Is complacency creeping up on you, like it does to so many of us? Are you getting overly comfortable with things? Sliding into a state of easy contentment? Blissfully unaware of your life traps or leadership derailers? Showing the signs of complacency?
Complacency can prevent you from doing the things you really want to do in life.
There are many areas in which you can become complacent. For example:
Evaluate your quality of life in ten key areas by taking our assessment. Discover your strongest areas, and the areas that need work, then act accordingly.
Comfort and satisfaction aren’t inherently bad. They’re good, up to a point.
The issue arises when you become too comfortable and complacent, losing the motivation and passion to embrace challenges and chase your dreams.
Complacency drains your drive and leads to inaction when you should be taking steps forward. It prevents necessary improvements, reduces initiative, and diminishes your sense of hope. Over time, it fosters mediocrity, closes windows of opportunity, and stalls personal growth and career progress.
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.
Are you seeing signs of complacency in your life, work, or relationships?
What steps will you take to regain the drive and urgency to escape this trap?
Postscript: Inspirations on Signs of Complacency and Urgency
“Complacency keeps you living a comfortable life… not the life you desire. Challenge yourself to do something different. Then, notice the new charged quality of your life.” -Nina Amir, author and coach
“The life you have left is a gift. Cherish it. Enjoy it now, to the fullest. Do what matters, now.” -Leo Babauta, author
“The tragedy of life is often not in our failure, but rather in our complacency; not in our doing too much, but rather in our doing too little; not in our living above our ability, but rather in our living below our capacities.” -Benjamin E. Mays, Baptist minister and civil rights leader
“By far the biggest mistake people make when trying to change organizations is to plunge ahead without establishing a high enough sense of urgency in fellow managers and employees.” -John Kotter, professor, author, and thought leader in business, leadership, and organizational change
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Many of us lack authentic alignment in our life and work. We don’t have a good fit between who we are and how we live. On the problem with lacking authentic alignment, why it happens, and what to do about it.
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Are you being true to yourself? Is there a good fit between how you live and who you really are? In other words, do you have authentic alignment in your life?
If you’re living in authentic alignment (1), there’s a good match between your inner world of your thoughts, hopes, and dreams and the outer world of what you’re doing with your life. There’s coherence between your core values, beliefs, priorities, and actions. With authentic alignment, you’re more likely to have not only physical but also mental, emotional, and even spiritual health and wellness.
There’s great power in the integrity of what author Kevin Cashman calls “total congruence” between who you are and what you do. As well as in the wholeness of what educator and author Parker Palmer calls “an undivided life.”
“A happy life is one which is in accordance with its own nature.” -Lucius Annaeus Seneca, ancient Roman Stoic philosopher
The Problem of Lacking Authentic Alignment in Your Life
There are many instances in which we can see the problem with misalignment. If your car tires are out of alignment, for example, you can have poor handling, uneven tire wear, reduced fuel efficiency, and suspension problems. What happens when the players on a team are all over the place instead of acting as a disciplined unit? How will it go if a married couple isn’t on the same page about children and finances? What happens to organizations when they’re not aligned?
There’s also a cost to lacking authentic alignment in your life. When it’s missing, you tend to:
spend a lot of time doing things you don’t really want to do
be disconnected or cut off from yourself, making you feel off kilter
suspect that you’re going through the motions of life
be anxious, frustrated, or overwhelmed more often
feel lethargic or exhausted
What’s more, misalignment undermines your ability to do good work and perform at your highest levels.
“…there can be no greater suffering than living a lifelong lie….
in the end what will matter most is knowing that we stayed true to ourselves.”
-Parker Palmer, educator and writer
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.
Lacking authentic alignment is common. But why? There are many factors that can disrupt the rhythm of marching to the beat of your own drummer, as the expression goes. For example, you may drift away from your core because you:
don’t know who you are (or have forgotten it)
feel a need to please others or feel beholden to other people’s expectations
take too many things on because you’re overambitious about what you can do
have become a prisoner of success, perhaps due to an excessive need for recognition
Sometimes, an external shock can create misalignment. It can be moving to a new community, losing a job, having a health crisis, or losing a loved one.
Benefits of Authentic Alignment
When you’re playing your own tune in life, it can bring you many benefits, including:
a sense of wellness, including inner peace and harmony
When you have authentic alignment, you’re more likely to feel content and secure. You’re better able to move on and let go of things that aren’t good for you. And you’re able to tap into your inner voice and intuition.
With authentic alignment, you’re also better at setting boundaries and bolder in doing the things you really want to do. You’re likely to develop and maintain better relationships because you’re no longer hiding yourself. People will get to know the real you as you show up in the world with more honesty and vulnerability, in turn fostering connection and intimacy. You’ll tend to attract people who are a better fit for you in things like friendships or romantic relationships.
When you have authentic alignment, you don’t fret about wasting time because you’re intentionally engaging in good things in your life. This can help you move from a vexing sense of doubt about whether you’re living well to a sense of clarity, satisfaction, and serenity.
Living in authentic alignment can bring you a sense of profound satisfaction, with no need to keep chasing things because you already feel whole. Finally, it can help you avoid the common regret of living your life according to other people’s expectations instead of a life true to yourself.
“Of all of the regrets and lessons shared with me as I sat beside their beds, the regret of not having lived a life true to themselves was the most common of all. It was also the one that caused the most frustration” (since their realization came too late)…. “It is a pity that being who we truly are requires so much courage, but it does. It takes enormous courage at times.”
-Bronnie Ware, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying
How to Create and Maintain Authentic Alignment
How to go about creating more authentic alignment in your life? Here are 14 approaches:
1. Develop your self-awareness. Know yourself so well and deeply that you feel a sense of clarity and comfort about who you are and what makes you tick, helping you feel more comfortable in your own skin.
