The Nuances of Asking for and Giving Advice

Asking for and giving advice is rarely what it seems. When you ask for advice, you are usually trying to meet needs for acceptance, support, healing, and/or empathy. When you give advice, you may be trying to meet needs for self-acceptance, belonging, and purpose. 

Unfortunately, asking for and giving advice are rarely effective strategies to meet these needs.

Asking for Advice

Asking for advice elicits others' thoughts and opinions, which are often given without a clear connection to your needs or the relevant situation. To complicate things further, advice can often be perceived as criticism. After hearing advice, you might feel frustrated, just as confused as when you started, and perhaps experience self-criticism. 

Asking for advice is useful when you have a need for clarity, information, or insight and when the other person deeply understands your situation and the needs alive for you and others involved in that situation.

A couple of possibilities stand out as reasons why you might ask for advice even though it doesn't meet your needs:  

1. Intuitively, you know others like giving advice, so asking for it makes it seem like you are asking less of them than if you asked for other forms of support. If you are like a lot of folks, you have some shame about having needs. You might also imagine you will burden others with your needs. In short, even though you may know what to ask to meet your needs, shame and the idea of burden prevent you from being direct and asking for what you know would be helpful.

You can often work through these blocks by giving your listener a real choice about giving you their time or not. For example, you might say something like, "I could use some listening around something. I wonder if this is a good time for you or if later on would be better?" Keep in mind that most people have difficulty saying "no" when asked to listen. The key to getting an authentic yes or no is to offer choices that are equally socially acceptable.

2. On a more basic level, you may just not know how to ask in another way. After all, you likely haven't seen many models of people stating needs and requests directly. Here are some simple ways to ask for support and empathy:

• Could you tell me what you are understanding about my situation? (after you share something)

• Could you just sit with me and hold me while I feel how scary that was today?

• I don't know what my needs are in this situation. Would you be willing to hear my story and then help me identify my needs?

• I know that if I can talk about this, I will get more clear. Would you be willing to listen and reflect back what you are hearing?

Giving Advice

If you are in the position of being asked to give advice, you might find that you are willing to offer your opinions and advice, even when it doesn’t help the other person take action to meet their needs.

Giving advice can have an almost addictive quality. An MCD student once described his experience of giving advice as, "I can feel myself amp up and get grabby. I puff up and I grab her problem and make it mine. I get to be important and smart because I am going to be the one to fix it. Underneath, I know I am trying to meet needs for validation and purpose."

If someone asks you for advice, it's helpful to pause before giving it. In the pause you might notice your own eagerness to be "the one who knows." Noticing this, you can take a deep breath and settle back into your center. 

Wisdom doesn't come from this "grabby" advice-giving kind of place. Unconsciously acting from that place can actually sabotage the deeper needs you are trying to meet for self-acceptance, belonging, and purpose.

When someone asks you for advice, you can offer curiosity about the needs the person is actually hoping to meet with their request. For example, you might say, “I hear you asking for advice, and I want to understand more about your needs and the situation you are facing. Could you share more?"

Another option is to not respond directly to the request for advice and begin directly with a reflection and empathy guess. Empathy helps reveal deeper needs and also helps the other person get in touch with their own clarity and wisdom. In the training world, we often say that if at the end of the workshop, participants aren't mentioning the trainers, you know you have done your job well. That is to say: truly supporting others is about helping them find their own wisdom, not about telling them what they should do.

Practice

Take a moment now to reflect on recent times when you have asked for and received advice. If some instances were helpful and others were not, see if you can identify what made it so in each case.  

For example, you might ask yourself questions like:

• "What needs were up for me in each situation?"

• "What was the other person saying or not saying that was different?"

• "How did I phrase my request?"

If you find yourself frequently giving advice or sharing what you know, take time to check in with where that is coming from. Is there another way you could be of service or meet your needs for acceptance, belonging, and/or purpose?