How Advice Gets Ruined by Cognitive Biases

When it comes to giving and receiving good advice, your brain may be getting in the way.

Daniel Kahneman, author of the blockbuster book, Thinking, Fast & Slow, is famous for his work on the psychology of decision-making. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. An enormous body of research from Kahneman and his colleagues over decades suggests the following:

  • You’re not as rational as you think.
  • Emotions, automatic responses, and mental shortcuts are much bigger drivers of our decisions than you might think.
  • Facts matter much less than you might think when you’re making decisions.

Kahneman and his long-time colleague, Amos Tversky, report that humans are prone to “severe and systematic errors” in their thinking because of the way their brains work. Much of that flows from cognitive biases, which are systematic errors in thinking that influence (and degrade) your decisions. Unfortunately, these cognitive biases can degrade or even ruin both the giving and receiving of advice. We address each of those in turn below.

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How Cognitive Biases Can Affect GIVING Advice

Here are several examples of how cognitive biases can degrade the thinking of advice givers and thus the quality and helpfulness of their advice:

Overconfidence Bias (when your confidence in your own knowledge or abilities exceeds the actual accuracy or skill you possess). You’re likely overestimating the probability your advice will work while also downplaying the potential difficulties. For example, if you’ve had some successful investments in the stock market, you might become overconfident in your ability to pick stocks or predict market trends. You might suggest risky investments without fully accounting for the risks and complexities involved. Big pain may follow for your friend.

Anchoring (when you rely too heavily on the first piece of information you encounter—the “anchor”—when making decisions, even if that information is irrelevant or incorrect). People tend to weight information more heavily when it appears early in a series, even when order isn’t important. For example, you might advise a colleague to accept a job offer based on the salary figure mentioned, which is higher than their current salary. Your colleague may end up overlooking other important factors like benefits, job security, flextime, and career growth opportunities.

Illusion of Control (overestimating your ability to control events). When giving advice, you’re likely forgetting many of the things that helped you address a similar situation. You may focus on your approach while downplaying the role of other key factors, such as other helpers and mentors, outside events, or even blind luck. Maybe you have navigated a few personal conflicts in your own marriage or with your team, and you start to believe you have a special knack for resolving relationship issues. You might give advice to friends experiencing relationship troubles, recommending specific approaches that worked for you. However, overestimating your ability to control and influence relationship dynamics can lead to poor advice, as each relationship is unique and influenced by complex factors that may not be addressed by the advice.

Framing (reacting to a choice differently depending on how it’s presented, whether as a loss or as a gain). For example, perhaps a business mentor advises a colleague to accept a job offer because it includes a significant annual bonus. Meanwhile, that framing is focused solely on the bonus without considering that it’s conditional on meeting challenging or even unrealistic performance targets—or that the base salary is lower than industry standards. Because of the framing, the mentee might overlook other less favorable aspects of the offer, resulting in a decision that doesn’t fully align with their current context and career goals.

Selective Recall (when you more accurately remember information or messages that are closer to your interests, values, and beliefs than those that contrast with them). You might recall more recent instances when taking an aggressive approach with your boss resulted in a big pay increase, forgetting about less successful times. Or you might be reminiscing about how a broad job search strategy worked well for you. As an investor, you might better recall the times when your stock picks were successful, conveniently forgetting the duds.

Curse of Knowledge (when you assume others also know what you know about a subject). If you have expertise in a field, you may struggle to simplify complex information for others who lack that specialized knowledge. It’s likely that you’ve known some things for so long that you forgot what it was like not to know them and thus have a hard time remembering that not everyone else knows them as well. For example, you might advise a junior employee to quit a job because you’re confident  they can quickly find a better position. Perhaps you’ve been through multiple resignations and firings. Meanwhile, you’re taking for granted your own extensive network and industry knowledge. You may be overlooking the junior employee’s less extensive network and their limited experience and job market understanding. Not to mention how overwhelmed or even terrified they may be feeling about the changes.

“Skillful performance and skillful teaching are not always the same thing,
so we shouldn’t expect the best performers to necessarily be the best teachers as well.”

-David Levari

“Hammers and Nails” (if you’re good with a tool, you may want to use it more often than is warranted). Example: If you’ve analyzed a problem in depth, you can end up exaggerating the importance of that problem. Recall that no one tool is good for everything. If your favorite tool is a hammer, look for colleagues with screwdrivers and wrenches. As a CEO, maybe you’ve used drastic cost-cutting in the past and now over-rely on that as a strategy. Or as a manager, maybe conflict-resolution training has worked well for you in the past but isn’t appropriate in the current context. As a founder, maybe you believe your inspirational speeches in front of the whole company are more impactful than they really are. (Source for the “hammer and nails” term and concept: Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About The World–And Why Things Are Better Than You Think.)

“We are skeptical that advisers can rid themselves of the cognitive and motivational biases that skew advice.” -Jason Dana and Daylian Cain, “Advice Versus Choice”, Current Opinion in Psychology, Volume 6, December 2015

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How Cognitive Biases Can Affect RECEIVING Advice

Unfortunately, cognitive biases can also downgrade or corrupt the thinking of the person receiving advice, compounding the problem even further. Here are examples:

Confirmation bias (your tendency to favor information that confirms your pre-existing beliefs and to ignore information that contradicts them). The person receiving your advice is likely not getting the message you’re trying to send. Instead, they’re subconsciously hyping the things you’re saying that fit with their existing beliefs while downplaying or even ignoring the ones that go against their beliefs. Common career beliefs that might bias their thinking include:

  • changing careers is a sign of instability or failure
  • a successful career must follow a straightforward, linear progression
  • advanced degrees or prestigious educational institutions automatically lead to better job opportunities and faster career progression

“Confirmation bias is probably the single biggest problem in business, because even the most sophisticated people get it wrong. People go out and they’re collecting the data, and they don’t realize they’re cooking the books.” -Dan Lovallo, decision-making researcher and professor

Halo Effect (when your overall positive impression of someone influences your judgments about their specific traits or advice). For example, you might get advice from a respected professor with an engaging teaching style but who has expertise in a different field. Because you admire the professor, you might follow her advice on career choices or thesis research methods that are outside her area of expertise. Meanwhile, you might be downplaying your own goals or not letting your core values guide you.

Positive Illusion (when you have unrealistically favorable attitudes about yourself or your future.) Did you know that the vast majority of us consider ourselves above average when it comes to leading, driving, getting along with others, and, yes, giving out helpful advice? Example: as an entrepreneur, you might believe that your new startup is destined for success despite numerous warning signs and market challenges. Your overconfidence can lead you to ignore critical feedback or warnings, ultimately jeopardizing your venture’s success.

Mere Exposure Effect (the tendency to develop a preference for things simply because they’re familiar). As a hiring manager, maybe you’ve repeatedly heard the name of a candidate from colleagues or advisors. This repeated exposure can lead you to favor (perhaps subconsciously) this candidate over others, even if other applicants are more qualified.

Personal Values Exercise

Complete this exercise to identify your personal values. It will help you develop self-awareness, including clarity about what’s most important to you in life and work, and serve as a safe harbor for you to return to when things are tough.

 

How Cognitive Biases Can Affect BOTH GIVING & RECEIVING Advice

Sometimes, the problem with cognitive biases and advice works in both directions—degrading the thinking of both the advice giver and receiver. A few examples:

Planning Fallacy (the tendency to underestimate the time, costs, and risks of future actions and to overestimate their benefits). For example, you might advise someone to set an ambitious deadline for a new project, underestimating the time required for research, development, and testing. Meanwhile, they’re overestimating the benefits of the work while downplaying the challenges. Ouch.

WYSIATI (“What You See Is All There Is”—the tendency to ignore the possibility that there’s missing information in a scenario). Here you might not consider that your current knowledge might be incomplete and that missing information could significantly impact your decisions. For example, if you traveled somewhere years ago, you might recommend that place based on your positive experience there, overlooking potential issues like crime, safety, seasonal weather differences, or new political problems. The person hearing about it may assume they don’t need to do their own checking based on your effusive recommendation.

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Conclusion

Clearly, advice comes with many challenges due to the way our minds work. You’re wise to be mindful of those challenges when giving and receiving advice—noting that many of these factors can be at work in a single advice session. Why not consider other ways of giving and receiving help that don’t have these pitfalls?

(This article is third in a three-part series on advice. Check out the other articles: “The Hazards of Advice” and “Don’t Give Advice. Do This Instead.”)

 

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Appendix: Quantity vs. Quality of Advice

Another problem comes with the quantity of advice given. Assistant Professor David Levari of Brown University and his colleagues found, across several studies, that top performers give more advance than others, but don’t give better advice.

“In our experiments, people given advice by top performers thought that it helped them more, even though it usually didn’t…. Top performers didn’t write more helpful advice, but they did write more of it, and people in our experiments mistook quantity for quality.”
-David Levari

In a 2022 Psychological Science article, the researchers concluded the following: “People seem to mistake quantity for quality. Our studies suggest that in at least in some instances, people may overvalue advice from top performers.” (Source: David E. Levari, Daniel T. Gilbert, Timothy D. Wilson. Tips From the Top: Do the Best Performers Really Give the Best Advice? Psychological Science, 2022; 33 (5).)

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Gregg Vanourek is a writer, teacher, and TEDx speaker on personal development and leadership. He is co-author of three books, including LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives (a manifesto for living with purpose and passion) and Triple Crown Leadership: Building Excellent, Ethical, and Enduring Organizations (a winner of the International Book Awards). Check out his Best Articles or get his monthly newsletter. If you found value in this article, please forward it to a friend. Every little bit helps!

Don’t Give Advice. Do This Instead

We often take for granted that advice is beneficial, but it has several hazards that are frequently overlooked. Often, it’s resisted or resented. Sometimes, it does more harm than good.

What to do, then, instead of giving advice? Here are 18 suggestions for how to help people without giving them advice:

1. Ask and listen. When people come to you seeking help, ask questions—ideally guiding questions that allow them to tap into their intuition, judgment, and deeper wisdom. Avoid jumping in to fill the silence. Give their thoughts and ideas time to percolate.

2. Clarify. Ask many questions to clarify the situation, people involved, and the relevant factors. How can you help if you don’t understand the context?

3. Invite their ideas. Don’t just leave room in the conversation for their initiative and creative ideas. Invite and celebrate them. Here are some things you could say:

What do you think?
If you had to get started on this right now, what would you do?
How could you make this work?
What are some possibilities to consider?

Focus on tapping into their inner wisdom and soliciting answers from them instead of handing down your own proclamations.

4. Detach from the results. Offer your help without attachment to what the person decides to do, or to the results. Guard against the sneaky arrival of your ego in the conversation, because it will place the focus on you instead of the person you’re trying to help.

5. Engage your heart. Share from your heart, not from a place of wanting to be right or needing to save or persuade the person. Invite their heart and wisdom into the conversation as well.

6. Provide space. Give the person space to express their own perspective, including concerns and fears.

Take the Traps Test

We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.

 

7. Be humble. Approach the situation with humility. Share your ideas and perspectives when appropriate (especially when asked), but allow for the fact that you may be missing something and that there may be multiple ways to address it. Recall that you don’t have all the facts and may be missing essential parts of the puzzle. Keep in mind that smart and experienced people often disagree about what to do with many situations.*

8. Focus on exploration, not certainty. Preface any input you provide by acknowledging you’re in exploration mode, not in certainty mode. For example:

Let’s bounce some ideas off each other.
This may be off but…
One idea could be…
What would you think about…

9. Empathize and offer emotional support. Don’t jump in without first pausing to observe how difficult this must be for them. Show them you recognize that—and that you care.

