Why Can’t You Take Your Own Advice?
Exploring why we struggle to give advice to ourselves when we are great at doing it for others, and what to do about it.
Why is it easier to give advice to other people and still be very confused about our own situations? Seems counter intuitive, because we have more context over our own lives, so we should be able to arrive at perfect advice for ourselves. But things are often not that clear.
There are several reason for this I think, where biggest one being our own biases. Our emotions are deeply intertwined with our personal situations. This makes it hard to be objective. Fear, anxiety, self-doubt, or even wishful thinking can cloud our judgment and lead us down paths that aren’t truly in our best interests. When we advise others, we have more emotional distance, allowing for clearer perspectives.
Also, we know our own stories inside and out—every detail, every thought. This can actually hinder us. We get bogged down by irrelevant information or past experiences, making it hard to see the bigger picture or fresh solutions. With others, we focus on the core issue, unburdened by those intricate details.
Offering advice is to other people is not risky because we don’t have to face the consequences. But when it comes to taking our own advice, it requires action and the possibility of failure. It’s much easier to tell a friend to leave a bad relationship than to actually leave one ourselves. Because in our case, our judgement is clouded.
This bias based on our past, leads us to conceive few logical future paths. But there can be many more paths that are inconceivable to us, because we are blind to them because of our biases. But you can largely fix this.
To solve this problem of giving advice to self, we need to keep few things in mind:
Get outside perspective. We’ve established that our perspective can be limited by our own biases and emotions. Just like we can give other people objective advice, we should seek such advice from others.
Write down your daily thoughts and see if there are hidden and recurring patterns. Journaling is very powerful.
Distance yourself emotionally from the situation. Imagine what would you do if it was happening to someone else. This can lead to new insights.
Use mental models. Learn about cognitive biases, read Charlie Munger’s excellent speech here: https://fs.blog/great-talks/psychology-human-misjudgment/. At any point, there are several of these biases in play, so identify them and see if they need to be addressed.
[Original Publish Date: May 30, 2024]