The Willingness To Ask

Spending $72.00 on M&M’s was much easier than I thought it would be.

I’m in New York City with the family, Times Square. And in Times Square is a huge retail store dedicated to just one thing. 

M&M’s.

On three floor with over 25,000 square feet of space, for me the highlight of visiting is always the Wall Of Chocolate, a 50 foot wide 2-stories tall collection of 74 tubes filled with every M&M imaginable. Grab a plastic bag, place it under the tube, open the chute, and the color of your choice drops into your bag. Then off to the next color. And then the next color.

The fun adds up.

And at $17.00 per pound, so does the cost.

Standing in the checkout line I had no idea how much I had spent, but from the weight of the bag I knew it would be steep. It was a fun experience, the kids were quite happy, and it’s hard to assign a dollar value to that.

The cashier was quite engaging, and we had a nice conversation while she weighed and scanned each of the bags we’d filled. “$71.85 is your total.” As I handed my card over for payment, I jokingly suggested I should have asked for a “friends and family” discount based upon the jovial nature of our conversation. Apparently she thought that was a good idea, and to my surprise, I was given 30% off my total.

I really wasn’t expecting a discount. But in asking, even jokingly, I did receive one.

If you don’t ask the answer is always no.

Asking can be rather uncomfortable at times. Especially when we are asking ourselves some uncomfortable questions. About our life. About what we want for our life. About where we are in life in relation to what we want in our life.

Often it’s just easier to take what’s in front of us and to take what life has given us and be on our way. Avoiding any introspective questions means we don’t need to deal with their potential discomfort. In time, though, such avoidance creates its own inevitable discomfort as you eventually acknowledge the gap between where you are and where you want to be.

Much of our willingness to accept less than we want for ourselves is an underlying mindset that we may believe we are somehow unworthy of receiving all that is ours to receive. And if we don’t feel we are worthy of it, we certainly won’t be asking for it. In accepting this premise, we will perpetuate our existing life experience creating additional evidence we will use to support this premise of unworthiness.

Asking has been a powerful growth tool for me. Especially when it came to me working through my own issues of unworthiness. In asking I was able question the validity of the unworthiness I had habitually accepted as true, a truth which had kept me stuck and perpetuating the limited life I was willing to accept. Asking allowed me to diminish the power of the limitations I’d been sustaining for years and in doing so I made space to receive the abundance of what had always been there.

Even though I knew more was possible, I needed to first accept that it was possible…for me.

Was I really pre-destined to live a life of less than I was created to live? Was I really permanently stuck where I was?

No.

And neither are you.

While the M&M store discount was a nice surprise, the true value of this experience was in reminding me that good things come to those willing to ask for them. Not just for getting deals on candy, but in asking who they are and asking for what they want to experience in their one and only lifetime.  

The life we are here to live needs us to be willing to ask for it. 

Are you willing to ask for you?

Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash