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Today's
Meditation:
I try to
give little advice. When I do, I try to preface it
with the statement, "This is simply advice, not me
telling you what to do." I know from experience
that advice isn't very often the best thing for anyone--
after all, what worked best for me probably won't
work best for you. You're a different person facing
perhaps a similar situation, but not an identical one--
what worked for me may or may not be effective
here. There is advice that is fairly universal
(don't text while driving, for example), but much of it is
simply someone else telling us what they think is best for
us.
Good
advice stands out, and we know it when we hear it.
Poor advice is much more common, and we usually know that
when we hear it, too. The problem is that often the
good advice is the harder path to follow, so we go with
the advice that we want to hear. We've simply fallen
victim to the confirmation bias-- someone else tells us
it's good to do what we want to do instead of what's best
to do, so we run with that and end up doing something that
wasn't best at all.
In
many situations I've given up asking for advice at
all. These are the situations in which I know what's
right, and even though it's hard, I know what I need to
do. Asking for advice would be more like asking for
someone else to justify a way out for me than actually
asking for advice, and I know that there really isn't any
easy way out. So I just do what I need to do, and
leave others out of it. (Of course, it's often wise
to ask others how to do certain things, especially
if they've been through it themselves.)
I
would like to think that my advice would be particularly
valuable to anyone who receives it, but the truth is that
it probably rarely is. I give it anyway, sparingly,
because I do have that urge to spare others unnecessary
pain or regret or problems. I have to keep in mind,
though, that there's a chance that my advice may cause
more of all of those things, so I need to be careful just
how and how often I dispense it.
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For further
thought:
In my experience, most
unsolicited advice comes from people who
genuinely care. They want what's best for you, and they think
their
cautionary tales (even when you know the advice to be
misguided)
can help you avoid missteps. Whenever possible, just
graciously
say "thank you" and move on. This lets those who
care feel like they
are participating in your success and helping you on your
journey.
Brittany Hodak
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