Do not be afraid to ask for help when you need it

I’ve been a customer of Amazon’s many years, and have always been pleased with their customer service. But the past couple of months I’ve had a frustrating, ongoing problem with them. Without going into the boring details, they were refusing payments from my bank account. This is an account I’ve had for 25 years, and I’ve been using it with Amazon over 15 years.

I talked to everyone I could think of—Amazon’s customer service people (several times), my bank (several times), my family and friends who are Amazon customers, etc. Nobody had any answers. I was hitting a brick wall. I’m generally pretty patient and optimistic. But this was beginning to wear me down.

Then a thought occurred to me, “out of the blue.” A message from Spirit, perhaps? Why not write Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon?

Immediately I said to myself, “That will never work. He’s too busy to read a letter from someone he doesn’t even know.” But my intuition kept prodding me. So I sent an email directly to him.

Within 24 hours I received a kind reply, and the problem was fixed. Why didn’t I think of that two months ago?

This was a great lesson for me to simply ask for help from the top. In this case, Jeff Bezos.

The next day I was catching up on some paperwork. Upon finishing, I realized an envelope with a check (which I needed to mail right away) had disappeared. I don’t know how long I spent looking all over for it. I cleared my desk, looked through my files, examined every nook and cranny of my office. No luck.

I walked out of my office, threw up my hands, and said, “Okay, Spirit, help me find that envelope.”

I went back into my office and there was the envelope on my otherwise empty desk. The desk had been totally clear moments before when I left the office. The envelope had reappeared “out of nowhere.”

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Why are we so reluctant to ask for help when we need it? And why not go right to the top—whether the “top” be Jeff Bezos, Spirit, or our own higher guidance, our intuition?

Please share your thoughts with us below.

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Here’s a short video of Dr. Brené Brown discussing asking for help with Oprah Winfrey.