Don't be Selfish: Stop Helping, Start Asking

Hello Hello!

I want to start today with a single idea. And I'm going to ask you to just sit with it for a moment before we unpack it.

We don't build trust by offering help. We build trust by asking for it.

Read that again if you need to. I sure did.

We don't build trust by offering help. We build trust by asking for it.

If your first reaction was something like - wait, that can't be right - I understand. Mine was too. Because everything we've been taught points the other direction. Be capable. Be reliable. Be the one with the answer. Don't burden people. Don't need too much. Figure it out yourself.

In the equine world especially, we wear self-sufficiency like a badge. We pride ourselves on knowing. On having done the work. On not being the person who has to ask. And there's real value in preparation - you know I believe that deeply. But I wonder if somewhere along the way we confused preparation with performance. And I wonder if that confusion is costing us more than we realize - in our barns, in our communities, and in the saddle.

Because here's what I've been turning over in my mind lately, and what I want to explore with you today. What if the most trust-building thing you can do - with another person, with your community, with your horse - isn't demonstrating your competence? What if it's showing your need?

That's what we're going to dig into today. And I'll warn you now - some of this is going to feel counterintuitive. Some of it might even feel a little uncomfortable. But I think by the time we're done, maybe you're going to look at some of your most frustrating moments in the barn - and some of your most frustrating moments in life - a little differently.

Let's start at the beginning.

That opening idea - we build trust by asking for help, not offering it - comes from Simon Sinek. He said it in a live conversation with Trevor Noah at the Brilliant Minds conference in 2024. And Trevor Noah's reaction was exactly what mine was the first time I heard it.

He said, "Say that again."

So Simon did. We don't build trust by offering help. We build trust by asking for it.

And then Trevor asked the obvious question. Why? Why would that be true?

Simon's answer was personal. He talked about a friend who had gone through something hard - really hard - and hadn't called. And when Simon found out, his reaction wasn't sympathy. It was something closer to anger. He said to his friend, "How dare you be so selfish as to deny me the honor of being there for you in your time of need."

I want to stay with that for a second. Because that reframe is everything.

We think that not asking for help is considerate. We think we're protecting people from our problems, from our needs, from our mess. We think we're being strong. But Simon is saying something completely different. He's saying that when you refuse to ask - when you decide on someone else's behalf that they don't want to be bothered - you are actually taking something from them. You are denying them the experience of showing up for someone they care about. And that, he says, is selfish.

Which means the title of this episode isn't just a provocation. It's actually quite literal.

Don't be selfish. Stop helping. Start asking.

Now. Around the same time I was sitting with Simon's words, I was also listening to Brené Brown and Adam Grant on their podcast The Curiosity Shop. Which I highly recommend! And Brené shared something from her research that mapped straight back to what Simon said from a different lense.

She said that when leaders are asked what builds trust for them - what actually moves the needle in their relationship with the people they lead - the answer is being asked for help. Not their own reliability. Not their competence. Not their track record. When a member of their team comes to them and says "I don't know how to do this, and I think you might - can you help me?" something shifts. The relationship changes. The trust deepens in a way that years of performance alone cannot manufacture.

Adam Grant, right on cue, cited the research behind it. Because that's what Adam Grant does, and we love him for it.

And the research has a long history. Adam referenced a 1969 study by Jecker and Landy that put a name to something Benjamin Franklin had observed 300 years earlier - that we like people we help more than people who help us. The person doing the favor, it turns out, is the one whose feelings deepen. Which means when you ask someone for help, you are giving them a gift they didn't know they were receiving. You are giving them the experience of being useful. Of being trusted. Of being the one who had something worth needing.

The ask is a gift to the one being asked.

So we have Simon Sinek's lived observation. We have Brené Brown's research on leadership and trust. We have decades of psychology research pointing in the same direction. And they are all arriving at the same place from completely different angles.

Asking for help builds trust. In the asker. And in the one being asked.

Now. I want to bring in one more thread before we take all of this into the barn. And this one I also heard from Simon in that same conversation with Trevor Noah. He talked about a psychology experiment involving rats.

In the mid-twentieth century, researchers put a rat alone in a cage with two water sources - one plain, one laced with drugs. The rat kept returning to the drug-laced water until it died. And for years that experiment shaped how we understood addiction.

But another researcher challenged it. He said the study was flawed - because rats, like us humans and our horses, are social animals. And this rat had been placed in complete isolation. So he recreated the experiment with a community of rats, in an enriched environment, with the same two water sources. And the rats tried the drug-laced water - but they didn't keep going back. They had each other. They had connection. And that changed what they needed.

Simon's point was simple and devastating: maybe what drives us toward numbing isn't the substance. Maybe it's the isolation?

