We all love giving advice. After all, with our vast and varied life experience, who wouldn’t find what we say valuable? And in an age of ever-more free flow of conversation, collaboration and agile working, surely throwing our opinions into the mix will help the great melting pot of ideas?
But it can be pretty annoying that the people around us can often ignore us. Take that work colleague that keeps getting stuck up on how their spreadsheet is formatted. You’re pretty sure they’ve spent the last two hours fiddling away with it and will probably leave work late again. Out of the kindness of your heart, you pop over and helpfully state ‘If I were you I wouldn’t worry about it’.
Frustratingly, the colleague will reply something ‘yeah, you’re probably right, but I am just trying to get this one thing right’ and continue as if you had said nothing at all. How exasperating, we were only trying to help and yet we were completely ignored.
Let’s flip this around. Imagine we’re trying to decide what next career move we want to go for. It’s confusing, and it’s hard to know what exactly the right answer is. We casually mention this to an acquaintance. This then suddenly prompts a long monologue that we should get into coding as this is the new craze. Their cousin started doing it and is now earning a six figure sum and living in the States. We politely nod, but are immediately turned off by the fact we have absolutely zero interest in coding whatsoever. This doesn’t stop the person giving his advice. We squirm, desperately searching for the nearest exit.
I am certain that every one of us has been in both situations. On the one hand, we are driven to be helpful and give our thoughts and experiences. On the other hand, for the most part, we detest unsolicited advice.
So how can we do this all a bit more constructively? Well, I personally believe that we find unsolicited advice annoying for good reason: it is often a non-contextual thought that takes little account of us, and often is more to make the giver feel better rather than actually genuinely being helpful. Having heard a lot of terrible advice myself, I’m quite happy to ignore random opinions that pay little interest in my personal wants and needs. I realise that sometimes there will be good advice splattered in there, but I know that I find it much harder to take seriously if I’ve not asked for it.
So if the reception of the advice is not the problem, then perhaps we need to focus on the delivery. We want to give advice because we feel we have relevant experience, and so believe we are going to help that person. Let’s face it, giving advice makes us feel wise, experienced and knowledgeable. In other words, it strokes our ego.
But are we really focusing on what is genuinely helpful here? If the advice only serves to antagonize and stress the person, you are being unhelpful, despite the implicit idea of giving advice being well-meaning. This includes even if it is good, solid advice. So in actual fact, it would have been better to have said nothing at all.
Now this is quite a strange concept in our culture of encouraging gregarious, chatty people. It can certainly feel uncomfortable having something burning to contribute and not doing so. And yet, in certain situations this would be the optimal outcome. So perhaps take a moment to think whether your advice will actually be received gratefully before offering it. You are an intelligent human being, and you will know when someone is open to advice or not. So use the social cues in the conversation.
I leave you with one other final but related thought: if we spent half as much time following our own advice as we do spend advising others, we would all be twice as advanced as a society. So if you’re struggling with this nagging urge to give your advise, perhaps the best person you can advise is yourself.
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