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hey what's up this is Leo for actualize that already and in this video what I want to talk about is the idea of getting advice and this is an interesting topic because I've always been fascinated about this idea of advice being important and advice being something that you can get a lot from from in your life and it's a good way of improving your life but there's also this problem with getting advice especially giving advice to other people and there's also challenges to giving advice to yourself but the challenge of giving advice to other people is that a lot of times I'll see people trying to give advice to others and it not registering in fact it that almost backfiring so what's a good example of this well for example a parent giving advice to a child a lot of times what I'll see kind of the the standard naive tendency is to be able to say well I know what's best for that person because I have more experience than they do and so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to give them some advice and then you share that advice and you see that it's not really working and so what you tend to do is you're like okay well I'm gonna get even more Stern with the advice it's like it's they're not hearing it it's not registering so I'm gonna even give that advice in a stronger way I'm gonna feel I can really jam that advice down their throat and when you do that you can almost see even how to predict what's gonna happen is that there's almost like a rebellion that happens there there's a tendency to not want to take that advice or to take that advice for granted I think what's important here is and this especially important video for parents is that you have to realize that it's one thing to understand something logically it's a totally different thing to really integrate it and understand it emotionally and so there's that aspect that you're forgetting when you're trying to dram advice down someone's throat when you're trying to give someone advice first of all there's a couple of problems here one problem is that their values are not identical to your values so and there there could be quite a big disparity between the values of a person you give an advice to and your own values and their situation in your situation so what you feel as being the right advice for them might not actually be very good advice because advice is not applicable at the same time to everybody there's specific points in your life where certain advice is good and certain advice is not good and there's specific advice that's good for some people that's not good for other people so just assuming that everyone has the same values as you and wants the same things it wants to approach things in the same way and learn in the same fashion that you learned is already problem that person you're giving advice to might be on a different wavelength and that advice just might not register the other challenge here is that you have to really take to heart and think back and ask yourself how did you learn these lessons right because there's a tendency especially for parents to say well I struggled you know I had to make these horrible mistakes I had to go through years of pain and struggle to learn this valuable lesson and now what I want to do is I want to kind of distill that lesson after all that knowledge and I want to hand down what kids know I said look I spent I went through a horrible divorce I went through through a horrible job I went through horrible medical problems I went through through all these scenarios and I learned these valuable lessons and I have these regrets I you know if I knew everything that I know that I know now I would have handled situations totally differently and so why should I have why should I watch my kid go through the same problems I don't want you to go through the same pains so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna I'm gonna share these stories with you and I'm gonna distill these golden nuggets and hand them down to you and then what you're gonna do is you gonna take that golden nugget and you're gonna you're gonna say yeah that's that's an amazing insight and then you're gonna go off and you're gonna live your life perfectly without having to go through all these challenges and these roadblocks that I went through and that sounds really good the intention behind that is great except the problem is that when you're when you're using that kind of strategy what you're forgetting is that the way that you learned those lessons is through the struggle and your discounting and under estimating how important and how critical that struggle was to you internalizing those lessons because those lessons if you feel a need to really share those lessons with others those are probably not lessons that you learn in a book those are lessons that you got because you went through hard knocks in your life an experience has really emotionalized those lessons for you because what happened was that you felt extreme pain or extreme pleasure different sent a sense of joy elation when you went through some of these through some of these experiences and what that literally get is it seared it seared the lessons in your brain whereas now if you take that and you just take the logical bits of that lesson and you hand it down to somebody it's not going to be the same thing so you have to really appreciate how much the experience of it and especially the hard struggle how important that was to learning the lesson and you know the best lessons in life as the old saw goes our learned through experience they're not learned through a book and they're not even learned from from your religious leaders or from your parents or from your teachers or from your mentors you can get some value from that kind of advice but it's not going to be nearly as powerful as when it's internalized and I think that parents and other people that are trying to give advice to other people need to recognize this really important fact I don't person as myself as being a life coach and being a student of personal development and having read you know a literally hundreds of books and got an expensive seminars on this stuff it's very easy for me to see what somebody's doing in their life and I had this tendency to say well you know I've studied this stuff I know that you can get a lot better result if you just did X or he just did Y if you just tweaked your approach this way and so there's a real drive on a tendency and drive on my part to just give advice to people and a lot of times that advice is really good but I also have to recognize that just because it is objectively good advice and the research supports and the books supported my own experience supports it and the experience my clients support it that doesn't mean that this is the right advice for this person and doesn't mean it's the right time for this person to hear this advice and it also doesn't mean that I can shortcut their learning process right that's the most important thing is that you have to realize that some people just need to struggle through things to really understand to internalize them you can't just hand hand down advice and expect it to be registered at the same level that it did to you because of your experiences and so when I think about that when I reflect on that I I tend to calm down and say you know what I don't need to be giving advice all the time I can ask prodding questions that's what coaches tended to do it's a tends to be a better approaches to ask deep questions that make the other person think more than just hand them down advice and a list of things to do because when you ask them questions that gets them thinking that gets them reevaluating what they're doing with their life and in that case it tends to be a better way to create a change because when the person understands for themselves and generates the answer for themselves they're more invested in it they have the motivation to follow up with it to take action on it rather than when you handed that thing down to them so I think it's really important to watch out for this this tendency to want to shortcut people people's learning curves and to say that you don't want people to struggle because the struggle is important it's a big part of life and the way that we become rounded human beings the way that we really learn and we gain wisdom is by going through the struggle of life that's what's really really rewarding so obviously that doesn't mean that you want to let people do you know commit horrible mistakes and do things that would that would really damage them but as long as you're protecting your friends and and your children or people that you're mentoring as long as you're protecting them from like making just really stupid decisions that are that have very drastic consequences then you want to kind of give them the freedom to go around there and explore for themselves and even when you see that they're going down the wrong path maybe you can question them on a little bit get them to think about it because sometimes people go down the wrong path because they're not even conscious they don't even know what they're doing but a lot of times people just choose to go down a path because they genuinely believe that it's right for them and maybe it even is at the time they need to explore they need to see if it fits with them and so if that's the case let them a little bit of that exploring don't feel like you need to stop them and impart your wisdom on to them let them do that exploring and trust that they have resourcefulness and that they have they have intellect and that they're gonna be able to realize that if something is not working for them in the long run I'm going to change their approach and then that maybe they'll come back to you and say you know what I've really gone down this path that I thought would work well for me but it hasn't and maybe you could share now some of your advice about how you also struggle through the same problem and and made it work for you and that is gonna help because then you're not taking that kind of frame where you're saying well I told you so you don't want to you don't wanna really do that what you want to do is you want to say yeah you know what I knew that you were kind of going down the wrong path but I didn't want to be pushy about it because I realized that it's important for you to to try out and make errors and that errors are not bad errors are ways that we learn this is how we build wisdom this is how we build experience and so those are all valuable lessons that you learn as you're going through life so if you are someone who is very advice-giving if you are someone who is working in advice-giving profession or if you have children or if you have even parents little older parents that you're getting advice to realize how advice works realize that you have this tendency to want to shortcut people's learning curves and then that's not always the best thing all right so this is going to be it for this video as always I look forward to your comments hearing from you contact me let me know what kind of content you like to you'd like me to make for you and also let me know what you think about this stuff and any question that you have and what your experiences are with giving advice