Ask HN: How do you give advice? Could you share your stories and thoughts on what you do to make your advice easier to accept? I'd like to know what contributes to making advice well-received by others. |
Ask HN: How do you give advice? Could you share your stories and thoughts on what you do to make your advice easier to accept? I'd like to know what contributes to making advice well-received by others. |
This might sound odd, but it's true. You're trying to change their behaviour because you'd prefer it another way. Maybe that's because you want to be a good person or it hurts you to see them fail, but ultimately you have selfish motives.
Secondly, realise that many people in their life have tried to control them before. They didn't all have pure motives. Many of them may have been wrong, in some ways significantly.
From these two thoughts — deduce that _it is absolutely critical that this person can defend against bad advice._ Without that skill, they will be totally lost. Gullible, open to confusion, even abuse. You are fighting their social immune system and you need to prove that you can be trusted. If you fail, accept that you have failed for a good reason.
Finally — and this is the most difficult part — frame your advice as a piece of information that will be believable and useful in the world of your listener rather than your own. How do you do this? Ask questions, seek to understand what they think, why they behave the way they do, their goals, their fears, who and what they respect. Once you've done this, reformulate your advice to fit the world you have discovered and try it out. This may include showing rather than telling. If it still doesn't work, try to understand what they heard and why it didn't add up to them.
If you can do all of this, people will follow your advice much of the time. The catch is that you might find yourself changing your own views just as often.
Uh, I don't believe that. What if you just want to help them?! What you say sounds very close to psychological egoism, the ethical position "that all behaviors are motivated by self-interest," that "all motives are selfish motives".[0]
[0] quick read: https://www.qcc.cuny.edu/socialsciences/ppecorino/ethics_tex...
lengthier read: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/egoism/#PsycEgoi
Persuasion on the other hand is certainly an attempt to influence someone's behavior.
Persuasion and advice are not the same thing.
The second thing to consider is how to approach the topic. Unless you have a strong emotional bond with the person where you can be very direct (e.g., family member, close friend), or you are an authority in the field you're giving advice (e.g., teacher, senior colleague), what you're giving is not advice - it's just your opinion. Spewing up your opinions on why someone should change to conform to what you think is right is unlikely to stick, unless it helps the person to look at the matter from a different perspective.
One way of doing it is to approach things with curiosity, helping the person to question their beliefs, and asking powerful questions that helps the person to reflect and look from different angles. Growth comes from within, so it's not about you giving the idea or problem-solving it for them, but helping the person to find answers for themselves. Yes, it takes time, but you have a much higher chance of helping them grow than just vomiting unsolicited advice.
You can find tons of resources around coaching, and it applies in any situation where it involves growth and development, either in the work environment [1][2], at home, parenting kids, etc.
But hey, what do I know. This is all my opinion, not advice :)
[1] https://hbr.org/2019/11/the-leader-as-coach
[2] https://hbr.org/2018/08/most-managers-dont-know-how-to-coach...
First make sure you have permission to offer advice. But remember…
No one likes advice. You cannot really know what is going on in someone else’s world. It’s easy to get it wrong. And advice isn’t about controlling people despite what another person said; that would be very aggressive and really an intervention not advice giving.
Instead ground your responses in your own experiences. You can never be wrong about yourself.
Tell relevant stories from your own experience.
Share resources that may be relevant.
Work through your own mental models you might apply in this situation. That isn’t telling people your mental framework is correct though you may believe it deeply. It’s saying “I use this framework. This is how I’d apply it.”
This gives the listener what they are really after when asking for advice. Insight into how you think. It’s a mystery to them and pulling back the curtain is a wonder.
They will learn and take what they can from the experience.
But in situations where I want to give unsolicited advice I either ask if they’d like some unsolicited advice and respect their response. Or I offer the advice as a story about myself instead of an instruction/order.
For example instead of telling a friend what they are saying is too aggressive I might talk about a time I said something that was a little aggressive and misunderstood and the problems it caused me. So they have the opportunity to learn from my experience without me forcing it on them.
Reduce the advice to something short and memorable. A rhyme, pun, or clever garden-path sentence are all good techniques - different people like different kinds of wordplay, so have a bunch of these at hand and know your audience.