10. Walk alongside. Emphasize collaboration, not instruction or direction. Consider actually going for a walk so you’re literally side by side instead of facing each other.

11. Show loyalty. Have the person’s back and be totally committed to their success.

12. Show respect. Show the person deep respect with your presence and attention while acknowledging the difficulty and complexity of the situation at hand.

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13. Demonstrate belief. Show them you believe in them and trust them to solve the problem. Express your confidence in them.

14. Place them in the starring role—and keep them there. It’s their challenge and their life, so the solution should come from them. Will you be the Samwise Gamgee to their Frodo? The Peeta to their Katniss Everdeen? The Mr. Miyagi to their Karate Kid? The Minions to their Gru?

15. Determine the most valuable form of help in the situation. There are many different forms of help beyond advice: input, reactions, feedback, constructive criticism, guidance, coaching, mentoring, dialogue, reframing, and more. Even playing the devil’s advocate or setting a good example. Don’t assume that because someone comes to you asking for advice that advice-giving is warranted. Read the person and the situation. Maybe they need help seeing the big picture? Or a deep dive on the root causes? Maybe they need wisdom and discernment instead of a quick fix? Perhaps they really need encouragement, motivation, or inspiration and not “the answer” handed to them on a silver platter. Or maybe they just need a sounding board—or an opportunity to brainstorm together without judgment. Or empathy and understanding. In most cases, guiding and coaching are much more helpful than giving advice.

16. Accept them as they are. Don’t try to change or control them. Help them find their own way through their travails given their personality, preferences, passions, and values, not yours.

17. Share your personal experience when appropriate. Let them draw their own conclusions. Don’t assume that because something worked out for you that it means they need to do things the way you did. Different person, different situation.

18. Lead by example. Perhaps most important of all, focus on setting a good example by what you do instead of doling out advice. Your example is your most influential tool.

“A good example has twice the value of good advice.”
-Albert Schweitzer, humanitarian, philosopher, and physician

 

Conclusion

Yes, advice can help sometimes, but too often it’s lame and ineffective, an ego boost for the giver but a downer for the receiver. Why not up your game by really thinking through how to support someone without stepping on them?

(This article is second in a three-part series on advice. Check out the other articles: “The Hazards of Advice” and “How Advice Gets Ruined by Cognitive Biases.”)

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Postscript: Inspirations on “Don’t Give Advice”

  • “Nobody can give you wiser advice than yourself.” -Cicero, ancient Roman poet and philosopher
  • “As much as we love advice, we often don’t need it. The answer already lies within us.” -Bruce Feiler, The Search
  • “Let us not underestimate how hard it is to be compassionate. Compassion is hard because it requires the inner disposition to go with others to the place where they are weak, vulnerable, lonely, and broken. But this is not our spontaneous response to suffering. What we desire most is to do away with suffering by fleeing from it or finding a quick cure for it. As busy, active, relevant ministers, we want to earn our bread by making a real contribution. This means first and foremost doing something to show that our presence makes a difference. And so we ignore our greatest gift, which is our ability to enter into solidarity with those who suffer.” -Henri Nouwen, The Way of the Heart
  • “We stand with simple attentiveness at the borders of their solitude—trusting that they have within themselves whatever resources they need and that our attentiveness can help bring those resources into play.” -Parker Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness

* Think of all the conflicting advice out there. For example, should you plan in detail or go with the flow and be agile? Should you specialize or diversify? Start strong and make your mark or spend the first 100 days on a listening tour? Exude confidence or demonstrate humility? Stay the course or cut your losses?