2. Strip away your ego, pride, and ambition. Set aside the expectations of others. Tap into your heart instead of your ego.
3. Remove your mask in front of those you love the most, deepening connection. Stop pretending to be something you’re not. Let them see the real you and invite them to reciprocate.
4. Explore the root causes that led you to want to avoid being yourself. Perhaps it was outside expectations? Or fear of judgment or failure? Fear of rejection, or of being hurt? Afraid to be seen for who you truly are? Sometimes, your life may be overly full, cluttered with too many commitments and too much “busyness.”
5. Return to your center by finding or creating sanctuary in your life. Sanctuary is a place or practice of peace in which you can leave the distractions, interruptions, and chaos behind and be present in silent, deep reflection. It could be a quiet room at home, a place of worship, or a quiet and solitary spot in nature.
6. Notice when you’re becoming misaligned. Pay attention to how you’re feeling. Is it frustration? Shame? Something else? Tune into your body and your emotions. Also, pay attention to the situations where it’s common: what are you doing and who are you with? See if there are patterns.
7. Practice disciplined self-care regularly. It’s easy to become misaligned when you’re tired, overworked, or burned out. Maintain healthy habits and rituals so you don’t fall into traps that get you out of alignment.
Quality of Life Assessment
Evaluate your quality of life in ten key areas by taking our assessment. Discover your strongest areas, and the areas that need work, then act accordingly.
8. Discover yourcore values. Your values are what you consider most important in life, what’s most worthy and valuable to you. Are you living in accordance with your values?
9. Discover yourstrengths. What are the things you’re good at and that make you feel powerful when you’re engaging in them? Make sure that you’re using them often.
10. Discover yourpassions. What are the things that consume you with palpable emotion over time? How can you integrate them into your days more often?
11. Discover yourpurpose. Think about why you’re here and what feels purposeful and meaningful to you. Are you living purposefully? This can be a tough one for people. Author Richard Leider points out that there are two types of purpose. First, is a “BIG P” Purpose (a noble cause or something you can dedicate your life to). But you can also have a “little p” purpose (daily choices of how to contribute to others). Leider notes that “little p” actions are just as worthy. Also, they can add up over time into something potent.
12. Craft avision of the good life. Think about how you want to live. What’s a bold and vivid picture of that? Make sure you’re working toward living it.
13. Be vigilant in declining activities that aren’t a good fit while agreeing to ones that are in alignment. When opportunities and requests come your way, do you have a good way to screen them? Without some sort of criteria or filter, you can end up with days filled with things are far afield from what you want to do.
14. Pay attention to when you need to interrupt the pattern and make a more radical shift. In a Harvard Business Review article, Donald Sull and Dominic Houlder point out that you may need to break the cycle with a catalyst like a course or sabbatical so you can spot unhealthy patterns and give yourself time to make needed changes.
Conclusion
Though authentic alignment may sound straightforward, it’s common for people to drift out of alignment.
It’s essential to be honest with yourself. If you can’t admit to yourself that you’re out of alignment, you’re unlikely to get it back.
It won’t help if you’re too hard on yourself when you drift. A little self-compassion can go a long way. Misalignment is common. If you find yourself judging yourself harshly and engaging in negative self-talk, change the channel and flip toward ideas for how to bring alignment back into your life.
It’s also important to have your own back. Go to bat for yourself just as you would your best friend. Finally, recall that authentic alignment is an ongoing process. Expect to have ups and downs. That’s okay, as long as you work to bring it back when you drift.
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.
“To thine own self be true.” -William Shakespeare, English poet, playwright, and actor
“To be nobody-but-yourself—in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.” -e.e. cummings, poet, painter, and playwright
“I know who I am. The more we try to be something we’re not, the less successful we’ll be…. I don’t care what I do as long as I adhere to certain values.” -Jael Kampfe, from our LIFE Entrepreneurs interview
“Some time when the river is ice ask me mistakes I have made. Ask me whether what I have done is my life.” -William Stafford, from his poem, “Ask Me”
“I think I’ve always had a strong sense of who I am, but allowing myself to be that person is more recent.” -Bridget Bradley Gray, from our LIFE Entrepreneurs interview
“Being true to who you really are can be one of the hardest things to do in life.” -Carlii Lyon, Australian executive
“Even if all these needs are satisfied, we may still often (if not always) expect that a new discontent and restlessness will soon develop, unless the individual is doing what he is fitted for. A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately happy. What a man can be, he must This need we may call self-actualization.” -Abraham Maslow, psychologist
“The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.” -Anna Quindlen, writer
“…the secret of career satisfaction lies in doing what you enjoy most. A few lucky people discover this secret early in life, but most of us are caught in a kind of psychological wrestling match, torn between what we think we can do, what we (or others) feel we ought to do, and what we think we want to do. Our advice? Concentrate instead on who you are, and the rest will fall into place.” -Paul D. Tieger, Barbara Barron, and Kelly Tieger, Do What You Are
“I can’t think of a sadder way to die than with the knowledge that I never showed up in this world as who I really am. I can’t think of a more graced way to die than with the knowledge that I showed up here as my true self, the best I knew how, able to engage life freely and lovingly because I had become fierce with reality.” -Parker Palmer, On the Brink of Everything
“The ultimate goal in life is not to be successful or loved, but to become the truest expression of ourselves, to live into authentic selfhood, to honor our birthright gifts and callings, and be of service to humanity and our world… life is seen as a journey of personal and collective unfolding toward our true nature.” -Frederic Laloux in Reinventing Organizations
“Afraid that our inner light will be extinguished or our inner darkness exposed, we hide our true identities from each other. In the process, we become separated from our own souls. We end up living divided lives, so far removed from the truth we hold within that we cannot know the integrity that comes from being what you are.” -Parker Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness
“Trying to live someone else’s life, or to live by an abstract norm, will invariably fail—and may even do great damage.” -Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak
“If you are experiencing unease or demotivation in your life, it is probably because you are not living according to your values.” -Andrew Bryant and Ana Kazan, Self-Leadership
“Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am. I must listen for the truths and values at the heart of my own identity, not the standards by which I must live—but the standards by which I cannot help but live if I am living my own life.” -Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak
“That’s who I am at my core, what I love. I mean, if a young person calls me and says, ‘Hey, can you help me? Can you listen to me?’ I can’t say no to that. It’s almost physically impossible for me to say no.” -Gerald Chertavian, from our LIFE Entrepreneurs interview
“One dwells with God by being faithful to one’s nature. One crosses God by trying to be something one is not.” -Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak
“I was dying inside. I was so possessed by trying to make you love me for my achievements that I was actually creating this identity that was disconnected from myself. I wanted people to love me for the hologram I created of myself.” -Chip Conley, author and entrepreneur, from our LIFE Entrepreneurs interview
Appendix: Related Concepts
There are several concepts related to authentic alignment that can help us understand it better.
