Look For The Helpers
It’s a dark and dreary Monday here outside DC, which fits my dark and dreary mood coming off of a few weeks of mayhem in my chosen city. Here are some snippets of conversations I’ve had over the past few weeks - at my son’s “Blue and Gold” banquet celebrating his transition from Cub Scouts to normal Scouts, while walking the dog, having drinks with a childhood friend, during my other son’s fencing class:
“I finally bought a ticket home for me and my kids because we didn’t know what else to do [after both parents were laid off from USAID]. We’re living in a studio apartment in the backyard of a former colleague while my husband tries to navigate how he’s getting home.”
“I haven’t slept in 2 months, I’m constantly worried about when I’m going to get fired.”
“I’m the source of my family’s health insurance, but my job will be in trouble in funding for special education gets cut.”
“I’ve been doing this work for 20 years. I don’t know how to do anything else. My whole field is gone.”
“I had to lay off my whole team. I am doing my best to try to find them something else, but I don’t even know what I’m going to do when I eventually get laid off.”
“I saw the RIF plan, and I’m definitely on the list getting cut. But I don’t know when. So I go to work everyday, but who knows which day will be my last.”
This is not a political post - will leave that for my friends at Politico (“who knew that my job would be the stable one?” said a friend whose spouse is in a science-based government agency). But these conversations have pushed my empathy into overdrive, surrounding a common human need: to help.
I think a lot about the fears that drive us - how we’re wired to survive. Our brains are coded to sense critical threats: threats they may mean losing status / position, losing connection to the group, losing expertise, losing livelihood - because any of these might have meant death 15,000 years ago when we were evading lions on the prairie. Yet in the modern world, this has translated to something altogether different: not being smart enough, not being successful enough, not hitting our goals, not fitting the culture, not being connected.
But I often forget that behind those fears is a truly powerful counterforce: the force for connection. The force that drives us to seek alliances, to collaborate, to care for others, to love, and above all - to help.
When I was diagnosed with cancer in 2022, I learned quickly how much people want to help and want to contribute to taking away your pain. But it’s hard in this world to figure out how to do that - for a few key reasons.
1/ We’re Afraid to Ask for Help.
And here’s where our fears come back in to play. Admitting we need help is inviting danger into your tent: others might see you as weak, which could destabilize your standing in the tribe. Asking for help is showing your vulnerable underbelly - someone could take advantage of it.
Asking someone for help opens up a realm of potential bad consequences:
They could realize I’m not good enough
They could see all my messiness and judge me
They could tell me no, showing me that they don’t like me
They could realize I can’t do things for myself
They could think I’m helpless
They might get it wrong - and I might lose control
Our own over-empathizing can even get in the way - they’re so busy, they have their own lives, they don’t have the time to help me.
But there’s a funny paradox inherent in this fear of asking for help. We are so afraid of the judgment of others, yet as Brene Brown says, “When you can’t accept and ask for help without self-judgment, then when you offer other people help, you are always doing so with judgment.”
My favorite part of this concept is actually the implied selfishness. When you offer help because you know you’ll want to accept help one day, that is vulnerability. We’re taught that the quid pro quo is wrong and maybe even devalues the offer. And yet, it is exactly that selfishness that creates a sustainable ecosystem of help.
2/ We’re Really Bad at Offering Help.
When people are going through a hard time, as much as we want to offer help, it’s often difficult to understand how to do it. In most cases, when people are confronted with another’s hardships, they tend to either avoid the conversation out of a fear of not knowing what to say or saying the wrong thing, or else ask, “How can I help?” The problem with asking “how can I help?” is the flip side of the fear of asking for help: it puts the burden on the person you’re asking. Depending on their situation, they might be so overwhelmed they don’t know what help to ask for, or they might be afraid to ask for too much, or they might not be sure what help you could reasonably provide.
But even when we do offer something concrete, people often mess it up. We default to:
The help that’s the easiest to provide, or reflects something we want to do already (see also: baking baguettes for my neighbor, because I want to bake more baguettes)
Help that makes us look good - the public donation, the visible gift
Support that reflects what we would want, as opposed to what someone else would want.
So What Can I Do Instead?
I’m so glad you asked! I have a few easy steps everyone can follow, whichever situation you’re in. And these work in any situation - at work, in your community, and even at school.
1/ Remind Yourself: People Want to Help
As this research from Stanford shows, humans are wired to be helpers. It’s literally in our brains: neuroscience has shown that helping others increases our oxytocin and dopamine, two of the “feel good” hormones that control our moods and emotions. Acts of kindness can rewire our brain and alleviate anxiety and depression.
Over dinner tonight, we had this conversation with my middle schooler about asking for help from his Spanish teacher: teachers go into education with the intention of helping others to learn, they want to be asked questions. And I tell myself every time I’m nervous about asking for help: really, I’m the one doing them a favor.
2/ Get REALLY Specific
As we’ve discussed, it’s hard to know how to help and what to do, and that lack of knowledge can be paralyzing. So if you’re in a rough spot, what you can do is give people really specific ideas to help.
When I was diagnosed with cancer, my sister sat down and helped me come up with a detailed, concrete list of things that people could do that were helpful. We ended up with about 30 different items, with a wide array of options - accompanying me to chemo for my local friends, care packages of dark chocolate and UberEats gift certificates for those further away. Making a list helped in two ways: I made sure that people were giving me things that were helpful, and it made it really easy for people to identify what fits within their resources to do.
This is also critical when managing up: what are the blockers that your manager can help you move? As a manager, my favorite employees were those that would tell me outright how I could help them.
3/ Offer Options
If you have someone in your life who’s going through a hard time - whether it’s a hard day, hard month, or a hard year - they may not give you a list that you can pick and choose from. However, this is a great example of how generative AI can help you!
Go to your favorite GenAI platform, and share the situation your friend is facing.
Ask the GenAI, “What are 5 options of things that I could do to help?”
Pick your favorite 3 options, and share with your friend: “Hey, I could do x, y, or z. Would any of those be helpful right now?”
By providing options, you’re taking away both the responsibility to come up with a method to help as well as the fear of asking for help.
This is a particularly critical skill for a manager to have. Too often, our employees are afraid to ask for help both for the reasons above as well as a fear of the professional repercussions. By preempting the conversation, you’re providing the safety for your employee to ask for what they need.
The reality is: life is full of highs and lows. At one time or another, we’ll all need help. And when you’re lingering in the doom and gloom alone, you’re denying someone else the opportunity for oxytocin and dopamine from helping you.
[Sidebar: I went looking for articles about Mr Roger’s famous quote to “Look for the helpers”, which inspired this blog post’s title, and came across this hot take in the Atlantic (paywall). The tl;dr version is that the advice to “look for the helpers” is meant for preschoolers and overly simplistic, and adults should be focused on identifying instead how they can be the helpers - and really how they can contribute to the systems which prevent the catastrophes in the first place. I agree completely - hence most of this blog post - and am also sitting with what that means for all of us from a systemic level. Food for thought for a later post!]