I’ll get right to it.
I’m sorry for giving you advice.
I’m guessing it frustrated you, made you feel unseen and unheard, and felt like I was trying to take power away from you.
I can relate. I’ve felt this same way when I receive advice.
And, I don’t want to keep up this unhelpful dance.
Often advice is unsolicited, based upon someone else’s experiences and goals, and comes along with an expectation that you follow it.
Until I started learning about coaching, I didn’t realize how unhelpful advice giving was and that there was another option. During my first coaching course, we were asked to refrain from both giving and soliciting advice.
Instead of using advice to find our answers, we were taught how to connect with our own wisdom. This was revolutionary.
So, for the last few years, I’ve been changing my relationship to giving advice. I’ve been trying to stop giving it with mixed results.
Instead of giving advice, I know I want to apply coaching skills in all of my interactions.
I want to practice generous listening with the goal of understanding what is true for the other person.
I want to listen with the intention of helping the other person get clear on what they want or need and to access their own wisdom.
I want to bear loving witness to the person in front of me and to remember they’re a land I’ve never been to.
I want to see the other person as sacred, precious, resourceful, and whole.
I want to help the other person to find their own power and sense of possibility.
I want to see the goodness in the other person and their vast potential.
I want to pause before sharing any information and first discern if is it helpful, needed, or wanted.
If I do share information, I want to share it with no attachment to whether the other person finds it helpful. I want to share it in a way that gives the other person complete choice about the situation.
I have failed to uphold these aspirations many times.
This morning, I was reminded why it’s important for me to keep working on not giving advice.
As I pulled into my driveway and gathered my belongings, a person doubled back on the sidewalk to tell me that I had a problem in my front yard.
They said I had a native plant growing in my yard that was unsuitable. Despite my annoyance, this person persisted to tell me how horrible this plant was. And despite sharing my gardening credentials with them, they kept going.
I finally said I would look the plant up, that I could handle my own yard, and that I needed to go.
Let’s just say this advice was not welcome, and it elicited a flame of anger within me.
As I walked inside my house, ready for battle, I took note of my big response.
I looked up said plant, and discovered that yes, some people, especially cattle ranchers, do not like this plant. I, however, am not a cattle rancher. I also learned it’s a critical plant for native bees.
It’s been a few hours since this encounter, and I’m still processing it.
What about this situation did I find upsetting? What can I do with these big feelings? How can I learn from them?
Feelings are messengers when we can check in with them.
There are a few things at play here for me.
One—I’m attached to my yard and garden. I’ve spent 10 years cultivating it, learning, and shaping it. I’m working on loosening my attachment to it, but I still care about it—a lot. The yard and how I related to it is a work in progress, but it’s my work in progress.
Two—I don’t enjoy unsolicited advice. Do you know anyone who does? Yet, we dole it out like it’s our right to give it. It’s disempowering and makes assumptions about the person we’re giving it to. This morning, the person assumed I wanted to hear what they had to say, that they were right and I would agree with them, and that I would take the action they wanted me to take.
All it did was piss me off...and want to go live in the woods far away from all people.
This situation reminds me of something learned about years ago when I took a class in motivational interviewing. When we push someone while trying to convince them, they can often push back and dig in deeper with their current stance.
So, convincing—and advice giving—can lead to the opposite of what you want it to do.
I told my husband about this encounter, which reminded me of another recent situation where I was given different unsolicited advice about my yard. I can see that I have a pattern of getting very upset when someone tells me what to do with my yard.
It may be because it feels like the other person is taking power away from me and assuming it’s their right to do so. Regardless, I don’t like it. And, I don’t want to be like them.
After talking to my husband, I went on a short walk with my dog in the nearby open space where said native flower grows freely. I was still feeling unsettled, and I decided to listen to the audio recording of the final Capstone Session for The Coaching Way, an amazing coaching course taught by author and coach Tara Mohr.
Coincidentally, Tara opened the session with an exercise examining advice giving and when it’s helpful and when it isn’t. She relayed a time when a close friend advised her to start a blog and how that was a pivotal moment in her career.
In that case, the advice was helpful and led Tara down a new path.
Tara asked us to think of times when we’ve been given advice that was helpful. What was a play in those situations?
The common themes were that advice was helpful when it came from a person who knew them well, when they felt loved, seen and heard, when the information was requested, and when the advice giver wasn’t attached to the advice being taken.
Then, we examined situations when advice wasn’t helpful.
Those answers were similar to my own.
Advice wasn’t helpful when it was unsolicited, based upon the other person’s viewpoint and preferences, when the person didn’t feel seen or heard, and when there was an attachment to the advice being followed.
No one explicitly named the power dynamic at work with advice giving, but to me that’s a key part of what’s at play. One person assumes they know better than the other, so they tell them what to do.
I can’t help but wonder how else the person from this morning could have more effectively shared information about the plant in question.
Perhaps they could have said good morning, shared that they noticed I had a plant growing in my yard that they had been removing from their yard for x, y, and z reasons. Then, they could have asked my thoughts on the plant and been open to my response.
I’m not sure if I would have been receptive to a random person in that situation either, but that approach would have felt a lot more respectful of my right to grow what I want in my yard.
What’s uncomfortable about this situation is that it reminds me how much I still need to work on this issue myself.
Just last night I gave my husband advice. He was talking out a situation with his elderly parents and his new job, and I listened and empathized. But, I also interjected with what he should do about work.
Sigh.
Did he appreciate my solutions? No. He did not.
Thankfully, I took a step back from my advice-giving habit, and I named how I imagined he felt in response to my advice.
Of course, he just wanted me to listen, not to tell him what to do. I would have felt the same way if I were him.
We also did some problem solving about his parents’ situation, and it seemed helpful. I think that’s because I asked what was needed and what could be done. I helped him to find agency in the situation, and I offered to take on a few of those tasks instead of telling him to do it.
In coaching conversations, I’ve learned to turn the advice giving part of myself off. In that context, I know my job is to connect the other person with their own wisdom, and their sense of power and possibility.
Refraining from advice giving in coaching sessions now feels normal for me.
But, in the rest of life, I have work to do.
I know writing about advice giving is helping me to integrate this learning on a deeper level. And, like with any new habit or practice, I will need to keep catching myself giving advice, and then compassionately begin again.
Shaming myself for giving advice won’t help. Treating it like a learning situation will.
I will need to be honest and to repair with the other person by naming how they feel, re-grounding myself in generous listening, and asking them what they need.
This work is humbling, but it’s the work I’m called to do.
I want to give others what I most want for myself—a safe space to be myself and to figure things out in my own way and in my own time.
That doesn’t mean I know everything or that I don’t need other people. It means, I need others to trust what I need lies within me. I think that’s what we all need.
What are your experiences with giving and receiving advice?
What do you know to be true?
Joanna Zaremba is a multi-passionate human who desires to speak the truth, is always learning, and is easily inspired and awe-struck by other humans, nature, and life. You can learn more about her and her work at www.joannazaremba.com.