These are words that many of us will recognize. At some point we will have heard them from someone providing their opinion in the form of advice. This advice,more often than not, is coming from a genuine care for our wellbeing. The way we deal with advice has a lot to do with how we have matured and developed personally. In the blog, Advice – seek, accept or ignore I wrote about the way we deal with receiving advice and how it makes up part of our self development.

The other view I intentionally omitted was how a lot of what we package up as advice are not from the recipients perspective. In fact, when we say, “If I was you I would…” or any variants to those words such as “What you should do is …”. What we are really saying is, “If it was me I would…” or “what I would do is…”. In essence, we give advice based on our own world view and in reality we are actually attempting to provide a solution. Most of the time we aim to be objective and give a balanced opinion, however it is a very difficult task. There is a thin line between being completely objective and influence of having a close relationship to the recipient of our solution. This is never more damaging than when people dish out relationship “advice”. As the relationship breaks down, two camps tend to develop, whereby each partner will get a lot of support from their friends and sometimes, unfortunately, a varied amount of solutions to their problems will be provided. Alas, this usually only results in accelerating the demise of the relationship.

This is an important part of our personal development, particularly learning to differentiate between seeking advice and a solution from others. When we are in the workplace and are faced with a challenge, we seek out a professional with expertise in resolving the specific issue. We present them with the exact details of the problem and our desired outcome. In the workplace when we are seeking advice, we tend to be much more aware we cannot apply it as a guaranteed fix. We spend more time analysing what is provided and easily differentiate between that and a solution we require.

We need to apply the same mindset from the workplace anytime we receive advice. We cannot seek solutions for every situation and this is where we build our experience. It is a crucial part of our development, being able to apply advice to varying different situations or disregard it. Some believe there is no such thing as receiving bad advice and only applying advice to the wrong situation. The only person responsible for applying the advice received is us and it is only as we develop that we learn when and how to apply advice given to us. All that is left to be said is, when you are next in a situation and seek advice, If I was you I would…