When it comes to helping a friend or family member through a problem, the solution is always so easy - in a matter-of-fact, almost smug-like manner, the advice spews out so easily:
Stay positive! Be careful. Tell her how you feel. Put yourself first. Don’t go out with that jerk again! Try to save your money!
In the moment we’re dispensing advice to others (unsolicited or asked), the solution just seems so darn obvious. We get to play God, Oprah and Dr.Phil, confident with the knowledge that if he/she listens to us, everything will work out for them. But, often times, we’re the ones who need to stay positive/ditch the jerk and the solution doesn’t seem so easy to analyze/fix.
Advice - so easy to dispense out, but how many of us actually practice what we preach? A question I pondered (but in more of a ‘WTF did I just google/what is wrong with me’ way as I palm-smacked my forehead) at 3AM the other night.
Laying in the dark, I squinted at my phone googling “signs it was a bad first date” after returning home from one of the worst, if not the worst, of first dates I’ve ever gone on with a guy who was far from a gentleman (he refused to give me my ATM card back after I paid for a round of drinks.) As I perused article after article, chock full of advice like “don’t ever go out with someone that isn’t nice to you,” I realized I knew all of this - it’s common sense - and yet, I needed validation from Cosmo.com and also, a site called Vixen Daily that I was doing the right thing.
Meanwhile, advice for others just rolls out while I conveniently forget the confident knowledge and very reasonable advice I’d give to a friend in the exact same situation.
According to author Dan Ariely, this happens because our judgment gets clouded by our emotional attachment to the situation and that “when we are in a particular situation, we take lots of irrelevant factors into account... “but when we’re external to it, we sometimes look at things more objectively.”
In other words, we (irrationally) bring all of our emotions/baggage from the past into a current situation, worrying about worst-case scenarios and ultimately, clouding our intuition or what we know we should do. It’s the self-talk.
Interestingly, a study supported Ariely’s thesis and found when people talked about their friends’ or peers’ conflicts, they were 22% more willing to search for more information about the circumstances of the conflict and 31% more likely to look at the situation from multiple perspectives.
However, the study also found that when participants described their conflicts in third-person, (i.e.- instead of saying “I recently discovered that my spouse is having an extramarital affair,” participants would describe the situation as if it were a friend’s would say, “She recently discovered that her spouse was having an extramarital affair,”) they were 35% more likely to offer similarly wise, well-reasoned advice to themselves that they would normally give to others and concluded with the following:
“So before you let your emotions run wild, consider taking a walk in someone else’s shoes and think about how you would advise someone else handle the same situation. It will offer some perspective to help you give yourself the same good advice you would give to someone else.”
We often justify to ourselves why our problem isn’t just so clear-cut, running ourselves amuck with “what if” questions, doubt, and worst case scenarios. “It’s different with me,” we think, “because of x, y or z.”
But, maybe, just maybe - we should try listening to the advice we love to dish out.