I was brought up in a family that espoused independence and valued self-reliance.
From a young age, I heard things like,
“Don’t rely on others,”
“The world doesn’t owe you a living”,
“God helps those who help themselves” (Slightly odd, because we were not a spiritual / religious family).
I rarely accepted help and even more rarely asked for it.
My worldview was that nobody was going to “save” me. I had to figure out where to go and beat my own path.
It certainly didn’t help that social skills weren’t my strong suit. Yet, I didn’t feel that much of a loss because I thought that I didn’t need help anyway.
I never thought that this was out of the ordinary.
The trouble with having such a mindset is that you start to question the motives of people who may genuinely want to help - not out of selfish desire or personal gain, but just to be helpful.
I certainly had these thoughts. If I didn’t want to help others, why would someone else want to help me?
Even today, this question enters my mind.
I am skeptical of others and their intentions, and I see extending a helping hand as having the effect of disabling the other person’s resilience, i.e. helping others makes them / keeps them weak.
Troublingly, this fed a fear of weakness. I feared that accepting help would make me weaker or cause others to think that I am weak.
Through reading a number of books and my involvement and participation in a Men’s Group (which I talked about in an earlier post), I started working through the latter issue.
The former issue - that of my fear that accepting help would make me weaker - is still an issue. As I think on it, I find that I don’t apply this as much to other people now, but I still apply it to myself.
It’s something I definitely have to work through because it’s starting to become problematic, especially in my current journey to validating and launching an online workshop - currently aimed at fellow introvert teachers / trainers who are new to the craft.
I will talk to someone who already has a sizeable online community, who is also an introvert, and who has previously offered to help promote useful content to his community.
I don’t know how it will go, but let’s try. One step at a time.
