July 2022
Listen to hear:
I have noticed that I really struggle to ask for help? Is that an HFA thing? And how do I do that more?
Welcome to the fifth episode of Ask Nancy Jane. These episodes are designed to answer the questions you've submitted either via email or on the as Nancy Jane page in the portal, you can listen to these episodes any time, they're meant to be a place to get that extra support or insight if you need it. All of these episodes are released on the last Tuesday of every month, I'm gonna try to make it no more than 10 to 15 minutes each month, and I'll answer up to four questions, so as a reminder, if you have questions, you can submit them to Questions@selfloyaltyschool.com, or head over to the as Nancy Jane page in the student portal, and I will answer the questions next month in the As Nancy Jane episode. So this month, I only have one question, which is, Nancy, I've noticed that I really struggle to ask for help. Is that an HF thing? And how do I do it more?
Okay, I hear you. Yes, it is an HFA thing.
And it's a human thing as well, none of us wanna really ask for help, none of us want to admit were weak and can't handle it on our own, but with Ha, it is an even stronger tendency 'cause we really like to push beyond our anxiety and over-function, and when we are over-functioning... The last thing we want to do is ask for help. So in Self Loyalty school, I often talk about when we go over the cliff edge over into where a high-functioning anxiety is really taking off or headed down that rabbit hole when we get there, that sometimes it makes it even harder to pull back and ask for help, the goal is to ask for help before we get to the edge of the rabbit hole, because once we go down the rabbit hole, it's even harder to ask for help, but it doesn't matter when you do it before the rabbit hole after the ravine... The goal is always to ask for help is always beneficial, to ask for help, and our Monger will tell us that that help is weakness, that's part of the problem, or Monger comes in there to tell us I...
You're asking for help, Help is weakness, you need to be strong, you can figure it out, but in reality, help is an act of self late, another reason. We don't wanna ask for help, or I don't wanna ask for help. I should say I can own it, is no one will do it as good as we will, that's kind of a mantra that we have, no one will do it as good as me, so I think about... And I've talked about this in some stories within Self Loyalty school, but when my family comes into town twice a year to visit at my mom's house, I am often in this spot of not wanting to ask for help, and it is something over the years that I have really tried to get better at and have greatly improved in asking for help, I asked my cousins for help and cooking, I ask my brother for help in cleaning up, I really have tried to lean into that idea of asking for help. But one of the reasons it took so long for me to do that was in addition to being able to ask for help in fighting my Monger message about strength and not being strong enough, I also had to fight my perfectionism, that if I ask someone for help they won't do it as well as I do it, so I needed to be able to let go of the fact that, yeah, when my brother cleans up, it's not gonna be as good as when I clean up.
When my cousin cooks a meal, it's not gonna be as organized as when I come... That's okay. But that's the second prong of this, it's not just, Oh, how do I ask for help? And actually ask for help. It's also a little bit of self-soothing and how do I let it go when it's not gonna be done the way I want it to be done, which is often the case when we ask for help, we're also having to let go of the fact that people aren't going to do it the way we wanted to do it. This happens all the time, and parental relationships and specifically between men and women, in the idea that the women will have a specific way, they want the situation to go down, they wanna have a specific way that do bedtime. They have a specific way, they do bathymetric, etcetera. And when the dad does the bedtime and bath time, it goes very differently, and so I have interacted with a lot of clients and in a lot of friends who have gone through this who have really struggled, because then what happens is the mom takes it back, they take back everything and they won't ask for help because they're like, No, no, no, it needs to be this way, this way, this way, they become rigid in their rules, and so it's about being able to loosen up that rigidity in addition to asking for help.
So again, it's not so much about the asking for the help, it's about how am I practicing supplant, How am I regulating my own nervous system, how am I calming down my own anxiety to be able to ask for help, knowing that help will ultimately also contribute to decreasing my anxiety and building myself loyalty, so it is about... Again, as I'm always gonna say, for me, it's been a big part of this has been practicing, as in this example that I give of going to my family's gatherings, it's about me acknowledging my frustration that I can't do everything, and my uncomfortable-ness that it isn't always gonna look the way I want it to, and letting go of those expectations so I can acknowledge that, yeah, this makes me uncomfortable to ask for help, and that's Okay. You can own that. It makes you uncomfortable.