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Gregg Vanourek is a writer, teacher, and TEDx speaker on personal development and leadership. He is co-author of three books, including LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives (a manifesto for living with purpose and passion) and Triple Crown Leadership: Building Excellent, Ethical, and Enduring Organizations (a winner of the International Book Awards). Check out his Best Articles or get his monthly newsletter. If you found value in this article, please forward it to a friend. Every little bit helps!

The Hazards of Advice

Article Summary: 

Advice is common, and we tend to assume it’s helpful, but there are many hazards of advice that we fail to account for. 18 risks and flaws that come with advice.

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Advice. It’s all around you. You may be drowning in it.

“You should do XYZ.”
“You need to get started on ABC, pronto.”

It comes from everywhere. From family, friends, colleagues, managers.

In most cases, their intent is good. They’re trying to help.

But many people don’t pay nearly enough attention to the negative unintended consequences of doling out advice. Sometimes advice does more harm than good.

Do you give unsolicited advice?
Are you, like so many of us, great at dishing out advice but terrible at taking it in?*
Have you ever shared a frustration with someone, really just wanting to vent about it, only to be on the receiving end of a tirade of advice from them?

Take the Traps Test

We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.

 

The Problem with Advice: 18 Risks and Flaws

Most people think of advice as helpful, and in some cases it is. But in many cases it misses the mark or even causes unexpected problems.

Yet, the advice train keeps rolling, in part because people haven’t taken the time to consider its downsides.

Here are 18 risks and flaws that come with advice:

1. While giving advice can feel great to the giver, receiving it can feel awful. Have you ever felt smothered by advice? Does it sometimes feel intrusive? It can put you on the defensive and make you feel put down or judged.

2. Giving advice can signal to the other person that you lack faith in their abilities. It can send the subtle message—even if unintended—that they need you or can’t get by on their own.

“It’s so counterproductive to think you can solve anyone else’s issues, because what it says is that they are not capable. It’s about the worst thing you can do for another human being.”
Karin Weber, author and life coach

3. Giving advice can undermine the other person’s confidence. Over time, that can impair their ability to address their own issues going forward.

4. Giving advice can create a cycle of dependency. It may feel good to have all the answers and be needed when people seek your advice. But you may be creating dependency on your expertise. They may start coming to you more and more. Meanwhile, you’re inadvertently preventing them from learning how to address things on their own.

5. Giving advice can be more about our own need to be helpful or to be seen as an expert or hero than about the other person’s needs. For many, giving advice can feel gratifying. It can make you feel smarter. Important and accomplished. Ask this: How much of it is really about you and your ego or control?

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6. Advice often comes at the wrong time. In many cases, people go out looking for advice at precisely the times they’re least able to receive it—the times when they’re down, confused, or frustrated. Similarly, when you see someone struggling, you may jump in with advice without even considering their receptivity to it.

“To rush in with success formulas when someone is emotionally low or fatigued or under a lot of pressure
is comparable to trying to teach a drowning man to swim.”

-Stephen R. Covey, Primary Greatness

7. The actual value of advice is rarely put to the test. Giving advice is easy not only because it’s quick and cost-free but also because you don’t have to stick around and implement it—and suffer the consequences if things don’t go as planned. Most people have no clue about the success or failure rate of their advice. (How could they?) And they probably overestimate their success rate by wide margins. (More on that in a coming article.) Many times, you never find out what happened after you gave your advice. What’s more, you don’t know if things worked out because of or in spite of your advice (versus other possible factors). In truth, there are many variables at play, so it’s overly simplistic to think it’s the advice that made all the difference.

8. Your advice may work for you but that doesn’t mean it will work for them. When you’re giving advice, you’re doing so from your current perspective, from your levels of consciousness and awareness. You’re doing so from a certain level of understanding and experience. You come with your own history, outlook, strengths, weaknesses, personality, passions, and predispositions. Maybe your advice would work brilliantly for you, but it’s unrealistic for them, with their personality, skills, and background.

