How to ask for actually helpful advice

Have you ever asked friends or social media audience for advice, and the answers you got just made you feel worse?

I see so many posts where people get really honest about what they’re dealing with — imposter syndrome, writer’s block, analysis paralysis, and more. People are so willing to be vulnerable and open themselves up to help, which is amazing! But sometimes, they don’t get what they need out of the experience.

First of all, not everyone is good at really paying attention to what’s being asked and answering that question. People love to have the answers, so if you ask a question they don’t have the answer to, they might just answer a different question instead.

This drives me nuts, so if it bothers you too, I want to validate that! We can’t turn other people into good listeners, but we can listen to ourselves when our feelings get stepped on.

And there is another thing going on that you have some control over. A lot of these requests for advice share a productivity symptom and ask people how to treat that symptom, and that can bring in unhelpful advice.

Symptoms have many causes

Productivity symptoms are things like:

• inability to decide what to do next
• difficulty starting a task
• difficulty finishing projects instead of starting a new one
• spending a lot of your time doing something that doesn’t feel like a good use of your time on any level (that is, it’s not even fun or restful)
• feeling foggy or tired whenever you try to face a specific task
• suddenly wanting to do the dishes or anything other than a certain important task
• seeing something important pile up because you keep not getting to it

These are easily observable symptoms—your first clue that something is wrong. I’m not using the term symptom here to imply that this is a medical issue or a disorder. They’re just behaviors. My point is that symptoms are things you can see on the surface, not their root causes.

In our culture, we tend to focus on objective, observable phenomena, and so it’s easy to stop there. But these symptoms on the surface aren’t the root of the problem. Two people can have the same symptoms for totally different reasons.

For instance, lots of people have trouble putting away their laundry in a timely manner. (Like me!) For some, it’s because they forget about it, so a reminder would help. For others, it’s because a pile of laundry makes them feel guilty about the state of their closet, so a reminder would only make them want to avoid it more. They need something to relax their guilt.

It’s easy to feel bad about yourself when someone else’s advice doesn’t work for you, as if it means the only difference is that you’re more broken than they are. But that’s not the real difference. The real difference is that their underlying problem is different from yours. Different problems call for different solutions.

The strategy under the symptom

Often, we have symptoms that are caused by coping strategies which are prompted by beliefs. The closer we can get to the root cause—usually a belief—the better we can address the issue.

To peel back the first layer of the onion, think back to the decision point where you could have done it but you didn’t. What thoughts and feelings did you experience in that moment of decision?

It might not have felt like a decision—your subconscious might be taking charge, so that on a conscious level, it felt like a knee-jerk reaction, or it just happened. In that case, try to notice what you feel in your body in that moment of reaction.

This might reveal the coping strategy behind your behavior.

The guilty laundry-avoider

For instance, if you avoid putting away the laundry because you feel guilty that your closet is a wreck, you might trace the symptom of procrastination back to the strategy of avoiding facing your guilt.

If you ask people how they relieve their guilt about a messy room or being behind on chores, you might get much more helpful answers than if you ask them how they make sure to put away their laundry promptly. You might hear things about accepting that you won’t always get all your chores done and that’s really understandable given all your other responsibilities, instead of hearing about chore charts that just reinforce your sense that you must keep a perfect house at all times and everyone else is doing so.

The distracted laundry-forgetter

On the other hand, if you just forget to put away the laundry, you might not find a coping strategy. (Some people do have a subconscious strategy of putting things out of their minds to avoid discomfort, so what feels like forgetting could be a strategy. But in this case I’ll assume it’s fully accidental.) When you investigate the moment of decision or reaction, when you could have put away the laundry but didn’t, you might find that you got distracted by something and then the idea just didn’t come to you again until you passed by the pile of clothes and suddenly remembered they existed.

In this case, you could ask for advice about how to avoid distractions or create reminders and routines for yourself. Because this accidental forgetting doesn’t have an emotional root cause, tips and tricks from people with similar patterns of distraction (perhaps with a similar neurotype) could be really helpful. Meanwhile, the pep talk that helped our friend with laundry guilt might make you feel misunderstood.

The belief under the strategy

This step can be hard to do alone, and you should never force yourself to do it if a part of you doesn’t feel okay with it. But if it feels alright, you can peel back the second layer of the onion in cases where you did find a coping strategy. We generally don’t use coping strategies for no reason, so when there’s a strategy, there’s probably a belief. It’s often a belief about yourself or about how the world works, like “I’m a bad person if I can’t keep my room tidy,” or “Bad things will happen to me if I don’t follow the rules.”

It might not be a belief that you consciously endorse—you might call it irrational or unhealthy. But to a part of you, it probably feels gravely true. You might only come into contact with this feeling that it’s true on rare occasions. That’s because most of the time, your coping strategies are working, protecting you from feeling the full weight of the belief.

If it feels safe to investigate that belief in a curious, compassionate way—to neither take on the belief as a truth nor to try to push it out of your mind—then you can bring the light of day to that belief and see if it loses its hold on you.

At this level, we’re very vulnerable, so advice may not be what’s called for. When you’re in touch with this “center of the onion,” it might be best for you to ask for empathy rather than advice. Sometimes, feeling seen and accepted just as you are is the very thing you need to disprove your painful belief.

What’s your strategy?

When you think of your biggest productivity issue, the thing you might want to pick people’s brains about, can you look underneath the symptoms to the coping strategy? What do you think it’s really about?

My 2024 Daily Intention Tracker is designed to help you look for these strategies or other causes underneath your symptoms so that you can get whatever kind of help you need.

Maybe just looking at the problems will make it clear to you what’s needed.

Maybe it’ll set you up to ask for helpful advice, so that you get the kind of input you can use instead of just a bunch of people telling you their favorite to-do system.

And if you ever want one-on-one help working through the feelings that are keeping you from following through on your goals, it would be a great piece of information to bring to coaching.

Still not sure? In a Discernment Session, I can help you peel back the next layer of the onion and find out what’s really driving this issue.