Asking for help is a sign of strength - not weakness

There is nothing harder than taking your own advice. At the start of the year, I wrote a story on the importance of authenticity and being yourself. And, while I know the theory, the proof came when I had to put it into practice. On Monday 21st?February I had to sign off sick for a few weeks.

I didn’t do it light-heartedly. It’s not something I’ve ever done before. But I had to accept that it needed to happen. And this was in no small part the result of talking it through with my team, who helped me realise that the only person who was being hard on me, was me.

I remember worrying about telling my manager. I remember feeling like this somehow made me weak. Yet, if I was giving advice to someone else who felt how I felt, I would have told them to be kind to themselves. And every single person I spoke to at L&G, helped me get back to that place of kindness.?

This is why talking is so important. We can know the theory. We can understand it on an intellectual level. But we are often too overwhelmed by our emotions to be able to put it into practice in our own lives. This isn’t some personal failing. It's because we are human, and we often judge ourselves more harshly than anyone else ever will.?

"In order to get up, the first thing to do is admit that we are down. "

The first few days were the hardest. And, as much as I was terrified of going through the motions of telling people, every single person asked if there was something they could do. Nobody judged. And it was at this point that I decided to follow my own advice and be truly open about everything. I didn’t default to my standard “I am fine” response. I started being open and saying, “I am not ok. But I will be in time.” And every single person gave me something different:

• My therapist, who I got through our Employee Assistance Programme, is helping me accept that my emotions don’t need to make sense, and giving me tools that help me go easy on myself when they don’t.
• The Occupational Health Specialist, that my manager referred me to, helped me understand some of my learned behaviours at work, and gave me helpful recommendations including, stressing the importance of regular breaks from my laptop – another piece of my own advice I often forget!
• My friends, whose support ranged from daily funny memes and long phone calls where we talked about nothing and everything, to visiting me with trays of food and making book recommendations, helped me laugh every day.
• My team, who regularly checked in, emphasising that they didn’t want to talk about work, but just wanted to ask how I was doing, made me realise how supportive my community at work is.

So, this is the main thing I took away from it all. There is a reason why people keep saying it is ok to not be ok. We all stumble at some point in life. And in order to get up, the first thing to do is admit that we are down. Because only then are we truly prepared to talk to others to ask for a hand up.