9. Context is essential, and often it’s incomplete or flawed. Sometimes, the person seeking or getting advice hasn’t done a good job of explaining the context and the core problem, setting the stage for incomplete or faulty advice. Or you jump in without a deep dive on the situation and all the players and factors.

“There are reasons why your ideas are often not that great. To start with, you don’t have the full picture. You’ve got a few facts, a delightful collection of baggage, a robust serving of opinion, and an ocean of assumption. You think you understand what’s happening. Your brain is designed to find patterns and make connections that reassure you that you know what’s going on. Trust me, you don’t. What you’ve got is one part truth and about six parts conjecture.”
-Michael Bungay Stanier, The Advice Trap

10. People asking you for advice may not have a good sense of what you really know well and what you don’t. They may have unrealistic expectations about the things you can speak about with authority. Many young entrepreneurs, for example, are hungry for advice as they build their new venture. Makes sense. When they approach a seasoned entrepreneur, they can have questions about a hundred things. Hiring. Onboarding. Tech platforms. Stock options. Cap tables. Seed rounds. Product launches. Sales. Pricing. Strategy. Business models. Customer development. Leadership. Culture-building. A.I. Can most entrepreneurs, even if successful, address all these issues with authority and conviction, tailored to all the markets and industries of the advice-seeking young founders?

11. Nobody wants to tell someone their baby is ugly. If someone comes to you seeking advice about their new idea (e.g., for a startup or a new approach), they’re unknowingly making it exceedingly awkward for you to give forthright input. Why? Because we humans are wired to avoid conflict and have difficult conversations. You might be tempted to place negative feedback in a “sandwich” of positives (as is commonly recommended), but that risks having the recipient miss the “meat” of what they really need to hear.

12. Most advice is woefully incomplete. Think about common advice you’ve heard a hundred times: Follow your passion. Find your purpose. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Go the extra mile. Drink a lot of water. Network. Meditate. Be grateful. Don’t go to bed angry. Etc. Etc. True, in many cases. Even helpful. But wretchedly oversimplified and missing essential elements. For example, how do you discover your passion? Do you have just one? What is purpose, and how do you find it? What to do after diversifying? And so on.

13. Advice can easily become overwhelming. All the aspects and steps may be clear to you, because you’ve been in a similar situation before. But it may all be new, daunting, and even confounding to them.

Personal Values Exercise

Complete this exercise to identify your personal values. It will help you develop self-awareness, including clarity about what’s most important to you in life and work, and serve as a safe harbor for you to return to when things are tough.

 

14. Giving advice can put distance in relationships. People may stop sharing concerns or problems with you because they know you’ll be too quick to jump in with your thoughts on what they need to do.

15. Advice can lead to resentment, which can poison relationships. Have you ever given advice and then felt frustrated that the person didn’t do what you said? In your mind, it may be perfectly clear and settled that they’ll go out and dutifully do exactly what you said. But maybe they had reservations about your advice based on their own experiences? Maybe they weren’t comfortable handling things your way, given their personality or values? Perhaps they got vastly different advice from someone else they trust? Maybe they didn’t know how to follow through on what you said or lost their motivation? Or something changed in the interim? When people don’t follow your advice, do you take it personally and get agitated? That can damage the relationship, and it’s often a sign that it’s become more about you than them.

16. Recall that “I was only trying to help” is often a cop-out (even when your intentions are in fact pure). True help often requires a smarter and more nuanced approach than dishing out advice. It may be easy to hide behind the “only trying to help” rationalization, but that doesn’t wash away your sins or address all the risks and flaws of giving advice.

“’I was only trying to help’ sounds like a positive statement born of caring,
but how often does it mask unwelcome intrusion?”

-Deepak Chopra, The Shadow Effect

17. Advice can shut them down. Sometimes, while the advice giver gets on a roll with ideas and solutions, it can cause the person receiving advice to become passive. The exchange becomes one-sided. Worse, it can silence their inner voice and take them away from their deeper wisdom by engaging their self-consciousness and ego, with status games suddenly afoot. According to Professor Richard Boyatzis of Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University, when people hear critical feedback, they tend to experience strong negative emotion, inhibiting their access to certain neural circuits in their brain and invoking “cognitive, emotional, and perceptual impairment.”

