why is asking so hard?

receiving openly is a practice

Generosity by Gretta McCall

Our ability to accept generosity from others governs a significant portion of our potential to grow and expand. There is a limit to what we can provide for ourselves. We can be self-sufficient and independent, while accepting help and gifts from others. To accept gifts is not to admit you are inadequate, it is to allow your universe to expand by welcoming others into it, by accepting their love.

My attention was turned to this topic when I noticed a common theme running through all of my and my friends’ problems: we were having trouble asking for (and accepting) what we wanted/needed. When I highlighted this theme to my peers, they weren’t initially open to the idea that their problem was a psychological block around asking. They couldn’t see that it was ultimately an ask they were scared of. And I can relate. Someone recently asked me “what do you want that you haven’t yet asked for?” Initially, my mind came up blank. I thought: I always ask for what I want. But the more deeply I pondered the question, the more I realized there was plenty I wanted/needed but wasn’t asking for. I was blind to my own resistance to asking—a blind spot I now realize many of us unknowingly carry around.

asking vs. receiving

I thought my challenge was exclusively around asking—that I just “didn’t want to bother people” (subtext: I didn’t want to express my needs). But the closer I looked, the clearer it became that it went much deeper—my psychological block was around the act of receiving itself. I rejected things people tried to give me even when I didn’t ask for them. So, how could I possibly expect myself to ask for what I need when I couldn’t even accept someone voluntarily giving me something I didn’t “need”?

we aren’t meant to “earn” gifts

Many of us have been conditioned to think that receiving is an act of inadequacy, that we should be able to support ourselves using only our own resources. When I say receiving, I mean receiving gifts. I always felt comfortable receiving as long as I felt like I earned the thing I was getting—whether it was a scholarship, a salary, or compensation for my time—receiving what I felt like I deserved was not a problem. But letting someone give something to me for no reason at all, when I had done nothing to “earn” the gift felt… wrong. Like I was accepting something that wasn’t mine. I didn’t think this was unusual or even problematic until I started spending time with a group of people where generosity flowed between everyone so frictionlessly, without resistance or unrest around receiving. I noticed that while I would get tense and unsettled when someone would try to pay for something or invite me into an experience as a gift, everyone else seemed relaxed, at ease with it. They exuded genuine peace and gratitude upon receiving. They accepted gifts with grace instead of resistance. I noticed how much more pleasant this was for everyone—the giver, who didn’t have to fight to do their act of kindness—and the receiver who could simply accept the gift instead of recoiling away from it.

I remember being confused at how gracefully people were accepting gifts—thinking: don’t they want to be the one giving? Don’t they feel uncomfortable receiving for no reason? But they didn’t. They were at peace with it. I also noticed that the most generous people happened to also be the most open to receiving. They understood that:

1. Receiving enhances your ability and desire to give.

2. The joy of giving is so immense that they wouldn’t want to take that feeling away from the giver by resisting the gift.

There is a natural reciprocity to generosity, where you need to be willing to accept the universe’s efforts to conspire with you to maximally spread your gifts into the world.

Seeing this group of people operate, where generosity flowed so naturally was the first time I realized that maybe there was something to this way of living—this “being open to receiving.” I realized that my conditioning around rejecting gifts stood out unpleasantly here. It made the experience heavier and more uncomfortable for everyone involved. I was learning that it wasn’t endearing to reject what people wanted to give you. It was immature and unnecessary. It was an act of self-importance.

how you receive is an important signal

No one is forcing anyone to be generous—people give because they want to. And yet, if we struggle to receive, we treat gifts as if they are a handful of burning coal. We push them away, avoiding and resisting them. We signal to others, ourselves, and the universe that we don’t want to receive. When you receive gracefully and allow the generosity to fill you with a sense of worthiness and love (instead of unworthiness and shame), you welcome more generosity to come your way. How you choose to receive is a signal that expands or contracts your ability to receive more. Refusing to receive removes you from the circular, reciprocal nature of generosity that naturally finds its way to you through those that appreciate you.

Through observation and reflection, I absorbed a few lessons about receiving:

1. Allowing yourself to receive enables you to give more freely yourself.

2. Soaking in the good feelings you are meant to feel when receiving enriches the giver’s experience of giving, and your own experience of accepting the gift.

3. You aren’t proving anything to anyone (including yourself) by resisting the gifts that naturally find their way to you.

