When Are You Helping, and When Are You Meddling?
There's a line between helping someone and meddling in their life, and it moves depending on who it belongs to. Ask yourself a plain question when a person confides in you: are you treating what they said as an unspoken prayer, or as something juicy to pass along? Good intentions aside, plenty of us manage to make a situation worse. The rule I keep coming back to is simple. If the matter isn't yours, make sure that anything you do helps rather than hurts.
That includes honoring what the other person actually wants, even when you're certain you've spotted a smarter path. Your solution might be excellent. It still isn't help if it wasn't the thing they asked for. Help that arrives unrequested is usually just your own preference wearing a costume.
Consider how little room a person sometimes has to move. When someone feels lost and can't figure out what to do next, controlling the situation may be the one piece of ground they still stand on. So if they're carrying a problem, resist the urge to spread it around. Do no wrong, first of all. You might flatly disagree with the choices they're making, but how the news travels could be the last scrap of dignity they get to keep, and the only part of the whole mess they still have a hand in. Leave it to them. In this instance it really isn't about you, and turning it into that does damage.
Then there's the drama queen reflex: rushing to be the first to tell a story that was never yours to tell. When a person is dealing with something hard, their attention naturally lands on themselves and on whoever is directly caught up in it. It doesn't land on the bystander who wants the spotlight.
Think about how often you've begun describing a worry of your own, only for someone to cut in with their version of the same thing, which, to hear them say it, was so much worse. That's the move to avoid. If you want to do something useful when you can't fix a thing and it isn't yours to fix, you can pray. That needs no audience at all.