Authenticity. When you’re authentic, it means you’re genuine, real, and true. Researcher and author Brene Brown defines authenticity as “the daily practice of letting go of who we think we’re supposed to be and embracing who we are.” Other researchers describe it as “the degree to which a particular behavior is congruent with a person’s attitudes, beliefs, values, motives, and other dispositions.” (Source: Jongman-Sereno, K. P., & Leary, M. R. (2019). The enigma of being yourself: A critical examination of the concept of authenticity. Review of General Psychology, 23(1), 133–142.)
Authentic Integrity. In our book, LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives, Christopher Gergen and I noted the importance of “authentic integrity”: “integration of all aspects of our lives in a way that coheres with our true nature.” It means living in alignment with our “core identity,” including our purpose, values, strengths, and aspirations.
“I just felt like I’ve lived a life that was true to itself…. Anybody who’s ever hung out in an ‘old man bar’—you know what I’m talking about—sees what happens when you don’t let that part of yourself do its thing.”
-Mary Cutrufello, musician and songwriter, in our LIFE Entrepreneurs interview
Self-concordance. Originally, researchers thought of self-concordance as being in touch with your deeper self. More recently, researchers are conceptualizing it as congruence between your implicit motives (unconscious, automatic drives) and explicit motives (conscious drives like personal goals). When you’re self-concordant, you tend to choose goals that are more personally productive and fulfilling. It enhances your ability to grow, achieve your goals, and feel happy. Researchers measure self-concordance via the relative autonomy index, with a continuum ranging from external to internal motivation. (Source: Kennon M. Sheldon and Erica A. Holberg, “Chapter Four—Using free will wisely: The importance of self-concordant goal pursuit,” Advances in Motivation Science, Vol. 10, 2023.)
Self-congruence. When you have self-congruence, you tend to behave consistently with who you really are and what you’re really like, according to researchers. This can include things like your “true self” or your attitudes, beliefs, and values.
True North. Authors Bill George and Peter Sims define your true north as “the internal compass that guides you successfully through life. It represents who you are as a human being at your deepest level. It is your orienting point.”
Critiques. Not surprisingly, there are also critiques of concepts like “authenticity” and “true self” in the research literature. For example, in their article, “The Enigma of Being Yourself,” Katrina P. Jongman-Sereno and Mark R. Leary write: “the human personality invariably contains myriad personality dispositions, emotional tendencies, values, attitudes, beliefs, and motives that are often contradictory and incompatible even though they are genuine aspects of the person’s psychological make-up…. People are genuinely multifaceted.”
“Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” -Walt Whitman, poet
Do we truly understand ourselves, including our behaviors, and the reasons behind them? Are our self-perceptions biased, incomplete, selective, or even inaccurate, as some researchers suggest? Additionally, how much does nonconscious mental functioning drive our behavior?
Researchers have noted that there’s ambiguity and variability in the definitions of terms like “authenticity,” not to mention cultural differences. They also warn against having an idealized version of the self, because it’s unattainable, leading to potential feelings of inadequacy or failure. For some, the pressure to “be authentic” can result in significant anxiety and stress.
Jongman-Sereno and Leary also note that our ability to adapt our behavior to suit different situations is generally beneficial for our psychological wellbeing and social relationships. We often find ourselves playing various roles at home and work, and that’s normal. (But there’s a significant difference between making small adjustments to ease interactions and wearing a mask to disguise who we really are.)
A brilliant but troubled young man from a tough neighborhood in south Boston is working as a janitor at an elite technical university. Despite his incredible potential, he plans to stick around with his childhood buddies and not use his gifts. His therapist comes from the same neighborhood and is fascinated by the smug young prodigy.
Sound familiar? It’s the plot of the acclaimed film, “Good Will Hunting,” of course, starring Matt Damon, Robin Williams, Ben Affleck, and Minnie Driver. And it’s also a case study in root causes.
In their first session, Will shocked his therapist, Dr. Sean Maguire, played by Robin Williams, with cutting observations about him based on his painting on the wall. When they met a few days later at the park, Sean told Will that, while he’s brilliant, he’s just a kid. Though he knows an astonishing amount of facts and figures, he really doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Will hasn’t traveled outside of Boston. He hasn’t yet experienced the things of the world that bring you deep wisdom, or real love with a partner.
