In 1991, Rick Astley, a British pop singer released the song Cry For Help. The song was number one on the Billboard Adult Contemporary charts and peaked at number seven on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. I heard this song on the radio a few weeks ago and the song really struck me, but particularly, five lines from that song really stood out: Why must we hide emotions Why must we never breakdown and cry All that I need is to cry for help Somebody please hear me cry for help All I can do is cry for help Those words are very profound when it comes to finding our opportunities in life. Think about the way we have all been conditioned more and more over time to just bottle everything up. Maybe even more so, think about how many times we’ve taken someone else's opportunities away by conditioning others to bottle everything up; to keep many of our deepest struggles to ourselves because we just don’t believe that anyone else cares. Unfortunately, many of us are as guilty of thinking nobody cares as we are projecting the exact same thoughts to others. I will be honest, that includes me. For a long time I would have been the first one to complain about a Facebook Post or Tweet that had what I referred to as “the familiar symptoms of whining.” It took a long time for me to come around from that way of thinking. The truth, I discovered, is that much of what I thought was that “familiar whining” was really just someone’s way of saying that they need help.
We often times are both part of the conditioning and the ones being conditioned to bottle so much up inside of us. The thing this limits more than anything is opportunity. We’ve already talked about the role that people play in finding opportunity and they play an equal role in diminishing opportunities from appearing if not careful. If you find yourself in this situation, bottling up things best not left inside, so consumed by emotional baggage and wondering when things are going to get going in the right direction, it’s time to cry for help. Open up, be vulnerable and above admit to yourself and the world around you that things are not exactly as they may seem on this hard outer shell you’ve created. The odds are that someone you know has been there too. They may be the key to your next opportunity in life. Conversely, you may be the key to their next opportunity. As we talked about earlier in the book, opportunity does not exist in solitude or singularity. “Who Am I that someone would want to help me?” “Don’t you know that people look to me to be strong, I can’t be asking for help.” These are just some of the thoughts that tend to flow through our heads on a frequent basis. Things are very rarely what they seem. Once upon a time we would have associated this as an issue for men much more so than women. From at least the 1950’s (and probably even long before that) up through the early part of the 2000’s there was a prevailing sentiment that men shouldn’t be and weren’t in touch with their emotions. “Real men don’t cry.” The perceived weakness of asking for help seems live within the eye of the beholder than the casual observer of any given situation. What stands out to me even more than the fact that we are often the ones to convince ourselves that we need to just suck it up, we almost never notice the person standing in plain sight, wondering if they need to offer support. The by-product of the way we are so timid and afraid of asking for help is that we’ve done the exact same thing with being willing to offer help. You might say that our lack of willingness to ask for help is impeding others opportunity. Think about a recent struggle, one where you likely could have asked for help but chose not to. You’ve probably heard a thousand times over about how everyone will struggle in life; the peaks and valleys analogy. Your struggles will make you stronger once you’ve overcome them and quite a bit has been written regarding that idea. The piece that seems to be missing is the opportunity that comes other peoples way when you seek out help during your struggle. Many times our stories create the greatest impact when we share them with someone asking for help, someone who needs strength and courage in a difficult time. Seeking out help from someone can create two opportunities at the exact same time. The first is an opportunity for someone to find that piece of encouragement, strength, belief in themselves or whatever they needed to face a challenge. The other opportunity is for the person providing that strength. Think of what simply allowing them to pour into you does for them. It could be the first time in a long time that this person realizes the true value in what they have to offer. It could be a chance for someone who has yearned for so long to be less introverted but never really knew where to begin. It could be the first time that someone got to truly experience the true joy of giving. Whatever the case, keeping your need for help bottled up inside might not only squander an opportunity for you, it might squander an opportunity for someone else at the same time.
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AuthorJeff Lahey Archives
January 2020
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