4. The whole point of gifts is that you don’t have to earn them. Rejecting gifts because you feel you “don’t deserve them” is a disservice to yourself and demonstrates a lack of understanding for what gifts are—an expression of love without strings attached.

my resistance to receiving

After all of this exploration, I began reflecting on my own relationship with receiving—why was I so resistant to it? When I was younger, I remember my Dad fighting with his siblings over who would pay for dinner—each of them trying to pay for the entire meal. They refused to let each other pay—they refused to receive the generosity from each other. They would be so unwilling to let the other pay that it created tension at the meal. Of course, this disagreement was well-meaning—they all wanted to give to each other! But all of them attaching to the need to be the “giver” added stress to the experience, when they could have simply allowed one person to enjoy giving, and the others to enjoy receiving. I think this and other similar experiences gave me the unconscious belief that: it is a bad thing to receive. It is only good to give. Receiving is an act of weakness, surrender, and selfishness.

paying attention to how we receive

Once I realized this, I became much more mindful of how I felt when someone tried to give to me. This required me to be present and observe the reaction transpiring in my mind and body without acting on it. I felt all the typical impulses rise up—the desire to push away the gift, make sure I could give to them before they could give to me. Waiting impatiently for the moment to end so I could block out what they had said to me me to shower them with my own love for them. But instead of acting on these impulses, I tried to just let them pass, to not grip onto them too tightly. I noticed how much more pleasant the moments were when I didn’t reject the person’s efforts to appreciate me. I realized how much more abundant my life could be if I genuinely opened myself up to receiving.

gifts are an expression of love—rejecting gifts is rejecting love

The main difference in receiving openly is not that you will tangibly “have more”—it’s not about the gifts themselves, but about the feelings of worthiness, appreciation and gratitude they bring when you are open to them. Someone is trying to express love to you through a gift. Whether that gift is a compliment, experience, object, or anything else. By closing yourself off, you deny yourself of their love. You steal the moment of abundance from yourself. You also reduce their enjoyment. Consider how you feel when you give someone a compliment and they squirm in discomfort. You want to pull back. Shoving the love down their throat isn’t appealing, so your desire to give it diminishes. They discourage you from giving. Whereas someone who absorbs acknowledgement openly encourages you to give them more.

Isabel⚡️ @isabelunraveled

learning to receive gracefully is a skill we need to practice. someone i was around last week accepted compliments with such grace, gentleness, and humility (but not embarrassment or rejection!) and it really made me rethink all the times i've shied away from someone's kindness.

be someone who people enjoy giving to

I’ve been reflecting on this idea of being someone that people enjoy giving to—what that might look like, and what that might invite into my life.

For longer than I’d like to admit, I viewed receiving as sinful or indulgent. When in reality, this couldn’t be more true. Receiving is an act of generosity itself. You are letting someone share their love with you. That is a GIFT! People need an outlet for their love. People want to share their abundance (this is the best part of having abundance in the first place). If you deny them the opportunity to do so, you steal joy from them. Whereas simply letting what is coming to you arrive, and receiving it with grace, humility and gratitude (not rejection, suppression or avoidance!) makes the experience of giving/receiving better for everyone. It also instils the idea in yourself that you are someone who is worthy of gifts. Worth of love, worthy of abundance—someone who others see, deeply appreciate, and want to propel forward. Being someone who people enjoy giving to does not mean you are someone who needs or demands gifts. It simply means you are present when they come and open to the love they represent.

gifts enable your becoming

I was sharing these reflections with a friend recently when he said something along the lines of: “you need to be open to receiving the gifts the universe is trying to give you, because they help make your mission possible.”

The idea that being unwilling to receive was slowing down my process of self-actualization hadn’t occured to me. I was viewing my journey to ascend to higher levels of self as one I had to go through alone, that gifts from others were completely unrelated to it. But I now see that when people share their love with you, they encourage, enable, and accelerate your process of becoming. Rejecting gifts slows down your growth that others are trying to accelerate.

gifts are an invitation

When people give to you, it’s a sign they want to be a part of your universe. They want to share some of their life with you. Every resource represents a small part of someone’s life—whether it is their affection, time, money—when they share it with you, they are inviting you into their world, and asking to be invited into yours. When you reject that gift, you reject their request to be entangled in your universe. Viewing generosity as a bid for you to be a part of each other’s lives can change how we think about receiving.

ego rejects, humility accepts

Refusing to receive is an act of ego. Receiving openly is an act of humility. When you are low ego, you know that someone sharing a piece of their life with you is purely an act of love. When you are high ego, receiving gifts makes you feel small and weak—like the other person is above you. When in reality, you are both equal beings engaging in a moment of appreciation. With humility, we recognize that resisting generosity is an egoic act, preventing us from engaging in the inter-connectedness of all humans. It would break the circle of reciprocity that the person is inviting you into.

