Best advice
People love giving advice. Even if they have only a vague idea of the situation or the subject matter. As soon as you share a problem with someone, they will rush to offer you their helpful opinions on how you should handle it or not.
“I’m not feeling well, I think I caught a cold”
“Oh, you should have a ginger tea.”
“Yeah, I already had five.”
“Then you need more vitamin C!”
“I know, I’ve been supplementing it for the past few days.”
“Oh no, you should get it from natural sources, otherwise it won’t work. Eat some oranges.”
Right.
Sometimes what they say makes sense or gets you to think about an aspect you haven’t considered before. But most often, they clearly have no clue.
At best, they tell you something you already know or have thought about many times. At worst, they insist that you should try something that would never work for you (you know it, because you know yourself, and also thought about their suggestion many times before). And they won’t stop trying to convince you to actually implement their suggestion until they see enough signs that you fully accept it and will go ahead with it.
“You look annoyed.”
“Yeah, this web app isn’t working, and I’m not sure why, look…”
“I see, you should clear your cookies.”
“But this is a static-content website and there are no cookies.”
“No, no, try clearing the cookies, it will work, you’ll see.”
Right.
Sometimes I’m really tempted to just tell them to shut up and take their useless advice and stick it up their… or something like that, but even though I take great pride in being direct, I just bite my tongue and nod my head, promising that I’ll surely consider their suggestion. That’s not because I don’t want to be considered a jerk (some may say it’s too late for that). It’s because I actually appreciate good advice and gladly learn from other people’s experiences (if someone else makes a mistake, that’s one mistake I don’t have to make). But for every piece of good advice or useful insight, I get ten useless ones if I’m not careful.
It turns out, getting good advice actually requires effort. It’s not enough just to describe your situation, or mention that you have a problem (I mean it is, if you want to be subjected to a potential tirade on how you should solve it in this particular way that would never be feasible and would probably also not solve your problem, but you should definitely still try it, because it’s the best thing to try). Since I feel generous today, I’m going to share the tricks I’ve been using to extort some good advice from people I talk to.
Frame the story in the right way.
That is, a way conducive to follow-up questions, or exchanging of personal experiences. I like to achieve that by being a little vague, so there’s enough room for the other person to ask me questions and focus on aspects I may otherwise ignore. I also stick to facts only when talking to an emotional/intuitive person, or to feelings and sensations when talking to a fact-based person
Make a clear distinction between ranting and looking for solutions.
Most people love to dive straight into solution-mode, so if that’s not what you want, or you want to simply defer it till you’ve presented your full story, be explicit about it. This is also how you can deal with unsolicited and unhelpful advice — just say that you were simply ranting and you’re not looking for solutions. Then move on to the next point.
Ask specifically what you’re looking for.
There are some questions that help steer the conversation in a way that helps. Try things like “Have you been in such situation before? How did you deal with it?” or “What would you do if you were in my shoes?” or “How do you see this situation?”
Mercilessly cut off babble.
When you hear the other person starts to speak in abstract or generic terms, or gives advice without attaching it to their own experience or what they know about you, shut it down immediately. You can use the very same questions from the previous point to redirect the conversation into more helpful territory.
Now that I’ve given you advice on how to get advice (how awesome is that?), there is one more point I’d like to make. All of the advice that I was grateful for had one thing in common — it made me realize something, or notice something new. It wasn’t about someone sharing an enlightening realization, but about provoking me to think of it myself. So it’s all about guiding the other person into provoking your thoughts. Help them help you. It’s easy like that.
Now I’m curious, what are your tricks for avoiding getting bad advice?
Originally published at bytesandsenses.wordpress.com
