My one New Year’s Resolution for 2014 is pretty simple: have more good days.
I don’t have bad days on a regular basis, but I don’t necessarily have good days either. The days where I go to bed feeling accomplished, proud, and balanced are few and far between. I want to celebrate this year by enjoying as many days as I can – even when it feels like mission impossible.
So each week, I’ll be sharing one of 52 Ways to have a Good Day – or maybe even a great one. Read the rest of the series here.
#5: Ask for Help
Humans are proud beings. We pride ourselves on being smart enough, fast enough, and simply able to do things without asking for (or needing) assistance. Yet when we get really desperate – when we’re totally overwhelmed, out of money, unable to feed our pets or children, about to lose our house or clueless on what to do next – we have to ask for help in order to survive.
So it makes me wonder if we would ask for help before we got to this point, would we ever have to be that desperate?
My sincere hope is that we wouldn’t.
Fortunately, that’s the extreme consequence of not asking for help and most people (myself included) are lucky enough to not even get close to that. Even so, asking for help has never come naturally for me. I’m independent, proud and stubborn so asking for a helping hand feels like it’s the most awkward moment in my life – even for the smallest of things. Ask Nathan and I guarantee he’ll back me up 110% because it’s still a struggle for us to this day.
That being said, I have let go of some of my hang-ups when it comes to asking for help. I had to. In order to move forward with my life in the direction that I wanted it to go, I absolutely had to let go. Otherwise our business wouldn’t have expanded the way it has, Nathan and I wouldn’t be self-employed, and we wouldn’t own a house with an acre of land. And having these things taught me that the awkward moment when I’m stumbling over my words and quietly asking for help is worth it.
These all may be big picture things, but these big picture things are the hardest things. Being able to ask for assistance with the hardest things makes those little, small favors 10x easier to get help with. So when my to-do list gets a little long, or I’m just not feeling the day, or I’m not sure how to do something right away – I ask.
Maybe not every time because my stubbornness still prevails, but a lot of the time. And when I do ask, it makes my day better. Knowing I have family and friends I can rely on to help me when I’m stuck or just need an extra hand makes my life easier to manage. Even more so, it can turn what would be a rotten day into a amazing day.
do you struggle with asking for help like I do?