What It Means to Support Others Without Always Having the Answers

No one knows everything. That’s obvious on a logical level, but it can also be a limiting thought in the context of certain careers. When your job is to help people with their personal problems, but you feel like you’re drowning in your own, what does that mean exactly?

Contrary to what you might assume, doctors, nurses, teachers, social workers, and mental health counselors do not have everything figured out. In fact, they may often share many of the same problems that the people they are helping struggle with. This is normal. It doesn’t mean that they’re unfit for the job. It just means that they, like billions of humans before them, have discovered a challenging truth. Life is complicated, messy, and sometimes full of contradictions.

What does it mean to help people with their problems even as you struggle with your own? In this article, we take a look at how and why imperfect people can still have meaningful careers in professions centered around helping others.

Why You Don’t Have to Have All the Answers

First of all, it’s important to keep in mind that truly no one has all of the answers. To acknowledge that you’re struggling is not to admit a fatal flaw. Quite the contrary. It’s evidence of a practical mind and an honest attitude.

Careers that are centered around helping others do not require perfection, particularly not perfection in your personal life. Is it true that a social worker or a mental health counselor might apply their professional principles to their personal problems?

Absolutely. Many do, though not with perfect consistency. No one would fault a dietitian for occasionally getting a cheeseburger.

No one would fault a professional tasked with helping others for having their own personal problems.

Remember that these jobs require nothing at all from your personal life. At home, you can be just as dysfunctional as anyone else. The criteria for being a professional who helps others is to:

• Recognize potential problems in others, and
• Help them work through solutions.

You do not need to have mastered those solutions yourself. You simply need to be able to help other people work through them.

Why These Careers Do Not Require Perfection

It’s nice to say that nobody is perfect, but that doesn’t really get to the heart of the matter. The fact is that none of the careers mentioned in this article require perfection. In fact, the skills required to be a good teacher, social worker, nurse, or counselor are effectively the same professional attributes required by other professions: time management, communication, organization, and subject matter mastery.

Yes, careers focused around people and their problems require a higher level of empathy than might be needed by an accountant, for example. But at the end of the day, these are still jobs. They run on systems, procedures, and company or institutional protocols. There is a roadmap full of dos and don’ts for how to do these jobs well.

You don’t have to have all of the answers because the job requirement is not to interpret every problem on your own and invent new solutions. There is, of course, an element of tailoring your services to the individual in front of you. That’s what makes a good professional. But you’re also not constantly reinventing the wheel.

Overcoming Self-Doubt

Self-doubt is a common quality among nearly all humans. It might even be fair to say that people who never question their own abilities may be operating under some level of delusion—productive delusion, perhaps, but delusion nonetheless. No one can do everything, control everything, or perfect everything.

When you feel overwhelmed by these facts, it’s often attributed to a condition known as imposter syndrome. Basically, you feel like everyone else knows what they’re doing, and you’re just faking it. Imposter syndrome is extremely common among professionals, business owners, parents—anyone who feels as though they have more responsibility than they are qualified to handle.

It’s important to remember in these situations that there are processes in place for vetting professionals. You didn’t walk into a hospital one day and say, “I’d like to be a nurse, please. No, I don’t have any experience, but I’ve always had a knack for band-aids.” You went to school. You completed hundreds of hours of clinical rotations. You checked the boxes. You passed the tests.

Lean on Continuing Education, Mentorship, and Professional Processes

When you feel doubtful of your ability to succeed as a professional responsible for helping others, remember that there are resources designed to help you do your job the right way.

Most of the professions listed in this article require continuing education. This means you’ll constantly be refreshing your skill set through training opportunities, classes, workshops, and more.

Many of these jobs also involve some form of mentorship. For example, a new teacher might have regular meetings with a more established teacher. The same is true for social workers and nurses. Sometimes these arrangements are optional. Sometimes they’re mandated. Either way, they provide an opportunity to get feedback on your work and talk through doubts. Chances are that a more experienced professional had many of the same worries at some point in their career.

It also helps to remember that you aren’t here by accident. You did the work. You passed the assessments. That means you have the skills. Now you’re working within a system designed to support and further develop those skills. You won’t do a perfect job, but you’ll do well.

Conclusion

The world needs doctors, nurses, social workers, teachers, counselors, and more—and now more than ever. We don’t have the luxury of waiting for perfect people. If you’re interested in a career centered on helping others, understand that you don’t need all the answers. Work hard, lead with empathy, trust the process, and know that you can do this.