When Good Advice Isn't Good Enough

There is a lot of good advice in the world.

Move your body. Eat more protein. Get enough sleep. Reduce your stress. Be consistent. Make a plan.

None of those things are necessarily wrong.

But sometimes I think we are so quick to offer the answer that we forget to understand the question.

Someone says, “I know I need to make a change, but I'm struggling," and almost immediately the solutions begin. Try this workout. Follow this eating plan. Use this app. Read this book. Talk to this person.

We mean well. We may even be recommending something that genuinely works.

But I wonder if our eagerness to help can sometimes become part of the problem. We want to make things better. We want to offer a solution. And in our rush to help, we may forget to stop and understand what the person actually needs.

Because helping isn't necessarily the same thing as giving someone an answer.

And even when we do have an answer: works for whom?

Before I can know whether a particular strategy might help you, I need to know something about you.

What have you already tried? What happened? What is getting in the way? What does your health look like right now? What does your day look like? What resources do you have available? What are you carrying that I cannot see?

And perhaps most importantly: what problem are we actually trying to solve?

As a health and wellness coach, that last question matters to me enormously.

My job isn't to make every problem a coaching problem.

Sometimes the most responsible thing I can do is recognize that what you are describing needs to be evaluated by a physician. Sometimes you may need the expertise of a registered dietitian, physical therapist, mental health professional or another provider. Sometimes coaching can be useful alongside that care. And sometimes the work really does belong in coaching: understanding what matters to you, what is getting in the way, and how to make change possible in the reality of your life.

Knowing the boundaries of my work isn't separate from helping someone well.

It is part of helping someone well.

Imagine a friend comes to you and says, “I really need to start exercising.”

“Great idea! Why don't you go to the gym and start lifting weights?”

On the surface, that sounds like good advice. Resistance training can help build and maintain muscle, strengthen bones and support metabolic health.

But what do you actually know about the person standing in front of you?

Do they have a health condition that affects what kind of exercise is appropriate? Are they dealing with pain or an injury? Maybe they need a lower-impact option. Maybe they need to be evaluated by a healthcare professional before deciding where to begin.

I once worked with a client who was a cancer survivor. She had experienced significant weight gain and joint pain, and walking could leave her needing two or three days to recover. Telling her to simply go to the gym and start lifting weights would not have met her where she was. For her, exercising in the water was a much more accessible place to begin.

The problem wasn't that resistance training was bad advice.

The problem was that we didn't yet know enough to know whether it was good advice for her.

We do this all the time with health. We take something that is generally true and assume it must therefore be individually appropriate.

But people are not interchangeable inputs.

Two people can want exactly the same thing and face completely different barriers to getting there.

Maybe both want to exercise three times a week. One has plenty of time but doesn't know where to begin. The other knows exactly what to do but is caring for an aging parent, working full time and trying to figure out where those three hours are supposed to come from. Another may have the time and the knowledge but be dealing with pain, exhaustion or a health condition that changes what is possible right now.

The goal may look the same. The problem underneath it isn't.

This is one of the reasons I think we need to get curious before we get prescriptive.

Instead of immediately asking, “What should this person do?” we can start by asking, “What is making this difficult?

That question can lead us somewhere very different.

Maybe the person doesn't need another workout plan. Maybe she needs help figuring out when movement could realistically fit into her life. Maybe she doesn't need another list of foods she "should" eat. Maybe she already knows what she wants to eat but gets home at 7:00 exhausted and has nothing prepared.

Maybe the problem isn't a lack of information at all.

Sometimes we keep giving people more information when information was never the missing piece.

Knowing what to do and being able to do it are not the same thing.

Change requires more than knowledge. It requires some combination of time, energy, physical ability, emotional bandwidth, resources, support and an environment in which the behavior can actually happen.

When one of those pieces is missing, repeating the advice more loudly doesn't put it back.

Helping well, then, often starts with asking rather than telling. It means getting curious about the person, their circumstances and what they actually need before deciding what kind of support might help.

Maybe helping isn't always about having the answer.

Sometimes it starts with taking the time to understand the question.

Good advice answers a general question. Good support starts by understanding the particular human being asking it.

Art Prompt:

Art Paint or draw: What does helping someone mean to you?