When You Need Help but Can't Explain What You Need

There was a time in my career when I went looking for help because I knew something was wrong, but I couldn't quite explain what it was.

I thought I knew. I had a sense that something about my career wasn't working, and I assumed that if I could find the right person to talk to, they might help me work out what to do next.

But what I remember most clearly about that period isn't knowing what I wanted to change.

It was the bewilderment.

I was struggling to make sense of what was happening to me. I had questions, but I wasn't sure they were the right questions. I had feelings I couldn't easily explain and a growing awareness that something about the life I was living had become difficult to sustain. And yet I was approaching the situation as though I had a career problem that needed a career solution.

I went to see someone for help and came away with a copy of What Color Is Your Parachute? A perfectly respectable book. One that has helped many people think about their careers and the possibilities available to them. But I remember looking at it and feeling that something didn't quite fit.

It felt Like I was a fish being handed a pair of trainers.

Perfectly good trainers. Possibly excellent trainers. But what exactly was I supposed to do with them?

I can smile about that now, but at the time, I couldn't have explained why the advice felt so unhelpful. I just knew it wasn't meeting me where I was, and looking back, I think there was something important happening in that encounter that I didn't have the understanding to recognise then.

The difficulty of explaining what we don't yet understand

When we ask someone for help, there's an assumption that we can explain what we need help with. We might not know the answer, but surely we know the problem.

Except that isn't always true.

Sometimes the very reason we're looking for help is because we've lost our ability to make sense of what's happening.

We know we're unhappy, unsettled, exhausted or increasingly disconnected from something that once mattered to us. We know that things aren't as they should be. We may even have reached the point where continuing as we are feels impossible.

But knowing how we feel isn't necessarily the same as understanding why we feel that way. And when we don't understand why, it can be incredibly difficult to explain what we need.

We reach for the language that's available to us.

We say we're unhappy in our careers.

We say we've lost our confidence.

We say we need a change.

And those descriptions may be entirely genuine. They're our best attempts to communicate something we haven't yet been able to understand ourselves.

And I think that's what was happening to me. I went looking for career help because that was the language I had for what I was experiencing. But I didn't yet understand enough about my circumstances, or myself inside them, to know if the question I was asking was the question that needed answering.

And there's a deep and profund loneliness in that kind of bewilderment.

You're trying to explain something that matters enormously to you, but the words don't quite reach impart that. And when someone responds to the words you've managed to find, rather than the experience you're struggling to describe, you can come away feeling that you've somehow failed to communicate.

Even when nobody has done anything wrong.

The pressure to be helpful

I've thought about the person who gave me that book many times over the years. And I don't look back on the encounter with resentment.

I went to someone for career help, they offered me a recognised resource for exploring career possibilities, so from their perspective, that was probably an entirely reasonable response to what I'd told them. After all, what do we do when someone comes to us with a problem?

We try to help.

We draw on our knowledge and experience. We think about what has worked before. We offer suggestions, possibilities, resources or a process that might move things forward.

There's real generosity in that impulse. But there's also, I think, a pressure that we don't always acknowledge.

When someone asks us for help, we can feel that our usefulness depends on having something to offer. We may feel uncomfortable if we don't know what to say, or worry that we're letting the person down if we don't provide a way forward. And if our professional role is built around helping people solve problems, that pressure can be even higher.

We have methods. We have frameworks. We have experience. We know how to guide people through particular kinds of decisions.

So we begin.

But what happens when the person sitting opposite us doesn't understand the nature of the difficulty they're experiencing?

What happens when the problem they've described is the closest approximation they can manage, rather than a clear account of what is actually happening?

We then find ourselves offering a very good answer to a question that hasn't yet been properly understood. And the difficulty is that neither person necessarily knows this is happening.

The person looking for help wants to make progress.

The person offering help wants to be useful.

And b are probably relieved when something resembling a solution appears.

But underneath that apparent progress, something remains unresolved.

When neither person knows quite where to begin

I find that so interesting because the discomfort exists on both sides of the conversation.

For the person looking for help, there's the frustration of not being able to explain themselves more clearly.

For the person offering help, there's the discomfort of not knowing how to help without moving towards an answer.

And between them sits an uncertainty that neither may feel equipped to tolerate.

And I wonder how often we mistake movement for progress in those moments. A suggestion has been made. A book has been recommended. A plan has been proposed. Something tangible has emerged from the conversation. It can feel reassuring to both people. But have we understood anything more about what's happening?

I don't think the answer is that we should stop offering advice or abandon the methods and approaches that can be so useful. We just need to recognise when we're moving towards a solution because we've understood the problem, and when we're moving towards one because remaining uncertain feels uncomfortable.

