Reach out and Ask For help

The importance of Asking for Help

Many times you face situations in life that are difficult to handle. You could be either too young to handle the situation or the crisis could too big to handle, you may not have any clue about what to do next. What to do in such situation or crisis arise in our life?

The situation could be created due to external factors that are out of your control e.g. health issues, pandemic, job loss, etc. 

But there could be crisis created by your own actions, behavior or habits. e.g. your habit of eating junk food and not exercising, can result in massive fat gain which can go beyond control. Your procrastination and laziness habit could cause you to not put required efforts to prepare for the exam or for your work deadline and the results would be failure in exams, anxiety, missed deadlines. Your smoking or drinking habit can cause you cancer that may be beyond cure.

Especially for students, the procrastination, laziness and only enjoying life without putting any efforts on studies can create lot of stress and anxiety to themselves and their parents. In todays world there are many types of distractions due to technical advancements. The internet has lots of information, both good and bad but one needs to control the amount of information he/she consumes from internet. Beyond a point, it becomes an addition where the student has this urge of always resorting to reading something new when he/she faces some issues or is not able to do something towards the goal.  The social media is another distraction where there is lot of attraction due to exaggerated push of information based on your previous interaction with the same. This pushes you deeper into the problem if your action to consume this deluge of information is not controlled.  

The cellphone makes a person always available. The audio notification and vibration feature forces you to reach for your phone and read the incoming messages or watch videos or respond with some action. So even if you had started to study with some level of determination such distraction will throw you off-track.

You can carry your cellphone anywhere with you - be it kitchen, living room, study room, school, work place and even to the bathroom. Now people to to bathroom to perform natural morning activity but sitting on the pot they start browsing internet, playing game and sometimes even forget what they are supposed to do there in bathroom.  After 30-40 minutes they realize that they came there for a different purpose. Such is the level of distraction. 

These distractions take a toll on students performance in school and colleges. When such a student fails in exam the decisions he/she takes at that time can either change his/her life for good or can take a turn towards worse direction.

A student with some guilt and his openness to accept his/her mistake can share the issues he/she is facing and talk to the parents about the same. The parents can take immediate corrective actions by giving their guidance, or in worse situations can take help from professional counselor to identify root causes and seek corrective actions in terms of change in behavior etc.  

But sometimes there are students who develop lots of anxiety or fear about sharing their failure with their parents or friends. They will hide their failure and take no action about it. Some can go to the level of lying to their parents and tell that they have passed the exams with good marks. They can even show forged marksheet. The parents will not doubt their child if he/she is lying about their exam results. The reason for such behavior is lack of openness, lack of belief that they could seek help from their parents or friends. There is also a lack of realization that their action could make the issue bigger and can result into disaster. The issue can become irreparable if not shared on time. Such students can go in depression, can become addicted to drugs, alcohol and start wasting their life. 

The parents come to know about such issues when it is already too late. A college kid can continue in the hostel and go on to the subsequent year in college without clearing the previous semester subjects. The parent can know about this only at the end of final year when they do not see a degree being awarded to their child. For parents it is a very shocking situation. Even the strict parents know that they will help their child in any issues even though they may show their unhappiness initially.  

Faced with such situation, the parents really feel helpless and even feel cheated because of their child's behavior and lack of confidence in them. A timely information about the issue, could result in guiding the child for the makeover exam or re-exam and timely completion of the educational course. The delay will now add to the fact that the child will have to put  more efforts, he may not have any of his friends to reach out to for help as they are busy with their work or next endeavors. The child also will now feel shy to ask for help. The professors also will not be forthcoming to help such students. The whole college system will ignore such students and may not provide any support. So now the student will have to put enormous amounts of efforts to take corrective action.

Hence asking for timely help when you are faced with any such issues is very very critical in life. The sooner you ask better it is for resolution. In this scenario, when the student sees that he is not able to study properly, not able to focus or not able to understand the subject, he can raise alarm and share the issue with parents. At this stage there is no damage that has occurred. The parents can give timely guidance, they can go and stay with the child for moral support, they can even get external tuitions to help the student to pickup any hard subject topics. The amount of efforts required at this stage to manage the situation is far less. And all this is possible by asking for help.

The student needs to show humility in accepting the issue and his bad habits and show openness to share  and discuss the same with parents or friends. Sometime there is ego comes in the way of openness and you fear losing face by sharing the failure or issues. But what he/she needs to realize is that they are creating a barrier between the issue and the solution and the problem will remain un-resolved and grow into a bigger disaster. The more time is wasted, the problem becomes bigger and bigger. As the saying goes, "A stitch in time saves nine",  asking for help, can cut down this growth and make sure that the problem is manageable with lesser efforts. 

Like this student scenario, if anyone faces issues in time that they think are beyond their control and are not able to correct themselves or they do not have a clue about how to manage it, reaching out and asking for help to the right person in your family or at work place or a friend is the right thing to do. It will not harm your dignity if you take it in the right spirit. This world is full of people willing to help others. You should always carry that belief.

Hence the biggest message here is that Asking for Timely help is key to avoid future disasters.