Sean sees that, though Will has incredible intellectual abilities feeding his crass self-assurance, he’s really just lost and afraid. Sean asks him:
“You think I know the first thing about how hard your life has been, how you feel, who you are, because I read Oliver Twist? Does that encapsulate you? Personally… I don’t give a shit about all that, because you know what, I can’t learn anything from you, I can’t read in some f*ckin’ book. Unless you want to talk about you, who you are. Then I’m fascinated. I’m in. But you don’t want to do that do you sport? You’re terrified of what you might say.”
Will, perhaps for the first time in his life, had the tables turned on him. Later, in an emotional exchange in Sean’s office, they trade stories of their violent fathers. Will recently broke up with his girlfriend and suspects that Sean will give him some textbook theories about attachment disorder or fear of abandonment.
But Sean does something surprising. He drops Will’s psych file on the desk and says, “It’s not your fault.”
Will says he knows that. But Sean keeps repeating it, over and over. Until it finally cracks Will’s heart open and the pain comes streaming through—and healing.
They’d finally gotten to the root of it.
What Are You Struggling With?
Think about whether there are any recurring patterns or challenges in your life. (If so, welcome to the human race. You’re not alone.) Common ones include feeling stuck in your career and struggling with things like money, body image, self-doubt, or toxic relationships.
Have you, like Sean and Will, gotten to the root of it?
When you’re passed over for a promotion, your first response might be to blame your ungrateful manager. Upon further reflection, though, you might realize that you’re deflecting responsibility. Without understanding and addressing the root cause, you’re stuck spinning unhelpful stories and playing the victim.
Are your financial woes really about your stingy boss or your mindset, habits, and choices? Are your health problems really about your stressful job or about your numbing of deeper issues?
Difficult issues, for sure, but how long will they go on if you’re not addressing them at the right level?
When your yard has weeds, do you mow over them, or do you get down in the dirt and grab them by the root?
You may notice that many of the traps of living—the things that inhibit our happiness and quality of life—come with common root causes. Examples:
Having avictim mentality often stems from difficult experiences or trauma, leading you to feel powerless and believe that other people or outside circumstances dictate the terms of your life.
Blaming often originates in fear of vulnerability or failure. You may have learned to deflect responsibility as a coping mechanism to protect your self-image or avoid the irritation of accountability.
People-pleasing often stems from a desire for approval and acceptance, perhaps caused by early experiences of conditional love or approval. Maybe you internalized the message that your worth depends on meeting others’ expectations.
Workaholism can come from a need for achievement, perhaps driven by difficult or embarrassing situations early in life. Parental, peer, or societal pressures that equate success with achievement can fuel it. Your excessive work may be a means to gain control or validation.
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.
Here are nine things you can do when engaging in root cause analysis:
1. Use the “five whys” questioning technique to get beyond surface-level symptoms and drill down to root causes. When you encounter a problem, ask “Why?” five times. That inquiry can help take you down to the underlying issue. (See the “Practice” section below for more on this.)
2. Recognize that, while it may be tempting to externalize the problem and shift the blame, the root cause is often internal. Keep your focus on how and why things have happened instead of on who’s causing you difficulty. That way, you’ll focus on things you can control and avoid going down the rabbit holes of blaming and victimhood. Consider whether the root cause has to do with your mindset, beliefs, choices, attitudes, or habits.
3. Think about several challenges you’ve experienced and see if there’s a pattern. Sometimes, by looking at a series of things, you can trace them back to a common denominator. For example, it could be a fear of looking bad or of failing.
4. Challenge your limiting beliefs. Identify your limiting beliefs and then dig deeper into the assumptions behind them and consider where they come from. For example, if you believe you’re damaged goods, a failure, or not worthy of love, think about whether you somehow got the message that you need to act a certain way or achieve at a certain level to be a good person.
5. Note that while getting to the root cause is ideal, sometimes you may need immediate relief. In some cases, it’s helpful to address acute problems to give yourself more running room.
6. Note that there may be multiple root causes. Sometimes, there’s a confluence of factors causing you pain. If you’re experiencing anxiety, for example, it may stem from life events, personality traits, peer pressure, cultural influences, childhood upbringing and parenting approaches, genetic factors, and/or brain chemistry imbalances.
7. Don’t do this alone. Seek help from trusted friends and colleagues, a small, supportive group, or a therapist. That will help you identify blind spots, bring in fresh perspectives, and challenge your assumptions.
8. Look for ways to prevent the root causes from coming up in the future. For example, getting to the bottom of why you feel stuck in your career can help you identify key issues, such as a lack of clear and compelling career goals, insufficient skill development, and fear of change. Perhaps your lack of clarity stems from not taking the time to reflect on your core values, strengths, passions, and aspirations. And maybe your lack of skill development stems from complacency or an overfull schedule.
9. Also look for the root causes of your victories and successes, not just your defeats and failures. Doing so can help you continue having good results and also port those approaches to other areas of your life.
Conclusion
Engaging in root cause analysis is vital to success and wellbeing. By understanding the underlying factors that contribute to your struggles, you can implement targeted approaches to address them, leading to better outcomes. This proactive approach can enhance your self-awareness and your personal and professional growth. By committing to this reflective process, you can finally unshackle yourself from the things that have been holding you back.
Quality of Life Assessment
Evaluate your quality of life in ten key areas by taking our assessment. Discover your strongest areas, and the areas that need work, then act accordingly.
“When solving problems, dig at the roots instead of just hacking at the leaves.” -Anthony J. D’Angelo, author
“Negative thinking is subtle and deceptive. It wears many faces and hides behind the mask of excuses. It is important to strip away the mask and discover the real, root emotion.” -Robert H. Schuller, pastor
“We lack emotional connection even when we are surrounded by other people. This feeling of being profoundly alone is the root cause of unhappiness in the human race. It is the root cause of addictions. It is the root cause of suicide. It is the root cause of acts of terror. And it is the root of the dysfunction in the way society is structured.” -Teal Swan, author
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.
