After 10 years as a freelancer, I was once again ready to become a W2 employee. We had two children now, ages eight and three, and I needed to switch professions, earn more money, and get company health insurance.

I joined a leading global professional services firm in a skyscraper with offices high over Times Square. I was excited to be working “full time” again, back in the mainstream.

Except the job came with one little problem. I immediately hated it. But I just as quickly learned that even in a harsh workplace, colleagues who have your back can emerge, a lesson I’ve taken to heart for more than three decades now.

My new boss soon established a rather strict performance benchmark. No matter how I tried, I could do nothing right. In the early going, I filled out a timesheet, logging the hours devoted to work on behalf of our clients, only for her to say, “No, no, no! That’s all wrong!” She crossed out my numbers and substituted larger numbers, inflating my billings. She explained that from then on I should pad my hours, along with why and by how much. I said nothing, much less objected, but felt ashamed of my complicity in this fraud.

Every assignment I took on for her, major or minor, had to be carried out again, only infinitely better. That was an issue for me because by then I was an accomplished professional with years of experience. Yet my boss castigated me as if I were a newcomer, oblivious even of the basics. One document I drafted had to be revised seven times, in every instance for the most picayune of rationales.

Then I met Lisa, a colleague in the same department. She was 12 years my junior. I was a vice president, and she was an account executive. She somehow sensed I was suffering, though it’s likely the look on my face made no secret of it.

We came to know each other around the office through drive-by conversations, at first casually but then more seriously. She came across to me as mature and confident well beyond her years, so much so that I expected her someday to be a big success in the business. I soon trusted her enough to take confide my grievances about our boss to her.

She listened with understanding and compassion. “Give yourself some time to work it out,” she advised. “I promise you’re going to be okay.”

Over the next few weeks, Lisa was always on hand to comfort and encourage me. She almost made it her job to coach me through my days. But by then I’d had it. My manager and I were grossly mismatched. It was too late to salvage that relationship. I decided to quit, found a better job and, a mere 10 weeks after I started, I was out of there.

Benevolent coworkers took me under their wing several times over the course of my career. I would struggle against some occupational adversity, usually in the form of anxiety over a difficult supervisor, and an experienced colleague, with nothing to gain but the doing of a good deed, would offer common sense counsel and say a kind word that put me at ease.

If you’re having a tough time at your job, sometimes all you have to do is ask for help, and someone—sometimes even a generation younger—will usually toss you a lifeline. The Harvard Business Review once estimated that “as much as 75% to 90% of the help coworkers give one another is in response to direct appeals.”

These saviors have set an example that taught me I should try at every opportunity to do the same for others. All any of us may need if we’re really up against it is simply for someone to tell us we’re going to be okay.

I’ve stayed in touch with Lisa. She developed breast cancer in her 40s, and eventually survived. Since then, Lisa has amply proven a cherished theory: People who routinely go above and beyond the call of duty in the service of others—in my case, playing accidental mentor to shepherd me through a singularly traumatic ordeal at a precarious moment in my life—are ultimately recognized and handsomely rewarded.

Today, Lisa is still with the same firm, only now she’s its chief client officer. She handles multi-million-dollar accounts and travels the world. More importantly, she’s widely beloved throughout her profession and beyond, with a reputation second to none.

“We make a living by what we get,” Winston Churchill once wrote, “but we make a life by what we give.”

I’ve already thanked Lisa more than once. But some people you can truly never thank enough.