It's actually even better when we own that asking for help makes us uncomfortable, it's making us uncomfortable, and doing it anyway is the key, and the part about the doing it anyway is to super make sure that we support ourselves and that support comes from Ask. So I'm acknowledging what I'm doing, I'm acknowledging that it's uncomfortable, acknowledging my feelings of disappointment and frustration, I'm gonna slow down and get into my body, so I'm gonna do a full body movement and I do a little wiggle just to make sure I'm in my body, and then key, kindly pull back to see the big picture, the big picture here for me, and this is one I will say to myself over and over and over again when it comes to this specific example of the family gathering is what is more important to me is being calm and spending time with family, those are my priorities, it isn't about how fancy the meal is, or how home-cooked it is, or how well it's laid out, it is about being able to spend time with my family and be as calm as possible, and that will only come if I'm asking for help.
So that's the power of asking for help. The power of having your own back and being able to talk yourself through that, now it may come that... Let's say your husband is putting the kids down and he's doing it the bath time, not the way you would do it, then it's being able to pull back and say, Okay, is that okay? Is there something he's missing that I need to make sure he adds in
Or daddy... Bath time is gonna be different than Mom abate time, and that's okay. So it's kind of being honest about what is really clear here, what is really important here, and do I need to communicate my needs about what is really important here? Or is there something I can let go? So I know for me, it is really important that we... So for me, when it comes to the family gatherings, there was nothing really important that I needed to make sure anyone knew 'cause none of it mattered, we were gathering together, we were eating food, I really had to recognize how much I was holding on to some rules that were not serving anyone, they weren't making the meal any better, they weren't doing anything, all they were doing was me thinking they were coming, my anxiety because I was in that unhealthy coping skill of over-functioning, and so my family comes, I'm nervous. Full of anxiety, I over-function. But now what happens, my family comes, I get nervous, I ask for help. And when I ask for help, I can recognize, wait a minute, all this stuff that I'm anxious about doesn't really matter, what matters is spending time with my family, but I wait, my family makes me a little anxious, so before I cope with that anxiety by working my fingers to the bone in the kitchen, now I recognize, Oh wait, if I'm not doing that unhealthy coping mechanism, what coping mechanism do I need to add in and maybe ask, it may be taking regular breaks, it may be not spending quite as much time with my family, in such long windows of compressed time, but instead seeing them for a little bit throughout their visit, there's a lot of different ways to handle that anxiety, but if I'm not honest, that the anxiety is there because I'm so busy over-functioning that I can't really calm the anxiety.
So the goal when asking for help is being able to recognize that you need help, ask for help, and also decrease your expectations for how that help is going to go down, all of those activities require a version of sub-multi... All of those activities require practicing ask and listening for the biggest fan. This challenge with asking for help is one of the reasons I crafted Self Loyalty school to be the way I did in the sense of you are asking for help only through passive means, you're only asking for help through email. Originally, I was gonna do a Q and A session once a month, and then I recognize a people with HF don't wanna come to a Q and A session usually and ask for help in front of everyone, they wanna have some anonymity. And so that's the power of being able to do the as Nancy Janes in the portal or via the email, because it's a way to do it passively. Also, it's... I regularly remind you of it, I'm regularly reminding you every other episode that you can reach out and ask for questions because we need to be reminded because we don't think of it, we just want to solve it ourselves, we're gonna figure it out, but you're paying for this service. You're paying for a school. And so in school, we have questions, so if you are holding yourself back from asking questions and asking for help, I really encourage you to lean into that, to lean into the power of getting clarity and asking for questions, and recognizing if you aren't asking questions and you have them, That is 100% the Monger keeping you from getting as much as you can out of Self Loyalty School.
Okay, that's it. I hope you have a wonderful month. If you have any questions, please reach out via Questions@selfloyaltyschool.com or head over to the portal and fill out the As Nancy Jane questions and I will answer them in the next Q and A lesson. Take care