Help (and how to get it)

Help (and how to get it)

Speaker Chuck Rolando

Language Level Intermediate

Source Speak up www.speakup.com.br

Self-help books, which explain how you can improve your life all by yourself, are a publishing industry phenomenon. For this reason Mayday! Asking Other For Help in Times of Need is highly original: it is a book which explain how you can overcome your shyness and get other people to help you. Its author, Nora Klaver, is a successful management consultant who, according to her website, “lives near Chicago with her beagle Ripley.” When Ms. Klaver met with Speak Up, we asked her to explain how she got the idea for Mayday!

MEN!

Nora Klaver (Standard American accent)

“Mayday!” comes from the French “m’aidez” and so “Mayday!” has come to signify a cry for help, usually, on ships on with planes, and when a ship or a plane is in trouble, the pilots will always cry “Mayday! Mayday!” and so for us it’s a generally acknowledged” signal that “Hey, I need help!” And this came to me when I realized that I had created a life that was full of all sorts of things, I was successful and financially stable and I was taking great vacations all over the world, but I realized that the people around me were more interested in taking what I had, rather than giving back to me, and so my story is that when I…probably 1994, I developed a tumor on my neck and the doctor told me that I was going to have to someone care for me for the week after the surgery. So, I called up my boyfriend and I told him I needed to have him come stay with me. Two days before the surgery he broke it off with me, he dumped me. So now two days before the surgery, I had no-one to help me and I realized that I didn’t want to live my life that way anymore and that I needed to find friends and loved ones in my life who would give me me as much as I give them. So I started focusing on this whole idea of asking for help as a way of connecting with new people.

UN-AMERICAN

Mayday! Has received an enthusiastic response in the United States. This is in spite of the fact that asking for help is considered very “un-American”:

Nora Klaver:

In the American society, you know, we are so in love with independence, it’s so embedded in us, it’s as though we’re all living, in the back of our minds, the myth of the cowboy on the range, we all want to go out and just prove ourselves and do it our own way, but it’s just…too difficult, it’s exhausting and I don’t believe that it how people are meant to live. I think we’re meant to live together in community, and not as individuals all by ourselves.