When we turn up to support someone, we are offering something – an ear, faith, knowledge, a process, an experience of acceptance and worth, skills, hope. Whatever it is we want to be intentional and do our wholehearted best for the other person.
But to fully embrace what we offer we also need to be able to receive it. To accept someone’s desire to support us, to pay attention to what it feels like to be truly heard, to receive someone’s goodwill and positive feedback with grace.
We want to be familiar with the different reactions we may have and not just on the good days when it felt good to receive the support. We need to lean into the discomfort too. When the help isn’t wanted, we’re not ready or it’s not what we hoped to hear. When it’s clumsily delivered or misses the mark.
And we need to be willing to go out of our comfort zones because we ask others to go out of theirs every day we show up to help. To risk failing, to risk succeeding. To face the unknown, to see ourselves and our potential with fresh eyes, to look for our blindspots and biases, reflexes and defences.
We need to embrace the whole two-way process or we’re only doing half of our work. We need to be able to ask for what we need because we want the people we support to be able to do that too. And that, quite possibly, is far harder than learning a new technique or strategy.
Helen Mentha 