Two reasons why men don't ask for help

Gents, if you recognise yourself in this article, in that you have an inability to seek support or are resistant to asking for help, then what it really means is that you are choosing to self-sabotage your current and future levels of success and happiness. 

I know that that might be hard for you to hear, perhaps even difficult for you to accept but given my experience, it’s true. 

There are two the main reasons why I believe men keep themselves stuck. 

They are conditioning and fear. 

That’s it, conditioning and fear; these are the reasons why men struggle unnecessarily in silence, self-sabotage themselves through unhelpful behaviours and/or end up pressing the big f**k-it button of self-destruction.

For most men, the rhetoric of seeking support or asking for help is hindered because they believe (even though it’s not true) that:

Asking for help means you are unable to help yourself which means you are vulnerable which means you are weak which means you are less of a man.

Let me unpack this further by firstly looking at conditioning.

Boys are slowly and systematically conditioning in numerous ways: through educational systems, through playing sport, through observing other men be that at home, in the media or the movies. They learn by default that to be a man is to be self-reliant, resilient, stoic and independent. 

Anything less than upholding these behaviours means you are weak, you are less of a man than those men that solider on, that are too stubborn to stop.

Over time, this conditioning creates and informs a man’s sense of self, his identity.  It creates the stereotypical lone wolf mentally. These lone wolves can be they shy and introverted or loud and egotistical, they are still lone wolves who find isolation safer than ‘being seen’. 

Next up we have fear.

Fear is a lifelong companion for men; it’s also another paradox of masculinity. 

Many men are quick to demonstrate physical courage and bravery when faced with a dangerous threat, yet many of these same men will at almost all cost avoid putting themselves in a position where they can experience some form of rejection or failure.

To evident this, think back, it accompanies us from not wanting to raise our hands in classroom because we fear ridicule from our classmates all the way through to delaying and avoiding going to the doctors because we are fearful of what that lump might be...

Two of my truths are:

Everyman carries with him fear. 

Everything a man wants is on the other side of fear. 

And when I look at masculinity, I see a lot of men that are not living their lives because they are too busy living their fears.

There are men out there that fail to achieve their goals or who live safe and small lives because of their inability to move past the conditioning they’ve experienced and the fear they feel…

As men, it’s important to recognise that we don’t have to bottle everything up, we don’t have to struggle through, we don’t have to fail to save face and instead we would do well to let go of our conditioned thinking and ours fears around asking for help because fundamentally, asking for help will not make us less masculine or more weak.