Practice: Using “Five Whys” to Identify the Root Cause
In the 1930s, Japanese inventor and industrialist Sakichi Toyoda developed a questioning technique known as the “five whys” method to improve manufacturing processes as part of the Toyota Production System. With this now-famous and widely used method, workers ask why at least five times when they encounter a problem, helping them discover and address the root cause of the problem instead of addressing surface-level symptoms.
Here’s how it works: When you encounter a problem, ask why it’s occurring, and then answer that. Then ask why again, and answer that. And so on, five times.
The idea is to encourage people to go deep enough and not stop too soon. But in reality, five isn’t a magic number, and the deeper why questioning process can end with any number of whys. But five is a good proxy for going deep.
Here’s an example:
Why does Alicia feel stuck in her career? Because she hasn’t taken on any new responsibilities lately.
Why? Because her current workload feels overwhelming.
Why? Because she spends a lot of time people-pleasing and managing tasks that could be delegated.
Why? Because she worries that her team members might not complete them to her standards.
Why isn’t our new product selling well? Because customers aren’t making repeat purchases.
Why? Because they’re dissatisfied with the product’s performance.
Why? Because it doesn’t meet their expectations set by our marketing claims.
Why? Because they overhyped the product and didn’t do sufficient testing before launch.
Why? Because there was pressure to launch too quickly due to the upcoming board meeting.
Appendix: Examples of Getting to the Root Causes of Things
Example: Missing Motivation. Marcus is unhappy with his job. His motivation disappeared years ago. Lately, he finds himself procrastinating and missing deadlines, which never used to happen. It’s leading to guilt and stress. Unbeknownst to him, what’s really going on beneath it all is that Marcus resents feeling undervalued. Two years ago, he was coldly overlooked for a well-deserved promotion and felt humiliated. Today, he’s filled with frustration and self-doubt—and thinking about resigning.
Example: Careening Career. Maria has been in the same work role for years but feels unfulfilled. And resentful. Despite her years of experience, she avoids seeking new opportunities because she fears she won’t be taken seriously. A previous boss dismissed her ideas callously, causing her to doubt her abilities. Today, she remains stuck in a position that bores her, feeling frustrated and trapped.
Example: Lost Leadership. When Catherine discovers that her team is missing its quarterly sales goals, she implements stricter sales quotas and adds daily check-ins. What she’s missing is that her team lacks confidence when selling because they don’t fully understand the new product’s features and functionality, and they don’t feel comfortable coming to her. Unbeknownst to her, Catherine’s task-driven approach comes across as cold and uncaring.
Example: Rocky Relationship. Cynthia and Thomas have been arguing a lot lately. They’ve been fighting about all sorts of things—the dishes, the kids, the budget, the yard. And things are escalating quickly to shouting storms. They’re frustrated and caught in a cycle of mutual blame. And they’re too busy finding fault with each other to step back and notice that, for a long time, Cynthia has felt unappreciated despite doing more around the house, and Tom feels unsupported in his stressful career.
Example: Nonprofit Nosedive. A nonprofit organization is experiencing a severe drop in participation at its events. In response, they’re ramping up their marketing efforts and changing their event formats. What they’re missing is that many families in the new demographic they’re targeting don’t have access to reliable transportation.
Example: Startup Struggles. An app development startup has a talented and dedicated team, but they’ve been missing important milestones lately—a shock to all. While they continue to blame individuals, the real problem is a lack of defined roles within the team, coupled with poor communication. Without clarity, their efforts are often redundant. Meanwhile, projects fall behind, clients get frustrated, and team members lose their enthusiasm.
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Are you racing through life with a restless and easily distracted “monkey mind” that jumps from one thought to another? Do your thoughts swing wildly in different directions?
If so, you’re not alone. But here’s the issue: mental chaos often leads to disruption in your life and work. It can make you anxious—and make it harder to accomplish your goals.
17 Signs Your Monkey Mind Is Running Wild
How to know if you struggle with this? When you’re in monkey mind, you tend to:
have scattered or frequently wandering thoughts
be easily distracted
have a hard time focusing on one task
feel restless, anxious, or unsettled
find your mind wandering after just a short while of doing something
struggle to prioritize effectively
feel impatient often
have a near-constant need for activity or stimulation
experience mental fatigue
make hasty decisions or take actions without thorough consideration
have difficulty listening and struggle to fully engage in conversations because you’re preoccupied
frequently forget details, appointments, or tasks
have trouble making decisions because you’re caught between conflicting thoughts
spend a lot of time thinking about the past or the future, making it hard to enjoy the present moment
revisit the same thought loops over and over again (rumination)
have trouble falling or staying asleep due to an overactive mind
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.
Monkey mind, while common, isn’t harmless. It comes with a host of problems. For one, it can elevate your stress levels and make it hard to concentrate. The constant mental chatter can inhibit your mental clarity and prevent you from being fully present with others or concentrating on the task before you. In short, it can downgrade many things in your life and work.
“What your future holds for you depends on your state of consciousness now.” -Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth
Conclusion
Monkey mind can be a big disruptor. It can diminish your happiness, sap your potential, and degrade your leadership.
Here’s to directing your attention towards what truly matters and in the process experiencing greater clarity and fulfillment.
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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.
“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” -John Milton, Paradise Lost
“I am burdened with what the Buddhists call the monkey mind. The thoughts that swing from limb to limb, stopping only to scratch themselves, spit, and howl. My mind swings wildly through time, touching on dozens of ideas a minute, unharnessed and undisciplined.” -Elizabeth Gilbert, writer
“As you walk and eat and travel, be where you are. Otherwise you will miss most of your life.” -Jack Kornfield, American Buddhist monk, teacher, and writer
“Learn to watch your drama unfold while at the same time knowing you are more than your drama.” -Ram Dass, psychologist, spiritual teacher, and writer
“The greater part of most people’s thinking is involuntary automatic, and repetitive. It is no more than a kind of mental static and fulfills no real purpose. Strictly speaking, you don’t think: Thinking happens to you.” -Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth
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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.