I've been sitting with that ever since. Sooooo many questions are floating around in my head especially in our virtual heavy world… but I want to bring this with us into the barn - not as a conclusion, but as a question worth holding.

So here's the question I want to hold with you for a moment.

What if some of what we see in our most herd-bound horses - the ones who lose their minds when they leave the barn, who call and call and call for their buddy, who seem almost desperate when separated from their herd - what if some of that is less about training and more about what Simon's rat experiment is pointing at?

I want to be clear - this is a wonder. This is me thinking out loud, not presenting a conclusion. But I find it worth sitting with.

We typically frame barn sour and buddy sour as training problems. Holes in the work. Sometimes we even frame it as a character issue - this horse is just herd bound, that's just who they are. 

But what if we flipped the question?

What if the horse who is desperately, almost frantically attached to their herd is a horse who has never been given another genuine source of safety and connection? What if the herd is doing all of the heavy lifting - all of it - because nothing in the training relationship has built a comparable sense of belonging?  The horse away from the herd is the rat in isolation with drug laced water.

And if that's even partially true - if there's something to that idea - then the training question changes completely. Instead of asking how do I make this horse or mule less addicted to the herd, we start asking something different.

How do I become the enriched environment and part of the community where we don’t need the herd addiction anymore?

And I don't think that happens through more pressure, more repetition, or more controlled exposure to separation. I think it happens through real partnership. Through a horse who has experienced, again and again, that you are the partner who notices when things get hard and adjusts. Who doesn't demand answers but invites participation. Who can be trusted with the ask.

Which brings us to something I've been turning over for a long time now. Something that I think might be one of the most important reframes available to us as equine people.

What if a horse who is misbehaving is a horse who is asking for help?

What if a horse who is misbehaving is a horse who is asking for help?

I want to sit with that because I think our gut reaction to it tells us something important about ourselves.

When a horse bucks, bolts, spooks, refuses, shuts down, pins their ears, kicks out, won't load, won't stand, won't move forward, pulls back - our nervous system responds. And depending on our training background, our experience, our history with that particular horse, our response might look like correction, or frustration, or withdrawal, or doubt. But almost universally, what happens underneath all of those responses is this: our trust erodes.

The horse becomes, in our minds, unreliable. Dangerous. Unpredictable. A problem to be solved rather than a partner to be heard.

And here's what makes that so costly. That erosion of trust telegraphs. Immediately and completely. Horses are not reading or understanding our words - they are reading our bodies, our energy, our feel. And the moment our trust in them drops, they feel it. And their trust in us drops in response. The circuit goes negative. And now we are two parties who trust each other less than we did five minutes ago, trying to solve a problem together.

But what if we could receive that moment differently?

What if the horse who is bucking is saying I don't understand what you're asking of me? What if the horse who is spooking is saying I am genuinely frightened and I need you to help me feel safe? What if the horse who shuts down is saying I have tried every other way to communicate this and nothing has worked? What if the horse who won't load is saying I don't yet trust that where we're going is okay?

These are asks. Uncomfortable, inconvenient, sometimes genuinely dangerous asks - but asks nonetheless. (side note… maybe our job as partners is to help our equines ask in ways we can respond to without the drama… that sounds like preparation doesn’t it?)

And if we could receive them as asks, everything about how we respond changes. We get curious instead of reactive. We slow down instead of escalating. We start looking for the question underneath the behavior instead of trying to eliminate the behavior itself.

Now. I want to be honest with you here. This is not always easy. I am not standing here telling you I have perfected this response. I have been the person whose trust eroded in a hard moment. I have been reactive when I wanted to be curious. I have met an ask with correction and felt the relationship grow cold in my hands.

But I have also had the experience of catching myself. Of taking a breath in a moment that wanted to become a confrontation and asking instead - what are you trying to tell me? And what I have found, again and again, is that the horse who felt met in that moment - truly met, not managed - became more available, not less. More willing, not more difficult.

Because here's what I think is actually happening. When we meet a horse's ask with genuine curiosity and willingness to adjust, we are teaching them something profound. We are teaching them that asking is safe. That communication works. That this relationship is one where their input matters.

And a horse who has learned that asking is safe is a completely different partner than a horse who has learned that asking leads to escalation.

Think about that for a moment in the human context. How many of us have had the experience of finally asking for help - from a mentor, from a colleague, from someone we respected - and been met with judgment? With dismissal? With impatience? And how quickly did we decide never to ask again?

We learned that asking was dangerous. And we protected ourselves accordingly.