Those are very different things.

And I think this matters hugely when people are struggling with their careers.

Career conversations can quite naturally gravitate towards strengths, skills, interests, values and future possibilities. These are all legitimate areas to explore, and for someone who understands their circumstances and is ready to consider their next move, they can be enormously helpful.

But when someone has reached a point of profound uncertainty and dissonance about their career , and maybe thier life, the questions may be much wider.

They may not yet understand what has happened to their relationship with work, what their circumstances are asking of them, or how the person they've become fits with the life they're trying to sustain.

So in those moments, beginning with what someone is good at or what they might like to do next can mean beginning several steps too far ahead, because the person may not yet be ready to answer them.

The courage to remain with the question

There's a kind of patience required in these conversations that can feel counterintuitive.

When someone is distressed, we want to relieve their distress. When someone is uncertain, we want to help them find clarity. When someone feels stuck, we want to help them move.

And sometimes those instincts are exactly what's needed.

But there are other moments when the most helpful thing we can do is resist the temptation to fill the uncertainty too quickly.

To listen a little longer.

To notice what doesn't quite fit.

To be willing to say, perhaps we haven't understood this yet.

That isn't always comfortable.

For the person seeking help, it can mean acknowledging that the answer may not be immediately available, particularly when they're desperate for things to change.

For the person offering help, it can mean setting aside the reassuring familiarity of a process and allowing the conversation to go somewhere they hadn't anticipated.

It asks something of both people, and maybe that's why it's so tempting to reach for the trainers. They're tangible, familiar and we know what they're for.

It's much harder to sit with a fish and admit that we're not sure what it needs.

Understanding where we are

These experiences have influenced how I think about careers and the way I work with people today.

I've become increasingly interested in what happens before we begin making decisions about our working lives. Not simply what someone wants to do, or what they're capable of doing, but how they understand themselves in relation to the circumstances they're living and working in.

Because the questions we ask about our careers are rarely separate from the rest of our lives. And when we don't understand where we are, it becomes very difficult to judge which direction might genuinely serve us.

It's part of the thinking behind the Proactive Empowered Careers® Compass, which I've been developing as a way of helping people take a broader view of their circumstances before deciding what needs to change.

The Compass isn't intended to supply a ready-made answer. Its value lies in helping people see more clearly what they're experiencing, including things that may have been difficult to recognise or articulate.

Because sometimes the most important shift isn't discovering a new career possibility. It's beginning to understand the situation you're actually in.

And that understanding can change the questions you ask, the help you seek and the choices you begin to recognise as available to you.

Maybe we don't need an answer just yet

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if that conversation all those years ago had begun differently. If, instead of moving towards what I might do next, we'd spent a little longer exploring what I was struggling to describe. If someone had been curious about the bewilderment itself, rather than assuming that the career question I'd brought was the whole question.

I don't know if it would have changed what happened next. But I think I might have felt less alone in trying to make sense of it. And maybe I might have begun to recognise that not being able to explain what was wrong didn't mean there was something wrong with my ability to explain myself.

It just meant I hadn't understood what I was experiencing yet.

And that's the difference.

I think about that now, both as someone who once needed help and as someone whose work involves supporting other people through difficult moments in their careers and lives.

We don't always arrive at these conversations knowing what we need. And the person listening doesn't always have to know either.

Sometimes the most valuable thing two people can do is acknowledge that they haven't quite understood the question yet, and be willing to explore it together.

That's where the real help begins.

Not with the trainers.

But with understanding the fish.

Listen to the podcast

In Episode 35 of the Proactive Empowered Careers® podcast, “I Can't Keep Doing This. But What Exactly Needs to Change?”, I explore the urgency we can feel when something in our working lives has become unsustainable, and why the solutions we reach for don't always address what we're experiencing.

The previous episode introduces the Proactive Empowered Careers® Compass and the importance of understanding where we are before deciding where we want to go.

🎧 You can listen to Episode 35 below ⬇️

Continue exploring

If this reflection has resonated with you, these conversations from the Proactive Empowered Careers® podcast explore related questions from different perspectives.

• Proactive Empowered Careers® Compass — Taking Our Bearings (Episode 34)

What becomes possible when we begin by understanding where we are, rather than immediately deciding where we need to go? An introduction to the thinking behind the Proactive Empowered Careers® Compass.

• Connection: The Starting Point For Real Change (Episode 24)

  Before we can make meaningful choices about our working lives, we need to recognise what's happening within us. This episode explores the importance of reconnecting with ourselves.

• The Pressure to Know What's Comes Next

  Why can it be so uncomfortable not to have an answer? A reflection on the pressure to know what comes next, even when we're still trying to understand where we are.