Scaffolding, Bras and Safety Nets: On Support Systems

The very first interview I did for GenMeh turned out to be oddly prophetic. The Board of Love girls were pretty pithy, but their advice about the need to seek out and assemble support systems for various facets of your life is indisputably solid. We’re social creatures and even the most ambitious, motivated and fiercely independent among us (shoutout to TM for this descriptor)  could benefit from some outside interference of the positive variety.

Photo by ZeHawk

Identifying when you need it and the type of support required (forget about actually asking for it), however, can be difficult and the latter absolutely varies according to your personality and the context you’re in.  Do you need a devil’s advocate? A shoulder to cry on? Someone to hold you accountable? A sounding board? One size of support doesn’t fit all people and situations ( break-ups and job hunts call for different support systems, for example).  In my case, I don’t need validation or cheerleading or even trouble-shooting and if you try to pat my shoulder, you’re probably gonna lose a hand. I’ve figured out that I need someone who will ask me tough questions, back me into a corner and force me to articulate all of my assumptions and get me to commit to doing X, Y, Z.  I’ve been working with a career coach for the last few months and it’s been very helpful on this front, especially given that I’m in the process of getting my own coaching/consulting  practice up and running (yeah, I’m letting the cat out of the bag. Email me if you’re curious).

There’s also the little issue of the type of support you need differing from the type you want.  It’s so much more comforting to have folks coo over you and bring you ice cream vs. challenging to you smarten the hell up and start drafting a plan for how you’re going to get from A to B, isn’t it? Even if the former simply encourages self-pity and reinforces the patterns of thinking and behavior that brought you to the point of needing someone to show up at your door with a pint of Chunky Monkey in the first place. But if you want the best match between your goals and the support you need to tackle them, it pays to be absolutely ruthless in the evaluation of what your current system consists of and whether or not it can do that for you.  All the Chunky Monkey in the world isn’t going to help you fix the weaknesses in your business plan or revise your college admissions essay, ya dig? It’s not a knock on your friends and family if you have to seek guidance from outside your circle and it doesn’t make you weak or bourgeois or a sucker if you find that you need to seek out a professional for specialized support (i.e., career or life coaching, resume writing, counseling, etc.).  In fact, it’s downright naive and myopic to assume that your social circle should be a jack-of-all-trades when it comes to providing all of the external emotional and intellectual resources you might require or that you should be able to simply white-knuckle your way to success entirely solo. It’s all about finding a match between your identified needs and the scope of support options at your disposal.

And you owe it to yourself to get it how and where you can.