The Chemistry of Advice and personal Experience

I am generally cautious in giving and taking advice. I only give advice if someone directly asks me for it. And even then I will always tell a person where his or her choices are, keeping my own life completely apart from what I tell them. Unfortunately not everybody keeps it in this way and whenever you get advice from anybody, I would always recommend remembering one thing: most advice is autobiographical!

It is true. As a counsellor, I have of course some more experience in not letting my own life influence my suggestions to the person in front of me. At the same time however, whatever you tell another person will always be a result of your own experiences! It is hard to avoid that. You have, personally, experienced one thing as positive and another as negative. You would try to pass the positive experience on to the one in front of you – but maybe for that person, something completely different would actually be the positive experience!

Nowadays, you can get a lot of advice completely for free on the biggest of platforms available to the whole world: the internet. There, a lot of people do something which is called giving advice but which is actually only the story of their lives presented as advice. The problem is that you may tend to take it literally and as something you should follow exactly!

So keep in mind that the advice of another person is always a mix of his experiences, his own thoughts and his feeling of what is right or wrong. Don’t feel bad if you are doing things differently. Your reality may look very different and that is good as it is!