I have wanted to tell people how to live. It wasn’t effective and it wasn’t fair to them. Learning how to stop giving unsolicited advice has been one of my biggest growth edges.
Unsolicited advice creates an incredible amount of resistance in the person we’re trying to advise. Even when we mean well, it often lands as criticism.
What “Pile On Top Coaching” Looks Like
One of my mentors calls this pile on top coaching. It’s telling someone what they should do instead of guiding them into having their own intuition about their next steps.
My social media pages are full of advice and that may come across as me wanting you to live the way that I’m living.
In the past, that may have been an accurate assessment. It’s incredibly uncomfortable for me to see someone living using a strategy that doesn’t match my own, especially if it doesn’t look like their strategy is proving successful for them.
The Judgment We Don’t Realize We’re Making
But that’s a massive judgment on my part. Because I don’t know what their life has been and I don’t know what they really need at that deep emotional level to find whatever it is they’re looking for.
Maybe they’re living right now the way they want to be living and I’m projecting onto them my own desires and experiences, narcissistically thinking everyone else must want the same things as me.
Reframing What Advice Actually Is
More and more, I’m attempting to allow people to have their own experience. And unless someone specifically asked me for feedback, I want to give them the space to live their own life.
My social posts aren’t about telling people what to do as much as they’re reminders to myself on how I want to be living. And if my advice to myself resonates with others then that’s fine too.
The Urge to Fix Big Feelings
I know that it’s uncomfortable to see someone having big feelings. There’s a tendency to want to shut those feelings down by trying to fix them with your unsolicited advice.
But we’re all having our own experience. And maybe that’s okay.
Learning how to stop giving unsolicited advice means getting comfortable with other people’s discomfort. It means trusting that they have their own inner guidance system, even when you can’t see it working.
What Actually Helps
The alternative to unsolicited advice is presence. It’s being with someone without needing to change them. It’s trusting that their path is their path, even when it looks different from yours.
This doesn’t mean you can’t ever share your perspective. It means waiting until someone asks. It means offering your experience as one possibility among many, not the correct answer.
When someone actually wants your input, they’ll ask for it. And when they do, your words will land differently because they were invited.
This is shadow work in action.
If you’re ready to process what’s been running your life, explore the Shadow Work practices.