Y, and z? Of course, as I just mentioned, we want to avoid making this into a transaction, like can you help me here and I will help you as soon as I get better. Do this. Just come out with the people you’ve already identified with a very specific request with no sorrys and know I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine.

Here’s the third tip. Try to stay off of email or text messaging when you ask for help, and I know it might feel a little bit easier to ask if you’re not face to face with someone or at least on the phone with them because there’s a risk, right? When we ask for help, we put ourselves out there and there’s always the possibility that the other person will tell us no, so it feels safer.

To do it via text. But here’s the thing, if you really want someone to say yes, it’s much easier for them to say no when they get the email or text. So do it in person. If you can do it in person or at least do it via the phone, and if need be, you can use text as a tertiary option, a third option, but try to be direct.

Make the connection with the person. As Greg did with me, it was through a phone call this week. Try these tips out you. Your recovery or in other aspects of your personal life and even your professional life. But there’s one thing I should stress. They don’t work if we still hold tightly. The belief that asking for help is a sign of weakness, and we get to reframe that story, which is the focus of Friday’s episode once we.

Believing, asking for help is a sign of weakness. Two, it’s the bravest thing we can do. Then those tips work really well, and you bring together a whole bunch of people who can help you feel whole again.

As always, thanks for being here. In this episode we talked about. Asking for help and how essential it is and how brave it can be as we go through our recovery. You can start by identifying those people who are closest to you and ask very specifically for their assistance. And when you ask for help, you don’t have to say sorry, but it’s helpful to ask in person or at least over the phone.

Again, thank you for being here. Thank you for being part of our community and being a fellow survivor. I. Remember to celebrate your scars as golden symbols of your strength and resilience,

and if you wish to learn more about creating beautiful ripples and how to prevent. A bad moment from turning into a bad day. Please visit my website, Michael O’Brien schiff.com and sign up for my newsletter called The Ripple Effect. And join us each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday here at Whole Again, and discover how you can heal, grow, and become more resilient.

And celebrate our scars as golden symbols of strength and resilience. Until then, remember, you can always come back to your breath. You’ve got this and we’ve got you.