Make sure the message is the same across time. People trust consistency on the one hand, and on the other people can become worn down by hearing the same advice for a decade and decide to adopt your thinking.
Charge a lot of money for your advice. People are more likely to accept advice they paid ten thousand dollars for over advice they paid nothing for.
Sometimes it is even useful to ask said person who might benefit from advice for advice. That opens the conversation to being receptive of each other's advice.
Lastly, you should probably question yourself regarding why your advice should be accepted in the first place. Majority of the time people will figure it out and your inaction of giving said advice is actually more helpful in the long run.
“Based on my experience, here are options, how one might weight them, pros and cons of each, and what led me to this conclusion. Use as input, but not solely and without proper contextualization.”
And giving bad advice is worse than giving no advice at all. Always avoid giving bad advice, or if it sounds bad because you can’t properly communicate the idea/thought. You do harm to others, as well as your own reputation, by doing so.
Narrow, specific, experience-backed advice is generally the best. I have found that most people will give you their opinion-as-advice, and it's most often worthless or worse (harmful). Only a very small fraction of people that will give you advice on a subject, are likely to have very relevant experience to offer you high quality actionable advice. Narrow, specific advice is good, general advice not nearly so much. General advice is better picked up on your own by living life, whereas narrow, specific advice can really jump you ahead in your thinking and learning curve (often you can plug it right into your puzzle, or at least see where the piece fits, and then grasp the broader picture better).
Advice that comes from a personal experience place will be drastically better received, along with the story that relates it, the story from which you learned the advice. It humanizes the advice, helps the other person relate, and makes it seem less pushy or judgmental (sometimes advice can rudely come across as telling the other person they're doing something wrong and should do it such and such way instead). By telling them your story, how you arrived at the conclusion you did, you demonstrate that you were in their shoes once.
This is an issue that has been on my mind a lot lately, as a lack of it at a critical time in my life, from multiple people, had critical consequences.
There's two things I wish people had done. The first is to provide advice in good faith with the sincere aim of helping the person, wanting a good outcome and with the belief they can do well. Advice that comes from acting in bad faith, will be picked up on as such. Acting in good faith is important because if you're not, you're undermining the advice: in that scenario your advice is suspect because it's impossible to know what your aims are. If you can't act in good faith, someone else needs to be advising.
Related to this is that criticism alone is not advice. This is something that's emphasized in different ways in different places, but it's because it's important: don't just criticize, let them know that you'd like to see them doing or feeling better, and preferably, how to do that.
The second thing I wish people had done is to try to identify what I will call "unspoken factors" in the situation before offering advice. For instance, what sort of advice has this person already received? What advice haven't they received? Is there something about the situation the person finds themselves in that's important to understanding them? Should the advice really be directed at that person, or the people around them? If the person is going to you for help, what are they "saying in between the lines"? That is, they might say they're having trouble with or want A, B, and C, but it might be that the real problem is, or what they really want is X, Y, and Z. Talk with them about that. Relatedly, don't assume that what they're wrestling with is "just in their head": it might be, but they might really be facing something problematic.
It is an iterative process. Then when you have an "advice", you can phrase it as a question of how would a new set of parameters be computed in their model and their impact on other aspects you may not be aware of. You could see the computation happening, and they'd say something like "Yeah, but it would negatively impact XYZ", which you'll take into account as a new constraint in the subsequent sets of parameters you submit for computation/simulation.
One effect of doing this is that a lot of people will ask for your advice because it works.
Otherwise, the advice can come across as criticism/attack. When attacked, the natural response is to defend. No matter how right/wrong each party is. Usually advice is some form of "you're doing this wrong; you can do this better." So always start from a place of agreement: what are they doing right/well?
[1]: https://www.inc.com/mithu-storoni/the-1-thing-good-bosses-ne...
Second understand that many years may pass before someone finally appreciates your advice and/or takes it. Don't give advice if you expect instant gratification and don't get discouraged that if it is immediately rejected since it might be accepted later.
Frame it with “I can tell you what works for me, but everyone is different and there are a lot of ways to do things… <advice/>”
Wait until it is asked for.