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.
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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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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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?
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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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.
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?
Quality of Life Assessment to help you discover your strongest areas and the areas that need work and then act accordingly
Strengths Search to help you identify your core strengths and determine how to use them more in your life and work
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.
“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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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.
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 adviceis 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 adviceis 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. Advicecan 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. Advicecan 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.
Quality of Life Assessment to help you discover your strongest areas and the areas that need work and then act accordingly
Strengths Search to help you identify your core strengths and determine how to use them more in your life and work
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.
“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).
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As a human, you’re naturally social. You’re wired to consider how others perceive you. This makes sense, since relationships are key to your well-being.
But this can be a big trap for you. When you’re overly worried about others’ opinions, you might make choices that harm you in the long run. You might avoid the short-term pain of disapproval in exchange for the long-term loss of missing out on better things.
This focus can lead you away from your true self, from your deepest desires, pushing you toward what others want or expect. In the process, you might lose yourself while seeking approval or trying to please others.
These are common traps—and with painful consequences.
When you let outside expectations drive you, it can lead to several problems. For example, you may struggle to communicate openly during disagreements. Setting boundaries becomes a challenge. You may start to work too much and become overwhelmed. Or you might begin to shy away from pursuits that genuinely interest you. You might miss potential opportunities as you focus more on meeting others’ expectations and less on following your own path.
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.
4. Set High Standards for What You’ll Spend Time On: Take time to evaluate new tasks and requests, ensuring they align with your standards.
5. Gain Perspective: Consider how much others’ opinions will matter in the short and long term versus your own convictions.
6. Experiment with Disapproval: See what it feels like to experience disapproval and assess its true significance (that is, whether it’s really as bad as you originally feared).
7. Boost Your Confidence: You might view confidence as an innate trait, but in truth it’s something you can build systematically by improving and developing mastery.
8. Earn Respect: Understand that setting boundaries and staying true to your goals can earn you respect.
9. Surround Yourself with People Who Accept You As You Are: Avoid people who are constantly trying to change you to fit their preferences. And be sure to return the favor by accepting your family, friends, and colleagues as they are.
10. Enjoy the Freedom of Being Your True Self: Anticipate the power of getting over this common stumbling block and basking in the release from worrying about what others think. Enjoy the peace that comes from trusting yourself.
Quality of Life Assessment to help you discover your strongest areas and the areas that need work and then act accordingly
Strengths Search to help you identify your core strengths and determine how to use them more in your life and work
Quality of Life Assessment
Evaluate your quality of life in ten key areas by taking our assessment. Discover your strongest areas, and the areas that need work, then act accordingly.
Postscript: Inspirations to Help You Stop Caring Too Much about What Others Think
“The unhappiest people in this world are those who care the most about what other people think.” -C. JoyBell C., writer
“The most freeing experience of my life thus far has been to… be unapologetically myself, and to stand in my own light.” -Hannah Rose, therapist and writer
“Being dependent on approval—so dependent that we barter away all our time, energy, and personal preferences to get it—ruins lives.” -Dr. Martha Beck, Harvard-trained sociologist, coach, and author
“I was dying inside. I was so possessed by trying to make you love me for my achievements that I was actually creating this identity that was disconnected from myself. I wanted people to love me for the hologram I created of myself.” -Chip Conley, entrepreneur and author
“So long as you’re still worried about what others think of you, you are owned by them. Only when you require no approval from outside yourself can you own yourself.” -Neale Donald Walsch, author
“Most people are controlled by fear of what other people think. And fear of what, usually, their parents or their relatives are going to say about what they’re doing. A lot of people go through life like this, and they’re miserable. You want to be able to do what you want to do in life.” -Janet Wojcicki, professor, Univ. of California at San Francisco
“The problem comes when people are so eager to win the approval of others that they try to cover their shortcomings and sacrifice their authenticity to gain the respect and admiration of their associates.” -Bill George, CEO and leadership author
“Listen to your heart above all other voices.” -Martha Kagan
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It’s a common trap—and more damaging than you think.
Focusing on what your parents did wrong instead of owning up to your own issues. Chiding your spouse for XYZ while you yourself have been dropping the ball on ABC. Blaming another department in your organization for product, service, or hiring delays. Attacking the other side for their faults instead of working together to solve the problem.
It’s tempting to shift blame onto others. Blaming might bring temporary satisfaction, but it ultimately stalls progress and even moves you backwards.
The Problem with Blaming
Blaming, despite feeling oddly good in the moment, comes with many pitfalls. It leaves things unresolved. Often, it backfires, exacerbating problems by damaging relationships.
Also, blaming undermines your own sense of agency and triggers defensiveness in those on the receiving end of your condemnation. (Who doesn’t resent being blamed?) Furthermore, blaming tends to escalate minor issues into larger conflicts. And it can be contagious, perpetuating a cycle of negativity in your family or work team. In the end, it diminishes your effectiveness.
Meanwhile, blaming often involves a degree of deception—distorting facts to evade responsibility while magnifying others’ faults—which erodes your credibility. Ultimately, you bear the brunt of these consequences, not those you blame.
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 downsides of blaming are clear, but it’s hard to stop because it can feel so darn satisfying. Here are 10 tips for how to stop blaming others:
#1. Stop ruminating on your problems. Fix your attention instead on something more positive and productive.
#2. Shift your attention to what you’re grateful for. You’re much more likely to thrive when practicing gratitude than when you’re casting blame.