The horse who has been punished for communicating - who has been corrected every time they tried to say something, whose asks have been met with pressure and escalation - that horse hasn't stopped having needs. They've just stopped believing that expressing them is safe. And so they either shut down completely, or they wait until the pressure is so unbearable that the only option left is explosion.

That horse is not misbehaving. That horse is protecting themselves from the cost of asking.

What that experience taught me - and what I keep coming back to - is that the misbehaving horse is not the problem. The misbehaving horse is the invitation. They are giving us an opportunity, in that moment, to demonstrate that we are the kind of partner who can be asked. Who can receive hard communication without punishment. Who can stay curious when everything in us wants to react.

And when we take that opportunity - when we meet the ask with genuine presence and willingness to listen - we are not just solving the problem in front of us. We are building something. We are becoming, one ask at a time, the enriched environment and community that rises above drug laced water.

So let's bring this out of the individual relationship and into the bigger picture. Because I think the principle we've been exploring - that asking for help builds trust, that the ask is a gift to the one being asked - doesn't just live in the one-on-one relationship between horse and human. It lives everywhere in this world we've chosen. And I think we are, as a community, significantly underusing it.

I want to walk through four dimensions where I think this matters. And I want to be honest - some of these are more comfortable than others. The last one especially.

The first dimension is the one we've already been living in - horse and human.

When we stop trying to solve every puzzle for our horses and instead invite them to help us solve it, something shifts in the relationship. This is not about being passive or unclear in our communication - you know I believe deeply in clarity as the foundation of everything we do together. But there is a difference between being clear about what you're asking and being so controlling of the answer that the horse never gets to participate in finding it.

When we prepare the conversation - when we set the conditions, make the ask, and then genuinely get curious about the path toward the response - we are doing something radical. We are telling the horse that their response matters. That we are interested in what they bring. That this is a conversation, not a monologue.

And a horse who has been invited into that conversation, again and again, becomes something different than a horse who has only ever been told what to do. They become a participant. A partner. Someone who has skin in the game.

That is not a small thing. That is the whole thing.

The second dimension is our community.

I want you to think about the last time you borrowed something from a fellow equine person. A piece of tack. A book. An idea. A trailer. The last time you called someone and said - I don't know how to handle this, what do you think?

Or maybe it's easier to think about the last time you didn't. The last time you needed something and talked yourself out of asking. They're busy. They'll think I should know this by now. I don't want to be a burden.

Sound familiar?

There is an old observation - and I've seen it described in various ways across different cultures - that the act of borrowing builds community in a way that self-sufficiency never can. When you ask your neighbor for something, you are not just solving a practical problem. You are creating a connection. You are giving them the experience of being useful to you. You are, whether you intended to or not, beginning to build trust.

And in our equine community specifically - where so much knowledge lives in the hands and bodies and years of experience of the people around us - the failure to ask is genuinely costly. Not just to us personally, but to the whole ecosystem. When we hoard our questions, we hoard our growth. And when we hoard our growth, the community stagnates.

The herd doesn't hoard. The herd shares what it knows. That's how it survives.

The third dimension is professional to professional.

This one is tender. Because the equine professional world can be - and I say this with love and from the inside - deeply competitive. There are clinicians and instructors and trainers who operate as though asking for help from a peer is an admission of inadequacy. As though the finished product is what earns respect, and the messy middle is something to be hidden.

And our students watch this. They are watching whether we ask. They are watching whether we admit we don't know. They are watching whether we treat our colleagues as resources or as competition.

When a professional in this space is willing to say to another professional - I've been struggling with this concept, how do you approach it - something shifts in the whole culture around them. It gives everyone else permission to be in process. It models that expertise and curiosity are not opposites. That knowing a lot and still having questions are not contradictions.

And as students, as riders, as people choosing who to learn from - I think this is worth paying attention to. The professional who never asks, who has all the answers, who positions themselves as the final word - that is not mastery. That is performance. And performance, as we've been exploring today, is actually the thing that gets in the way of trust.

Look for the teacher who asks. That's who you want to learn from.

The fourth dimension is instructor to student. And this is the one that I find most vulnerable - and most important.

As an instructor, everything in my professional conditioning tells me to have the answer. To be prepared. To know. That is, after all, what people are paying for. Right?

But I have learned - slowly, and sometimes painfully - that some of the most powerful things I can do in a lesson have nothing to do with telling. They have everything to do with asking.

What are you feeling right now? Not what do you think you should be feeling - what are you actually feeling?

Is this landing for you? Is the way I'm explaining this making sense in your body, or do I need to find a different way in?

What have you learned somewhere else, from someone else, that was different from what I'm teaching? Tell me about that.

