By: Hannah P. Galeone
If you had told me that I was going to major in English and pursue journalism as a career, I would have laughed at you. Yet here I sit, in my seventh semester of college, trying to power through my Bachelor’s in English and Literary Studies. The first time I saw an article I’d written displayed proudly across the front page of the student newspaper, the Blue and Gray Press, I felt a pride in myself that I hadn’t felt in a very long time. Seeing the copies of newsprint stacked in academic buildings made me smile. I am a writer, I realized. After years of feeling lost I finally had a place, a meaning, and a goal.
But just as soon as I’d found my purpose, just when I thought I had it all figured out, all of a sudden, everyone had an opinion about what I wanted to do with my life. “Are you crazy?” “Don’t do it.” “[Journalism] is a really hard career path, you should look into backup plans.” These are a sample of the reactions I’ve gotten when I’ve told people I want to be a journalist. What is worse, is that some of the people discouraging me from pursuing journalism are journalists themselves. My parents are supportive of me and my desires and sure, they see that I can be lazy at times, but at the end of the day they want me to be happy. “That’s so rude of them, why would they say that to a young person trying to figure their life out,” my mom said after one of these conversations.
I’m a generally stubborn person, and having other people tell me what to do is high on my list of pet peeves. But as I continued to get less than satisfactory feedback on my choice of career, I started to wonder if maybe I was the problem. This all made me think about how to take advice well. While I want to be receptive to what other people say, I also want to know when to stand my own ground. I decided to look into what it means to be a good advice-taker
Advice Givers
First, I looked into what drives people to give unsolicited advice, which is defined as “feedback that is unwanted or unrequested by the receiver.” I wanted to know more. According to Leon F. Seltzer Ph. D, author of the psychology blog, Evolution of the Self, often the advice people give says more about them than the receiver.
“Th[e] strong impulse to giv[ing] unsought advice is behavior [that] hints at a person whose ego demands perpetual reassurance,” he writes. According to Seltzer, these chronic advice givers need to be consistently reminded of their elevated intellectual “rank” or “level” compared to that of the advice taker. The people who give advice in this manner desire to be in constant competition with those around them, creating an environment in which they can give unwarranted advice.
It was nice to know that the people discouraging me from pursuing my passions weren’t doing so because they thought I wasn’t capable. But it was frustrating that they were doing it because they wanted to be morally superior.
Although some people were sharing advice out of their self-motivated minds, I also know that some advice sharers truly care. This type of advice giver recognizes that they are doing so for the other person’s benefit and not their own. According to an article from The Muse by Sarah Kauss, “providing truly useful advice starts by coming from a selfless place.” A strong advice giver will also be able to realize when their advisee doesn’t want assistance. Kauss says that being brief when giving advice is detrimental, because the person will reach out for more if it’s wanted.
It’s All About Balance
While people have various approaches to giving advice, there are also different ways we learn to accept it. According to their article, “The Art of Giving and Taking Advice,” David A. Garvin and Joshua D. Margolis say that advice takers must deal with hurdles in their path of advice acceptance including “a deeply ingrained tendency to prefer their own opinions, irrespective of their merit, and the fact that careful listening is hard, time-consuming work.” They say giving and taking advice is a “subtle and intricate art” and on both sides requires effort. Givers and takers of advice must have self-awareness, emotional intelligence, restraint, and patience. And it is easy for the advice process to go wrong which can lead to consequences such as frustration, weak solutions, and damaged relationships. Garvin and Margolis also offer their criticism that, because advice skills are supposed to “emerge organically,” the skills are rarely taught formally. I prefer my own opinions over those of others, but that does not mean my opinions are the only ones in existence.
My challenge is becoming more open to taking advice and I wanted to know how this is achievable. As stated in Garvin and Margolis’s article, “it’s a mistake to think of advice as a one-and-done transaction.” Thinking introspectively about the interactions with people who discouraged me made me re-think the situations. Hearing peoples’ negative reaction to my career choice was automatically hurtful. But it’s possible that I was jumping to conclusions too quickly. Maybe I should have talked with them more to find out what drove them to say what they did. Maybe I was taking what others had said too seriously. It’s possible that in thinking about their own journalism career apprehension, they came off as rude or discouraging to me.
When I started to understand the psychology behind advice, I actually had even more confidence in myself. I feel better about pursuing journalism because I know know that my concerns are malleable and a good source of self-drive. Now I know that when I encounter someone who gives me bad advice, that there is a way to accept it. Rather than immediately shutting down, I feel comfortable asking someone to explain the motive behind their thoughts. Listening to their opinions can help me see what their fears are and how I can use that in my own life. I have to stop generalizing.
Acceptance
Advice is a touchy subject and it can create tension between the people who are exchanging it. But advice doesn’t always have to be a conflicting concept; it can be, and is, extremely helpful in a lot of situations. There’s a delicate way to approach giving or taking advice, too. When you give suggestions, you have to think about who you’re talking to and how you’re choosing to bolster your claims. You have to be sensitive.
Taking advice is also an intricate process. Learning that there are different types of advice givers has shown me that not everyone is bad at it — only some people are. I just have to learn to determine who’s poor at advising. I now know that asking people to elaborate on their advice can be beneficial in certain situations and I plan to get to know more about why people say the things they do.