Advice Busters

I need to remember two things before asking advice.

1. Nobody but you knows all of the pieces behind any one situation where advice might be needed. Therefore any and all advice is only partial and never fully informed. Nor can you explain enough for people to be able to understand fully. The whole personal experience + subjective view = where the situation came from.

2. Many times you already know the answers somewhere up in your braincase, sometimes you've even gone over many of the options people will offer up as their portion of advice pie.

I've found, when you point out that you've already thought of "that solution" but it raised this, this and that instead of doing what you hoped - they get really mad. A typical response to "I thought of that, but..." is "well smarty pants, if you've already thought of everything why are you asking my advice then?"

Um. Because that answer created more questions which makes the original problem even more complex and now I'm bogged down? Or, Because I was hoping you'd come up with a better answer than I did? (Most hate that one.)

I like playing devil's advocate with those who give advice, it might possibly be a part of my mean streak, but it's really good fun to me. Someone gives me advice, my brain comes up with a thousand different outcome scenarios to it and I start stating them in the form of questions. It's like a conversation game to me, can you defend your advice when it's picked apart with the facts of the problem in it's entirety? (See getting advice problem #1 for why this is actually impossible. Hee!)

Gabe was the one who taught me that trick, we used to banter back and forth for hours like that when no one else showed up for coffee and debate afterhours. Not many people can do it without getting excessively exasperated and even angry with me within a relatively short amount of time.

It's like my weird habit of stating a fact and having it be interpreted as a guilt trip or whining or being upset. (Because people can't tell by my tone how to interpret it.) If I'm upset I either go silent and glare, get shreiky and teary-eyed or walk away in a huff. But usually I'm pretty dry and sarcastic as my normal brand of humor, pretty dry with my statements, which are usually made just to inform others of whatever schmutz I think they'd like to know about me and my daily life. This habit is where I got the comparison to being a Vulcan aka Spock. It's about like that. Heh.

Sometimes my sarcasm hits a nerve with someone, when they have been behaving naughty in sneaky subtle ways and feel guilty about it. You can say just about anything to them and all of a sudden it's "What do you mean by that?!? Are you implying I did/said something wrong? Why are you laying such a guilt trip? What did I do to deserve your anger??"

Er. Slow down, take a deep breath, I wasn't doing any of that. Feeling guilty about something I should know about or you wanna, I'll just go over here and pretend none of that just happened? Talk about confusing and sudden when that's the response I get.

All I said was "fill in domestic facts here, for your perusal Captain."

Like the cheater who's constantly harassing their SO, accussing them of doing the exact thing they are doing - out of guilt. Or the bully with the superiority complex who picks on others with noticable weaknesses because the bully actually has very low self-esteem him/herself.

When you hit a sore/guilt spot by accident, you'll end up taking the brunt of the emotions wrapped around it. I'm just as guilty of this overreaction myself, there's been a few times when someone's accidentally pushed the wrong button and I've unloaded all guns, full auto.
(It's one of the things I've been trying to wrangle in and under control, it's really not a nice thing to do to people.)

I wish my emotional side only hit every 7 years like Pon farr. LOL I'm a closet Trekkie!
Instead I have Pon farr every 28 days or so, way too freaking often for my liking.

I have to remember that people love giving advice, to have their opinions heard and taken to heart. You can listen and say thank you, but it doesn't mean you have to swallow it hook, line and sinker. Sometimes people just need to get the words out of their head, talk it out, write it out, paint it out - whatever it takes to stop the looping and deadends of fallible subjective speculations.

I have one piece of general advice - when someone asks you for advice, offer your ears instead and really listen to what pours out of them. Let them keep going for as long as their steam lasts. If they get stuck in a loop, gently nudge them out of it with a probing question which helps to lead to an exit for that track.

And if we think we know what's going on, stop before speaking - assess whether you are projecting your own experiences on theirs, making assumptions on partial info or actually providing an objective point of view.

Yep.