That last question especially. Because when a student has learned something different - from a different trainer, a different method, a different tradition - and they feel safe enough to bring it into the room, that is information I cannot get any other way. That is the horse communicating. And if I meet it with defensiveness or dismissal, I have just taught them that asking is dangerous and I’m missing out on learning something that could help many more students and me!

But if I receive it with genuine curiosity - if I say, tell me more about that, help me understand what that felt like - something opens. The student feels seen. The learning deepens. And the trust between us grows in a way that no amount of correct information can manufacture.

Asking my students for help is not a confession of inadequacy. It is an act of respect. It is me saying - you have something I need. Your experience matters here. This is a conversation, not a lecture.

And isn't that exactly what we're asking our horses to believe?

Now. I want to pause here. Because I am aware that everything we've talked about today could be heard a certain way. And I want to make sure we're not leaving with the wrong takeaway.

Because if what you heard today was - ask for everything, share everything, be vulnerable with everyone, all the time, in every relationship - I want to gently but firmly course correct. Because that's not what any of this means. And in fact, that version of it would undermine everything we've been building toward.

Brené Brown says something that I think is one of the most important and most misunderstood ideas in her entire body of work. She says that vulnerability minus boundaries is not vulnerability at all. It's inappropriate disclosure.

Vulnerability minus boundaries is inappropriate disclosure.

Which means that not everything is meant to be shared with everyone. Not every ask is appropriate in every relationship. Not every person has earned the right to be asked. And not every moment is the right moment.

Brené goes further. She says that authenticity - real authenticity, the kind that actually builds connection - should be offered to people who have earned the right to see you. And your story should be shared with people who have earned the right to hear it.

That is a completely different thing than radical openness. That is a discerning, boundaried, relational act. It requires you to know who you're talking to. To understand the depth of the relationship. To ask yourself - has this person demonstrated that they can hold what I'm about to give them?

And Adam Grant adds a dimension to this that I find equally important. He says that authenticity without empathy is selfishness.

Authenticity without empathy is selfishness.

Which means that even when you have found the right person, even when the relationship has earned the depth of the ask, you still have to be paying attention. To whether this is the right moment for them. To whether they have the capacity right now. To whether what you need is something they are actually positioned to give.

Because an ask that is only about your need, with no awareness of the other - that's not vulnerability. That's offloading. And offloading dressed up as vulnerability is still just offloading.

Brené ties it together beautifully when she says that authenticity should be in service of connection. Not in service of relief. Not in service of being seen. In service of connection. Which is a relational act, not a personal one. It requires both people.

Now let's bring this back to the barn. Because this nuance matters enormously here too.

When I talk about inviting your horse to help solve the puzzle - I am not talking about presenting a horse with a problem they are not prepared for and calling it collaboration. A green horse cannot help you with a half pass. A horse who has never been asked to think cannot suddenly be handed the responsibility of figuring everything out. The ask has to be proportional to the relationship, to the preparation, to the readiness of the horse in front of you.

You build the conversation before you ask the hard question. You prepare the conditions before you invite the response. You earn the right to ask by doing the work that makes the ask receivable.

This should sound familiar. Because it's exactly what we talked about in Episode 7 - there can be no softness without clarity. The structure enables the vulnerability. The preparation enables the ask. You cannot skip the foundation and call what follows collaboration. That's not partnership. That's chaos.

And in the same way - when we talk about asking our community for help, asking our colleagues, asking our students - those asks have to be real. They have to be honest. They have to come from a genuine place of curiosity or needing what you're asking for, not from a performance of humility designed to make you look good. Because people can feel the difference. Horses especially can feel the difference.

A false ask is not an ask. It's a manipulation. And it will be received as one.

The real ask - the boundaried, empathetic, genuine ask - that is what builds trust. That is what changes relationships. That is what creates the conditions for the willingness and connection that we are all, in our barns and in our lives, trying to find our way toward.

And speaking of willingness - that is exactly where we are headed next.

Because here's what I've come to believe. A horse cannot truly relax in a relationship built on performed competence. A human cannot either. Willingness - real willingness, the kind that feels like a gift rather than a concession - requires safety. And safety requires trust. And trust, as we've spent this entire episode exploring, begins the moment someone is brave enough to ask.

Next time on The Balance Point, we're going to talk about what that relaxation actually looks like. About willingness and balance and what it means when a horse - or a human - finally feels safe enough to let go. It might be the most misunderstood concept in all of horsemanship. And I cannot wait to dig into it with you.

Until then - I want to leave you with one question to carry into your week.

Where are you performing competence when you could be genuinely curious and asking for help? In your barn. In your community. In your relationships.

And who are you denying the honor of being there for you?

Take care of yourselves, take care of each other. Take care of your animals. And I'll see you next time on The Balance Point.