Advice

            Advice can be a good thing. Over the span of my lifetime, I’ve received valuable thoughts from friends and family that have improved my parenting, my expectations as a wife and mother, my outlook on school, on how I feel about myself and how I expect my life to go. But, like anyone who reads this, I’ve also received some very bad advice. So, what’s the difference? What makes it tolerable or even valuable and what makes advice… well destructive.

Rose Bushes, Shediac, New Brunswick

            When I was a young mother, I said to my mother, “There will be no spanking,” this was in response to her assertions that we should definitely spank (it was a different generation). She looked at me and said, “I think that’s a bad idea.” And then she dropped it. Many years later she said to me, “I thought you were crazy to not spank those kids but look at how lovely they are.” As a consequence, I remember her advice as well intentioned if wrong. Another relative said to us nearly every time we saw him, “There’s a cure for that at the end of your wrist,” about everything. Normal developmental behaviour, kids that were sick, hungry, exhausted. It didn’t matter; he was convinced we were just wrong. His insistence that we must be wrong meant we never, ever left our kids alone with him. We knew he didn’t respect us. His advice was wrong for us and our lives and the added insult that he wouldn’t let it drop created distance and friction in the relationship. Their advice was essentially the same, but the delivery, and the frequency was very different.

            The advice that I have found most valuable was targeted to me and my life, was in alignment with my values and sought to give me solutions that worked for me, rather than for the other person. Even when advice was not well aligned, I could tolerate it, as long as it was infrequent and dropped when it was apparent that I wasn’t receptive. My limits aren’t your limits, and you may have more or less tolerance for advice, and that’s okay, as long as you are comfortable.

            One of the things that I find really impacts advice are the boundaries of the advisee. When you hear advice that’s wrong for you, how do you respond? Do you follow it because you think you have to? (And maybe feel resentful afterward.) Do you nod your head and smile and then do whatever you want? (Feeling good about that decision, or perhaps resentful not to have responded.) Do you have a polite but firm message to get people to back off? (Perhaps making you feel empowered). Does the solution you’re using work for you, or does it make you feel resentful or exhausted? When I was a young mother, a friend said to me, “You can just nod your head to anything anyone says, that doesn’t mean you have to do it.” This isn’t how I handle it now, but at the time as a young woman with really poor boundaries, that advice (see what I did here) was invaluable, and I used it again and again. This doesn’t work for everyone, but it does work for some people.

I’ve coached folks to come up with a brief message, something like, “Thank you for your advice, my husband and I have already considered that.” (Then you have to quickly change the subject.) Again, this doesn’t work for everyone. A friend of mine uses the line, “I’m not looking for advice today, just a listening ear,” before she begins talking so that her listeners (friends, husband, family) all know what she’s wanting before she begins speaking. This one doesn’t always work perfectly, but the listener always has a clue as to what she wants, it sets a boundary before she even begins speaking.

One of the most valuable pieces of advice (see look I did it again) I received early in my training as a social worker was the question, “I wonder what would happen if…”. This gives the person room to reject your proposal, to talk it through or to engage in thinking about what strategy might work. I use this one a lot in my personal life. It’s not directive, and it gives people room to disagree, but also gives you a chance to share relevant, aligned thoughts.

So why am I writing a blog about advice? Because it’s so pervasive, and it can cause so much distress… and friction. Part of my work with individuals is to help them sort out their own boundaries, and how they want to implement them. What works for one person doesn’t work at all for someone else. Part of learning more about yourself, is sorting out what feels like support and what feels intrusive, and why. Later on, I'll write a blog specifically about advice and Neurodivergence and why it can be very challenging.

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