#3. Consider why you’re blaming. With a little self-reflection, including focused attention on the situation, you may discover that you’re trying to avoid shame or pain by externalizing the situation, at least in part. Look for a richer and truer picture of the situation than what comes with the simplistic focus on a guilty or offending party. This, of course, requires character and self-awareness.
Are you honest and strong enough to see your own hand in this?
#4. Consider whether you’ve become subconsciously attached to the problem and its associated drama. It may be feeding you with energy—albeit negative and unproductive energy—that makes you feel vindicated or superior.
#5. Practice empathy and try to understand the context, motivations, and feelings of the person you’re blaming. Put yourself in their shoes. Ask questions and explore their perspective and rationale. Which will serve you better: understanding or blaming?
#6. Look for a lesson that you might learn if you focus on understanding instead of blaming. Instead of using it as an opportunity to stroke your ego and attack someone else, why not reframe it as an opportunity for you to learn, grow, and avoid similar problems in the future?
#7. Focus on finding a solution, not a scapegoat. In the end, what you really want is resolution and progress.
#8. Instead of allocating all the blame to somebody else, try assuming joint responsibility. In the end, the assignment of blame matters much less than resolving the issues well. Take note: You want to avoid too much externalization of the problem but also too much internalization of it. In most cases, both sides played a part in letting things slide.
#9. Focus on collaboration instead of blame. Explore ways in which joining forces to address the issues may benefit you both and sidestep potholes.
#10. Take full responsibility for your life, including your choices, behaviors, and outcomes. Sure, there are always outside factors present. But assuming responsibility restores your agency.
Quality of Life Assessment
Evaluate your quality of life in ten key areas by taking our assessment. Discover your strongest areas, and the areas that need work, then act accordingly.
When in conversation with someone you’re tempted to blame, take a deep breath, regain your composure, and try to remain nonjudgmental, curious, and open-hearted. Focus on jointly exploring the situation and finding solutions instead of attacking each other.
In an article, podcaster and former lawyer Jordan Harbinger recommends avoiding statements like “It’s all your fault” and “I can’t believe you did that.” Instead, ask questions like the following:
“Help me understand why you made that decision.” “Did I do anything to make you react that way?” “Is there something I’m missing about my role here?” “Here’s how I see things. How do you see things?” “What should each of us have done to make this situation as productive as possible?”
Final Thoughts
Sometimes you may unconsciously resort to blaming. It can be automatic (and thus difficult to stop).
It’s important to recognize blaming as a trap that tends to make things much worse. Why not rise above it and in the process find solutions while building trust?
Quality of Life Assessment to help you discover your strongest areas and the areas that need work and then act accordingly
Strengths Search to help you identify your core strengths and determine how to use them more in your life and work
Passion Probe to help you identify your top passions and start integrating them more into your life and work
Passion Probe
Our passions are the things that consume us with palpable emotion over time. We love doing them and talk about them often. Take this self-assessment to find the ones that resonate most with you.
Postscript: Inspirations on How to Stop Blaming Others
“The blame game is a waste of time. Any time you’re busy fixing blame, you’re wasting energy and not fixing the problem.” -Rick Warren, Baptist evangelical Christian pastor and author
“Blame… can be poisonous, hurtful, or devastating for its victims. It can tear apart marriages and fracture work relationships; it can disable major social programs; it can inflict damage on powerful corporations; it can bring down governments; it can start wars and justify genocides.” -Stephen Fineman, The Blame Business
“It’s always easy to blame others. You can spend your entire life blaming the world, but your successes or failures are entirely your own responsibility.” -Paolo Coelho, Brazilian novelist
“Wherever you find a problem, you will usually find the finger-pointing of blame.” -Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
“You become a victim when you blame yourself or others for some problem or error.” -Jay Fiset, Reframe Your Blame, How to Be Personally Accountable
“Blame is the demonstrated lack of self-respect choosing to deposit one’s negative actions onto others to reinforce one’s view of being of good, fair, and approved.” -Byron R. Pulsifer, author
“To grow up is to stop putting blame on parents.” -Maya Angelou, poet and civil-rights activist
Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter
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Do things feel heavy and dense in your life right now?
Maybe you’re stressed out about a challenge at work, or a problem at home that’s got you off balance. Perhaps you lost your job, or lost a big account at the office. Maybe you’re struggling financially, or have health concerns in your family. Perhaps your team is struggling with performance and motivation.
It may feel like the world is closing in. In those moments, it’s hard to maintain perspective.
The Problem with Lacking Perspective
Feeling that way is understandable, but losing perspective can be a big problem—and even make things worse. How?
When you’re stressed, you tend to view things through negative filter, causing angst, resentment, and pessimism. And when you lack perspective you have a hard time determining the relative importance of things. (See my article, “How to Stop Catastrophizing—Managing Our Minds.”) That can cause you to let things get out of whack, leading to new problems down the road.
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.
When you can put things in perspective, it means you can think about them in a reasonable and sensible way without making them better or worse than they are. Doing so has many benefits. For example, keeping things in perspective helps you:
assess the importance of things in their broader context
focus on what matters most
understand situations and other people’s viewpoints
keep anxiety and worries in check
understand things more clearly and accurately, thereby reducing mistakes
view things from different angles
see both positives and negatives
react intentionally and constructively instead of impulsively
maintain your objectivity
develop empathy and compassion for people instead of judging them
avoid unnecessary conflicts
improve your relationships
forgive people instead of holding onto counterproductive grudges
learn from experience
discover new ways to view your problems
develop your resilience
grow as a person and leader, in part by seeing how you can transcend your current limitations
Maintaining perspective is also important for leaders, in part because they face so many challenges.
Part of the job of a leader is finding problems in and discovering ways to get them solved. Encountering problems can feel overwhelming if you don’t have the ability to rise above them and see the big picture.
