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Can you come up with the worst advice you’ve been given? Is it from yourself?

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It probably isn’t. We tend to seek advice from, for example, colleagues who have time, rather than those who have the right skills or experience. And even if we went to the best, the chance that the council is not useful is great, as the one who gives the advice is, all other things being equal, closer to himself than you. The council is more based on the one who gives the advice than the one who receives.

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Wouldn’t we, as the recipient, speak up when we were given bad advice? Not always. Often, we seek the advice of others because we ourselves are in doubt, unsure whether we are making the right decision. That nervousness makes us worse or unable to assess whether advice is good or bad in our own situation.

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Getting the best advice is to give it yourself

On the one hand, we are too unsure of ourselves and would like other people’s advice. On the other hand, we are the best at advising ourselves. How does that work?

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If you want to be better at giving yourself good advice, ask yourself what you would say to a friend or colleague with the same question that you yourself wonder about.

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What do you say?

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Listen to what you say. This is often the advice that you yourself can usefully follow.

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By pulling it away from yourself and pretending to be your best friend, you get to focus on the 2-3 most important aspects of a question, and you don’t get to bury yourself in lists or excel sheets with pros and cons. It becomes simpler when we keep things at bay.

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Align expectations when you’re giving advice to others

Should we stop giving advice to others when they ask us? No, there is much more to advice than the council itself; For example, to become wiser together, exchange perspectives and forge closer ties. If you still want to get better at giving better advice to others, try asking those seeking advice about the following before giving advice:

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• Do you need to validate an already made decision?

• Do you need to challenge your assumptions? (What are facts and what are assumptions)

• Do you need us to think through all your considerations together?

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And when you seek advice from others, align expectations based on the same three points above. What do you need. Often it is not the advice itself that we need, but the process towards an answer.

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Hard to give yourself advice? Learn it anyway

Giving others the best advice, we should be following ourselves can feel contradictory. A paradox that we can become better at dealing with by being our own best friend. If you experience doubts about the best way to go in a situation, you can investigate what you are looking for advice for by:

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• Listen to the advice you give others

• If your friend was in the same situation, what would you say?

• If no one has asked you for input on your question before, think of a person and ‘give it to them’ in mind or say it out loud to yourself

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This is often the advice you beneficially can follow yourself.

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We can give better advice, make the situation less complicated, and motivate ourselves toward a goal by looking at it all as if it were someone else’s.

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Do you want to learn more

You can now start giving yourself better advice. If a confidential space will support what you are talking to yourself about, you can read more about how coaching conversations or philosophical conversations can be valuable to you.

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If you would like to work more with your leadership in a confidential space, please get in touch here, where you can learn more about how it can be done and take the next step.

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