To be humble is to realize that we are all valuable and worthy, and that gifts simply represent an exchange of love between two equal people. Why would you reject that? It is only when we believe there is an element of superiority to giving and an inferiority to receiving (an ego-driven thought) that gifts feel like something to resist and avoid.

receiving enriches your ability to give

When you do receive openly, you feel even more compelled to give. And this beautiful chain of generosity persists through you. When someone does something for you and you stay in your heart (instead of getting in your head), you immediately feel compelled to perpetuate that feeling of love through another being. Love perpetuates love. Generosity perpetuates generosity. And by extension: receiving perpetuates giving! When you cut yourself off from the gifts that find their way to you, you prevent yourself from existing in that virtuous, ever-expanding cycle of giving, receiving, appreciation and love.

receiving as an act of self-love

Opening yourself up to receiving is an act of love for yourself. There is nothing indulgent about it. You are simply accepting what has found its way to you through your own magnetism and abundance.

Receiving openly is a core part of becoming. It’s also something we rarely think about as the cause of our problems, because it seems so tangential to the pain we experience in every day life. But most problems—whether personal or interpersonal—come back to boundaries—to recognizing what you need and asking for it. The everyday pain we feel is often a reflection of failing to recognize our needs and request that they be met.

Living a life in full expression stems from the ability to receive openly and ask for what you need. The former makes the latter easier. Both in unison propel you to greater heights of presence and power than you could ever reach alone.

independence is independent of what you receive from others

Receiving from others doesn’t replace your ability to give to yourself, it only complements it. You can be independent and capable of satisfying your own needs, while being open to receiving. We are more powerful when we are connected through community. To fully share your gifts with the world, you need to accept gifts from others.

prompts around asking

I’ve been toying with some prompts that reflect where we might need to ask or receive:

• Identify the problem: What is causing you pain right now?

• Identify the solution: What might help relieve that pain?

• Identify the ask: Is there an ask you could make that would catalyze this relief?

• Identify the askee: Who do you need to ask this from (yourself, friends, colleagues, family, etc)?

• Adjust the framing internally: How can you frame the ask in a way where you don’t feel like you are “taking” from someone else, but rather inviting someone to give to you?

• Expect acceptance, but make peace with rejection: When we ask for things, sometimes the answer is no, and that is okay. The ask is the part we are responsible for, not its outcome. Part of getting comfortable with asking is getting comfortable being rejected. It’s about separating our self image from how others respond to us.

separating asks from identity

The goal of all of this is to engage in the act of asking and receiving without ego—to not let our ego tell us we are “good” or “bad” for asking for what we need or receiving openly. We must understand that our worth is independent of what others share with us. Gifts are simply an acknowledgement of our energy, presence, and reciprocity for the gifts that we consciously and unconsciously share with others.

receiving openly

When we allow ourselves to receive gracefully, we feel more compelled to share. When are fully present and enjoy the acknowledgement of a gift, it fuels us with joy, positivity, enthusiasm, and confidence. The point of the gift is not the exchange itself but the feelings it offers. When we view receiving as an attack on our ego and a threat to our identity and independence, we lose the benefits of the gift. Opening ourselves up to receiving invites in the incredible emotions that come with gifts and wipes away the distracting, egoic feelings that keep us from accepting them.

The path to abundance is paved with receiving gracefully. When we learn to accept love from both ourselves and others, we accelerate our journey to becoming ourselves and sharing our gifts with the world.

---

Work with me 1-1: I help people discover their true desires and align their actions with their values to cultivate a life that feels true to them. This unfolds through a guided process of conversation, introspection and conscious action. Learn more about working with me here.

Learn to unblock your ideas and express yourself freely: Creative Liberation is a 6-week virtual course, where I teach you how to conquer your avoidance, unblock yourself, and self-express freely. Get updates here.

Thank you for reading :). If you liked this, you might enjoy more of my ideas on Twitter, or a related post of mine: humility vs. hubris.