Last week, we talked about becoming helpful and helpable as a team. Today, I want to go deeper on that second word… helpable, because there is a misconception that can become a barrier to personal growth.
Every one of us gets stuck. There are things you don’t know. Situations you’ve never handled. Moments when your confidence gets shaken. Conversations you avoid because you’re not sure what to say. Responsibilities that feel overwhelming. Goals you’re not sure how to reach.
None of that makes you helpless. It makes you human.
The danger comes when “I don’t know what to do yet” slowly turns into “There’s nothing I can do.” Those are completely different beliefs and they produce completely different behaviors.
When you believe there’s something you can do, you start looking for it. You ask a question. You talk with someone. You change your approach. You get more information. You experiment a new method. You admit something isn’t working. You take the next available step.
When you decide you’re helpless, you simply stop looking.
That’s why helplessness is so dangerous inside a team. A scheduling problem becomes “That’s just how patients are.” A communication problem becomes “Nobody ever listens.” A case acceptance problem becomes “People just don’t have money.” A performance problem becomes “We’re too busy.” A culture problem becomes “That’s just the way we are.”
The moment we decide the cause of everything is outside our ability to influence it, we’ve also decided that improvement is outside our ability to influence.
I don’t want that for you. I don’t want that for your patients.
This doesn’t mean pretending every circumstance is within your control. Of course it’s not. You can’t control every patient, every schedule change, every personality, every traffic jam, or every unexpected thing that happens during a day.
You can almost always control your next response. That’s where progress begins.
Sometimes progress doesn’t always feel like forward movement. Maybe it simply sounds like, “This isn’t working, and I need to do something differently.”
That’s why being helpable matters so much. Asking for help is not surrendering responsibility. In fact, asking for help is taking responsibility. You’re saying the outcome matters enough to you that your ego is not going to stand between where you are and where you need to go.
That’s a powerful mentality personally, professionally, and as a leader.
For Your Patients
When you move from stuck to resourceful, patients feel it. They see a team that solves problems instead of complaining about them. They experience care from people who ask questions, get better, and keep moving forward. That builds trust faster than anything we could ever say in a conversation.
When a patient sees a team that believes problems can be solved, they start believing their own problems can be solved too. That’s when case acceptance goes up, that’s when referrals happen, and that’s when people stay loyal for years.
Here’s what I want you to do this week:
1. Identify one place where you feel stuck personally. Don’t make this theoretical. Pick something real. Maybe it’s something with your role. Maybe it’s a patient conversation you struggle with. Maybe you’re behind on something. Maybe there’s tension with another team member. Maybe there’s a skill you need to develop.
2. Change the question. Instead of asking “Why is this happening to me?” ask “What can I do next?”
3. Then, ask this: “Who could help me?”
Those two questions will move you from helplessness toward resourcefulness very quickly. You don’t need the entire solution today. You just need movement.
Progress builds confidence. Every time you take action, learn something, ask for help, or make a difficult decision, you give yourself evidence that you’re not stuck forever. You can learn something. You can change something.
This doesn’t stop with you alone. When someone on your team is struggling, don’t immediately take the problem away from them. Instead, help them discover what they can do about it by asking questions that move them toward ownership. Give them support without accidentally teaching them dependency. The goal is not to become the person who solves everybody’s problems; the goal is to develop people who believe problems can be solved.
Work together and you’ll discover that the situations holding you back were never quite as powerful as you once believed.
