What’s the Difference Between Support and Advice Giving?
Support can take various forms however, providing emotional support and advice is different.
Supporting someone means providing emotional or practical assistance when it is needed. This support occurs when someone is going through tough times, needs help navigating challenges, trying to achieve specific goals, or working on maintaining well-being. Emotional support means understanding, hearing, and valuing someone by offering understanding and validating emotions. For example, active listening and asking clarifying questions when your friend is going through a challenging situation is an example of emotional support. This can include physical support; for example, hugging someone when they feel sorry is an example of emotional support. On the other hand, Practical support means assisting someone with specific tasks (relational, educational, or even occupational). For example, you can provide solution-based assistance to your friend about their homework. These two aspects of support are complimentary.
As you can see, support can take various forms. Nevertheless, every aspect of providing support involves common points, such as active listening, empathizing, validation, and reassurance. Active listening requires giving your full attention and showing mindful body language, helping the person feel heard. Empathy allows you to see a situation from another's perspective, fostering connection and understanding. Validation acknowledges and understands a person’s feelings, while reassurance can restore confidence through comforting gestures. Reassurance means providing comfort or encouragement about the challenge.
Advice-giving is also considered a form of practical support. However, providing emotional support and advice is different. They might have seemed identical because the common items we counted above seemed to apply in both terms. Still, they are not. Providing support is distinct from advice-giving because advice-giving aims to give a direction to resolve an issue. This direction is often in line with advisors' experience, which can overwhelm or dismiss the individual’s feelings if offered unsolicitedly. To effectively support someone, it's important to acknowledge their struggles, communicate your willingness to help, and ask open-ended questions to understand their specific needs. Let's take a closer look at these concepts.
What Does it Mean to Support Someone?
Supporting someone you care about often means providing some kind of assistance (emotional or practical) during a time of need. It does not matter which one you choose; there are different ways to support someone you care about. Without separating aspects of support, we will look closer at the terms below:
Active listening
Empathizing
Validation
Reassurance
Kind Gestures
Physical Touch
Here are definitions of these terms and what you can do to take these actions:
Active listening & Empathy
Active listening and empathy are used in every way of support to provide full engagement, acknowledgment, and emotional connection. Eventhough both concepts are similar, they require different skills and are used in, especially, emotional support.
Active Listening
This is the practice of attentively listening to another person.
Active listening requires your undivided attention, eye contact, and mindful body language. This is especially helpful when someone wants to feel heard.
Empathizing
Empathizing is the ability to look past one's own emotions/biases and put oneself in someone else's shoes, seeing a situation through someone else's lens.
Empathy facilitates connection and helps people feel understood.
Validation & Reassurance
Validation and reassurance are used for different aspects of support. Validation means acknowledging and affirming the emotions of another, while reassurance means providing comfort or encouragement. The difference is that one is about being heard, and the other is about getting comfort or confidence. Here are more detailed information about them:
Validation
This is when one person signals to another person that their feelings and distress are recognized and understood.
Like empathy, validating feelings can help someone feel understood, heard, and seen.
Reassurance
This can be used when someone needs comfort, confidence, or encouragement about a situation.
Reassurance can take the form of different behaviors, such as information sharing, physical touch, or other gestures that soothe anxiety and restore confidence.
Reassurance can be especially helpful for people who experience low confidence or self-doubt.
Kind Gestures & Physical Touch
Kind gestures involve thoughtful actions to show that you care about that person. They do not have to involve physical gestures. On the other hand, physical touch is a way of communicating nonverbally. Both can be categorized as emotional support.
Kind Gestures
These gestures can be anything someone does in hopes of positively impacting someone.
This can include acts of service or gift-giving. It can be especially helpful for people going through a difficult time (or a period).
Physical Touch
This is a form of support that communicates love to someone.
Scientifically, physical touch reduces stress hormones and elevates oxytocin hormones to relax the person.
Physical touch can include hugs, kisses, caresses, and cuddling. This can be especially helpful for someone whose love language is physical touch.
Other Forms of Support
Other forms of help often conflated with emotional support include advice-giving and problem-solving, which are part of practical support. Here are definitions of advice-giving and problem-solving:
Advice giving is when one person shares with another person their opinions or feelings on what someone should do in a situation.
Problem-solving is when one person provides another person with suggestions on how to “fix” an issue.
Both forms of help can be helpful under specific circumstances, typically when the person in distress explicitly asks for advice or problem-solving support.
Issues With Advice Giving & Problem Solving
Advice-giving or problem-solving are often unhelpful when someone does not ask for these. When we give (unsolicited) advice or solutions, we negatively impact the person we want to support:
Overwhelm the individual with suggestions
Dismiss the feelings of the individual
Communicate a lack of empathy, care, or understanding
Make the situation about our feelings
How to Offer Support Emotionally
It's hard (if not impossible) to always know the best way to support someone in distress. However, there are things you can do to avoid assuming the support someone is seeking.
How to address active listening?
First and most important is to detect what kind of support is needed. To do that, you can ask questions such as, “What kind of support do you need?” or “Do you want to talk about this more?” This will help you detect what is needed in accordance with other people’s needs.
You can listen to others without interrupting and use verbal techniques such as summarizing, paraphrasing, and asking clarifying questions.
You can use nonverbal techniques such as nodding or using eye contact.
To do that, you can communicate your desire for support. You can use phrases like, “I would love to help you. Is there a way I can support you? Please let me know if you need anything.”
How to address empathizing?
You can imagine yourself in someone else’s shoes and ask open-ended questions.
You can be mindful of your responses and modify them if they involve criticism or minimizing.
How to address validation and reassurance?
To do that, you can label other’s emotions correctly and validate that their feelings are valid.
You can use phrases like “it is okay to feel this way.” or” I'm sorry you’re going through a hard time.”
You can use phrases like “You are doing your best, and that is more than enough.”
How to address kind gestures and physical touch?
To address kind gestures, you can bring a meal, coffee, or tea to another person, write a text message to check on someone, or provide errands when needed.
If one’s love language is physical touch, hugging when someone is going through a difficult time or tapping on shoulders can provide some support by increasing oxytocin levels.
Takeaways
Supporting someone you care about means providing assistance during difficult times.
This assistance can take various forms, such as active listening, empathy, validation, reassurance, kind gestures, and physical touch.
Advice-giving is about sharing opinions or feelings with another person on what someone should do in a situation.
Advice-giving or problem-solving is often unhelpful, and it can lead to other people feeling overwhelmed, dismissing their feelings, and lacking empathy. In this case, we might focus on our emotions rather than the situation itself.
Offering support includes acknowledging or validating other people’s feelings, communicating aimed at support, and asking questions to clarify the situation.