Boomerang Advice
Wait, didn’t I say that?
Has this ever happened to you?
You give someone advice. Your spouse, your sibling, your young adult child. Let’s even assume they asked for the advice. You gather your hard-earned experience and wisdom, carefully consider the best response, and lay it out for them.
And it is received with all the enthusiasm demonstrated by a babysitter being given a handful of half chewed cookie from a toddler’s mouth. You might get silence, or outright dismissals, or have your advice countered by an opposite suggestion which is clearly more appealing/practical/effective than your sorry ass idea.
Ouch. But we’re mature as fuck so we take a breath and say nothing.
But wait. A week or a month later that same person tells you, breathlessly, of the great wisdom they received. They display this new nugget of brilliance, sparkly with genius.
And it is EXACTLY the thing you told them weeks ago, which they received so unenthusiastically.
Anyone have this experience?
This doesn’t just happen in personal relationships. I see it in my executive coaching practice and I’m sure other professional listeners experience something similar.
I have thoughts.
Why can’t people hear you, in particular? Often your role, or the projections someone puts on you, cloud their ability to see your advice clearly. Adult children may still see a parent only as Mom or Dad and can’t always access that Mom is also a CPA or Dad is a Physical Therapist. Sometimes people you are close to can’t hear you because they can’t see past who you once were. To your older brother, you may always be the little sister who got in trouble, even after you have the PhD.
Emotional undercurrents crop up and obscure the value of what you know. Subtle or not so subtle competition or jealousy can arise between siblings or even between partners and spouses. When you’re dealing with your teen or adult children, you also need consider they are becoming adults and want to separate themselves from you. It may be part of this process to automatically reject what their parents say. I remember a therapist once telling me that a mark of maturity was for a teenager to pick out an outfit and when their mother say they love the outfit the teen wears it anyway.
Preconceived notions about who you are can be more damaging at work. People often don’t listen because they can’t associate smarts with someone like you. You’re too young, old, female, Black, Latino. Their ideas of worthy advice givers do not include people like you. If this is the case, you might need to look for another job.
It could be timing. There’s a saying that when the student is ready the teacher will appear. It is also possible that multiple teachers rode through before the student was ready and so the student couldn’t hear any of them. People sometimes say it takes 100 people to get an alcoholic sober, and if you are 1 thru 99 you’re going to feel like your concern was wasted, but if they couldn’t listen until the 100th person, the 99th was still critical, even if that 99th person seemed to be ignored.
It could be capacity. I can’t tell you how many times I have had clients hire me to achieve a specific objective and then stop working halfway through. We build a roadmap and decide that we need to do A, B and C. Great. We chug along up to and through A and then they stop. They don’t articulate a reason – it’s not that they can’t afford to work with me any longer or that they have changed direction. They just stop.
I used to complain to my husband and ask why clients hire me for my expertise just to ignore the expertise they hired me to provide. And then I realized they weren’t ready; they didn’t have the capacity to change to the extent they needed to change at that moment.
We all do this, as individuals and as organizations; we overestimate our capacity for change and underestimate the resistance to doing the hard work required to effect that change.
The change still has value. Getting from nothing to A is still progress. And maybe in the future they will be able to get to B and even C. But I can’t push them into it. No matter who you are helping, you cannot want them to change more than they want to change. You can’t put more effort into the transformation than they themselves are expending.
What’s the best response to being on the receiving end of this? Probably none of this is about you. Even when your expertise is being discounted because of prejudice, that is still on the person discounting you and no reflection of your abilities. Of course, it’s still painful. Feel the fuck out of those feelings. Being consistently disregarded is a good reason for ending or changing any relationship. Just don’t take it as a reflection on your competence.
If it’s a loved one who comes back to you with your advice in another wrapper, I opt for polite smiling and nodding. I indulge in a silent cheer that I was, indeed, correct in my most excellent advice and make a note to tell a friend about this later. But otherwise, smiling and affirming head bobs are the order of the day.
Check in with yourself. If this happens to you often you might want to ask yourself the following questions.
Are you being asked for the advice that you are giving which is being disregarded? Try to give advice only when asked. This is a challenge for me, since I give lots of advice in a professional capacity and am quick to toss out advice with my friends and family. I try to check in. “Do you want suggestions or am I just listening?” This can be a tough one to say no to, to be fair, but I try to give the opt out option before holding forth.
Are you offering advice from real experience or authority? To me, there’s a big difference between someone reeling off nutrition advice they saw on social media from an uncredentialed influencer and someone speaking from lived experience, expertise or education. When I offer work advice, it’s as a board-certified executive coach with over one thousand hours of executive coaching, plus the master’s degree. If I’m going to throw around advice about auto mechanics or math, I have no experience or expertise and I should be ignored.
Is your advice up to date? What I was told to do with my babies 40 years ago is very different than the advice given to my daughter when her kids were born. Go with the up-to-date information. If you have adult children with children of their own, assume their pediatrician knows the latest and follow whatever instructions you are given about the grandchildren. Buying a house, dating, medical treatment, getting a job, are all entirely different than they were even two years ago, so your experience 5 or 10 years ago might not be relevant.
Check your delivery. You may think the pearl of wisdom you offered your son about his credit card debt was delivered with care and consideration, and be hurt when he recounts the same advice as new and helpful when he heard it from his uncle. But you could get curious, or, better yet, ask someone else about your delivery. We can often, unintentionally, bring energy to advice that we don’t perceive but the person we are giving the advice to hears with the intensity of trumpet blasts.
Most of us have energy around parenting, finances, health and food, and it’s much louder than we think. I’ve rarely heard one woman in a family talk to another about food/eating/dieting/weight and not have it come across as a conflagration of energy and conflict, because those subjects are so loaded for most women. A mother may think she’s just suggesting her daughter would feel better if she ate more vegetables, but there’s little chance it will land well. My guess is that many of those women aren’t aware that their voices tighten and the urgency seeps out of their posture, and everyone around them reacts to that. Check with someone you trust and ask them to assess your intensity level around topics where you are being ignored.
Can you let it go? For some of us, it is difficult to let go of other people’s choices and decisions, especially when we believe – perhaps correctly- that those choices will be damaging. You can’t control other people. Once they’re old enough to drive, there is very little you can do to force them to act in ways you want. That’s just a reality. I’ve had this beaten into my awareness many times, especially when dealing with loved ones with a substance abuse disorder, that it makes the whole process of not being listened to much easier. Practise letting it go.
Can you find a better home for what you know? If you have real expertise and knowledge, there might be a better place for it than at the family dinner table where eyes are rolled at you. I write this substack, which often has advice, and people read it. My clients often ask for my advice and take it.
If you want to be listened to, consider what skills you can share – gardening, knitting, cooking, organizing – and then find a group who are looking for that expertise. There is no shortage of lonely people who want to hear from a caring soul who is interested in them. Elders in assisted living facilities, kids in juvenile detention, incarcerated people, many of them would be enthusiastic recipients of your care and attention, and maybe even your advice, if what is really driving you is your own loneliness or longing to be valued. Find the people you can help and help them. You’ll feel much better for it. That’s my advice.