“One of the things leaders have to be good at is perspective. Leaders don’t necessarily have to invent ideas,
but they have to be able to put them in context and add perspective.” -John Sculley, businessman, entrepreneur, and investor
Adaptive leadership is a modern leadership framework focused on how leaders can prepare and encourage people to deal with changing environments that are beyond the technical capacity of people to solve with straightforward solutions or the normal way of doing things.
Instead of trying to be the hero and solve everything, adaptive leaders motivate the people in the organization to face their difficult situations and adapt to the challenges they face together. They recognize, as Harvard leadership scholar Ronald Heifetz says, that “The work is through the people.”
One of the keys for leaders, according to Heifetz, is for them to “get on the balcony.” He explains:
“To diagnose a system or yourself while in the midst of action requires the ability to achieve some distance from those on-the-ground events. We use the metaphor of ‘getting on the balcony’ above the ‘dance floor’ to depict what it means to gain the distanced perspective you need to see what is really happening.” -Ron Heifetz, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership
The idea is for leaders to maintain both sharp focus and broad comprehension at the same time. This will help them understand the situation, the challenges, and the people. Meanwhile, leaders must reframe their view of conflict, seeing it not as a problem to be avoided but rather as an opportunity for learning, growth, and advancement. Doing so requires perspective.
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.
How can you maintain perspective when it feels like things are spinning out of control? Here are 12 ways to do so:
1. Read. One of the best ways to develop and maintain perspective is to read a lot, including classics of philosophy and literature as well as religious or spiritual texts.
2. Project forward. Think ahead five or ten years and imagine looking back on your current situation. That can help you see it in the larger sweep of your life so you don’t blow it out of proportion.
3. Talk things through. Lean on family, trusted friends, colleagues, a mentor, or a small group. That way, you can connect with others about what’s going on and hear their views on things. You’re also wise to talk to people from different vantage points (e.g., age, gender, culture, circumstances, history).
4. Distance yourself from the situation. You can do that conceptually, by looking at it from another person’s perspective (e.g., if you’re struggling financially, consider your challenges from the vantage point of someone with far fewer resources than you). Or you can do it physically, by changing your scenery. Often, removing yourself from the situation helps in ways big and small.
5. Do a reality check. Keep in mind that bad things happen to all of us, and that’s okay. It’s the nature of life. Be clear about what you can and can’t control.
6. Recall your capabilities. Think of times when you’ve overcome challenges in the past. Why shouldn’t this time be any different?
Passion Probe
Our passions are the things that consume us with palpable emotion over time. We love doing them and talk about them often. Take this self-assessment to find the ones that resonate most with you.
7. Start working on solutions instead of worrying so much about problems. With small but steady steps, you’ll start to see that your problems are probably more manageable than you thought initially.
8. Get out into nature. Go on a hike. Get out on a lake or into a forest. Feel the sun on your face and breathe in the air while taking in the sights, sounds, and smells of our bustling world. Contemplate the vastness of the cosmos and observe the intricate mesh of nature and life with reverence and awe.
“They will forget the rush and strain of all the other weeks of the year, and for a short time at least, the days will be good for their bodies and good for their souls. Once more they will lay hold of the perspective that comes to those who every morning and every night can lift their eyes up to Mother Nature.” -Theodore Roosevelt, conservationist, naturalist, and former U.S. president
9. Be grateful for what you have. Pausing to think of all the blessings in your life can help you avoid excess negativity and keep the positive things in your life front and center in your thoughts.
10. Meditate. With a meditation practice, you can train your mind to be more present, focused, and still, with a calm and clear awareness of the present moment. That can help you avoid anxious reactions to life’s vicissitudes.
11. Pray and attend religious services. Prayer can help you tune into a divine perspective. Attending religious services can connect you with ancient scriptures and teachings—and the importance of viewing life from a sacred perspective.
12. Contemplate your death. Engage in the ancient practice of memento mori, which is Latin for remembering that you will die. In many ways, death can be the ultimate purveyor of perspective. It can help you see trivial things for what they are. And it can help you face up to the fact that much of what you worry about isn’t so important after all.
Conclusion
Ultimately, when you maintain perspective you’re able to weather storms better and keep your focus on what’s most important. Getting good at having and keeping perspective will serve you very well in life and leadership.
Strengths Search to help you identify your core strengths and determine how to use them more in your life and work
Passion Probe to help you identify your top passions and start integrating them more into your life and work
Quality of Life Assessment
Evaluate your quality of life in ten key areas by taking our assessment. Discover your strongest areas, and the areas that need work, then act accordingly.
Clayton Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?
Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Bronnie Ware, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying
Song: “The Long Run” by The Eagles
Postscript: Inspirations on Perspective
“Plan with your whole life in mind.” -Aristotle, ancient Greek philosopher
“Keep in mind how fast things pass by and are gone—those that are now, and those to come. Existence flows past us like a river…. Nothing is stable, not even what’s right here…. You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.” -Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
“Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.” -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German poet, novelist, and scientist
“It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.” -George Eliot, Middlemarch
”Some things are just plain more important than others; in fact, some things are so important—your life, your health, your family—that others are trivial by comparison.” -Stephen R. Covey, Primary Greatness: The 12 Levers of Success
“As you look back on your life, you may realize that the things that mattered most were too often at the mercy of things that mattered least… that you were terrorized by the tyranny of urgency, and that you enjoyed very little creative freedom…. How different our lives are when we really know what is deeply important to us, and, keeping that picture in mind, we manage ourselves each day to be and to do what really matters most.” -Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.” -Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter
Join our rapidly growing community. Sign up now and get monthly inspirations (new articles, opportunities, and resources). Welcome!
