ELOISE LIKES WRITING: ADVICE ON ADVICE
Lately I've been thinking a lot about advice, from both the giving and receiving perspectives. Here are my thoughts on it:
- "Don't give people advice" has seeped into our culture, and that is great inasmuch as it avoids the common pitfalls, but I pretty often find myself internally begging for someone to just directly tell me what they think. External perspectives can be very useful information! I'm driving a lot more blind without them. I've had good results with asking to box off 5 minutes where we throw out "overstepping" and my conversation partner just candidly tells me what they see and what they think I should do, and at the end of the 5 minutes I'll decide for myself if parts of that perspective ring true and useful.
- Agency should always lie with the advice-receiver, who has their own eyes and is the ultimate decider of what is right for them. It's bad if there's a vibe that the advice-giver is the wise sage and the advice-receiver is the student. I like to avoid viewing advice as being "a set of instructions", and see it more as "an exploration of a possible approach".
- People with above-average resistance to taking in true negative information about themselves are in a really tough spot. They can slowly destroy their lives and there's little they or anyone else can do about it.
- It's pointless or harmful if the advice-giver doesn't actually understand the problem very well, or isn't taking the advice-receiver's values into account. The best advice-givers I know spend most of their time first asking questions with openness.