18. Advice is often a poor substitute for what’s really needed. Do they need to be told what to do? Fixed? Or do they need to be seen and heard, to be witnessed? Often, what people really need is connection, solidarity, and support—and to tap into their own brilliance and power.

 

Conclusion

Of course, advice isn’t all bad. Sometimes it really helps. In many cases, you might be missing something important that another person can bring to the table with advice.

Yes, it’s folly to try to go it alone. And yes, we sometimes need help and input from others. But often, the last thing people need is the kind of advice we’re all awash in.

When it comes to advice, we can and must do better.

(This article is first in a three-part series on advice. Check out the other articles: “Don’t Give Advice. Do This Instead” and “How Advice Gets Ruined by Cognitive Biases.”)

 

Reflection Questions

  1. Are you giving this kind of unsolicited or one-sided advice too often?
  2. Have you stopped to notice that it may not be as helpful as you think and that it may come with more risks and flaws than you’re accounting for?
  3. What other kinds of exchanges might be more helpful?

 

Tools for You

Strengths Search

We all have core strengths–the things in which we most excel. Take this self-assessment to determine your core strengths so you can integrate them more into your life and work.

 

Related Articles

 

Postscript: Quotations on Advice

  • “A good example has twice the value of good advice.” -Albert Schweitzer, physician, philosopher, and humanitarian
  • “…some people walk around giving unsolicited advice. The assumption is that they’re right, others are wrong, others need correcting, and the act of doling out advice is like a gift from above. More often, though, it trounces on people’s feelings and makes things worse. People don’t want to be fixed. They want to feel supported and valued as they go through their own journey, including wins, losses, and learnings. We all want to be the heroes of our own story.” -Gregg Vanourek, “How to Give Feedback—A Communication Superpower
  • “…all advice can only be a product of the man who gives it. What is truth to one may be disaster to another. I do not see life through your eyes, nor you through mine.” -Hunter S. Thompson (Thompson was 22 years old when he wrote this letter to his friend Hume Logan in response to a request for life advice)
  • “One of the hardest things we must do sometimes is to be present to another person’s pain without trying to ‘fix’ it, to simply stand respectfully at the edge of that person’s mystery and misery. Standing there, we feel useless and powerless…. In an effort to avoid those feelings, I give advice, which sets me, not you, free.” -Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak
  • “Anyone who tries to force-feed you advice isn’t likely to be a competent soul guide.” -Martha Beck, The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to True Self
  • “The human soul doesn’t want to be advised or fixed or saved. It simply wants to be witnessed—to be seen, heard, and companioned exactly as it is. When we make that kind of deep bow to the soul of a suffering person, our respect reinforces the soul’s healing resources, the only resources that can help the sufferer make it through.” -Parker Palmer, “The Gift of Presence, the Perils of Advice”

* Admittedly, part of the problem is that some people are promiscuous about soliciting advice. Sometimes, they have an ulterior motive. What they really want is for you to do something for them (go to bat for them at work or introduce them to an important person), and they’re using your vanity as a way in (e.g., making you feel smart and important by nodding breathlessly as you dispense your brilliant advice).

Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter

Join our rapidly growing community. Sign up now and get monthly inspirations (new articles, opportunities, and resources). Welcome!

 

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Gregg Vanourek is a writer, teacher, and TEDx speaker on personal development and leadership. He is co-author of three books, including LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives (a manifesto for living with purpose and passion) and Triple Crown Leadership: Building Excellent, Ethical, and Enduring Organizations (a winner of the International Book Awards). Check out his Best Articles or get his monthly newsletter. If you found value in this article, please forward it to a friend. Every little bit helps!