When clients show up, one of the questions is what type of help they seek.

Quite often, what they look for is support with a magic wand, the best of which works instantly. And it’s not unusual, that people react as if they had one.

That is especially true, among colleagues and friends, when they seek advice, ask for a bit of help, or ask a “simple” question.

It’s the desire to help as much as the desire to feel powerful that are showing up. Seen through another lens, it is the desire to avoid uncertainty as well as the sense of powerlessness. Anxiety connects both.

While asking for help can be a display of integrity it also highlights a vulnerability. The person asking for help may be clear that they either don’t want or can’t deal with the situation on their own. But in asking for help, they step into a dependency. They can’t know if the help provided will do what they hope for nor if asking for help will actually provide help.

The person being asked for help meets the expectation that he has the help asked for. Starting to help becomes a promise that his reactions will provide the hoped-for solution. They find themselves putting their status at stake and having to prove their competence. They too step into a dependency. They can’t know if they will receive all the information needed nor if the other will be able to use the help provided as expected.

Both thus may prefer to stay away from the problem and use a more general approach allowing both to say that they didn’t cover the problem well enough.

It’s using the magic wand to keep the problem away.

The other solution would be to take the time needed to use each other’s expertise to understand the problem in its specificity. Sometimes this creates the solution, sometimes it clarifies that the problem is not the real problem, and sometimes it allows figuring out that someone else is needed to solve the problem. That is if it can and needs to be solved.