Guidance Systems

It must be difficult to give the right level of guidance to people who ask you for help. Actually, I suppose it is like being a TA, in that giving students the answer helps nobody but is sometimes the default when you're busy. I wonder how people learn to give enough information so that people aren't lost without just giving them the answer? I know I have trouble giving good hints when I'm teaching labs, at just the right level of informativeness to allow for learning, and this applies to personnel guidance in general, so it's a skill I'd like to learn--from both the guidance-giving and the guidance-receiving sides.

I try to do my research activities independently--I'm a grad student; I should be able to figure this stuff out mostly on my own, right? This takes me a fairly vast amount of time to do, but I try not to ask for help too often for the following reasons:
1) I won't learn how to be an independent researcher if I'm always running to the experts for help. When will I learn to manage my own questions, if not now?
2) Indicating to people that I need assistance tends to--in my perception--make them give me the answer. I don't want the answer; I want directions to a process for finding the answer. (This is probably the same personality trait as not reading the synopses of books or movies which I want to read or see.) Honestly, I'm sometimes afraid to ask for clarification because I fear that I'll then get explicit, step-by-step detail about what needs to be done. Then what widely-applicable skills have I learned from that?

Incidentally, please don't read into this a criticism of a particular person or persons; this is intended as a general question-posing session. I'm not saying I'm right in the above assessments and assumptions, and if anyone has further input, I'm more than willing to encounter that perspective. Things look mighty different outside my own head. I'll bet there are papers or books on education or management which deal with this topic, but I've not read any of them that I can recall.

What I really want to know is this: How do I ask questions such that I learn how to find the answer without learning immediately what the answer is?