Penelope and the Stinky Fleece
Or, How to Respond to Unsolicited Advice
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how (not) to give advice. But we are not just advice-givers; more commonly we are on the receiving end of advice that we might not have requested. This week, I’ll offer some ideas for how to respond when other people give us unsolicited advice.
First, a little story. The sister of one of my best friends is a fiber artist. For reasons that will become apparent beginning in the next sentence, I will call her Penelope. Penelope’s hobby is spinning yarn and weaving textiles. One day, her mother-in-law, whom—to continue the ancient Greece theme—I will call Anticlea, was at a sheep-sheering festival and thought it would be a lovely idea to send Penelope a fleece fresh from the sheep, which she could spin into yarn. Anticlea purchased a whole fleece that had just been sheered, stuffed it into a cardboard box, took it to the post office, and mailed it to Penelope. How lovely and thoughtful, right?
Wrong. Anticlea lacked two important pieces of information: First, a whole fleece is quite heavy, and because expedited shipping cost more than Anticlea was comfortable paying, she sent the fleece by freight. It sat in its box in the height of summer for more than three weeks before arriving at Penelope’s house. Second, a fleece straight from the sheep is unimaginably filthy. (The fleece that fiber artists buy to spin into yarn has been thoroughly washed first.) Fleece straight off the sheep is full of grime, grease, bits of hay, bugs, urine, and manure. All of which festered in that box for those three weeks. When Penelope opened the box, the smell was so foul that she had to chuck the whole thing in the trash and then fumigate the house.
My point is that unsolicited advice is often like that stinky fleece. The advisor may feel as though s/he is offering a precious gift, but to the recipient the advice may seem useless at best and repellent at worst. And yet, because we flawed humans will continue to give and be subjected to advice, we need to find a way to forestall it, or to hear it without being hurt, or (possibly) to follow it, or (sometimes) to toss it out and fumigate the house. What follows are some strategies and language we can use to respond to unwanted advice while also preserving our relationships. I hope you will share your strategies too, readers!
Launch a Preemptive Strike
Sometimes the best way to deal with unwanted advice is to prevent its being delivered in the first place. One option is to politely say to would-be advice-givers, “I’m facing a problem that I need to work out for myself. I’ll let you know if I need advice.” We are allowed to be direct like this! Our loved ones may even appreciate our saving them the trouble of rushing in to encumber us with help.
Another option is to provide a better outlet than advice-giving for people’s kindness. In my previous post on how (not) to give advice, I mentioned a college friend whose child had a serious health problem. When she announced that her child was ill, she made her family’s needs clear: “We have excellent doctors working with us, and we are not looking for medical advice. We welcome your good thoughts and prayers.” My friend had the insight that people tend to offer advice in a misdirected effort to be helpful. So her Facebook post redirected her friends’ helpful impulses away from useless (and possibly upsetting) advice, and toward actions that would actually make her feel better. If we are facing a conundrum or challenge and need concrete action rather than empty words, we can do our friends and family (and ourselves) the favor of specifying what we need from them.
Remember the Principle of Charity
To follow the principle of charity, we interpret people’s words and actions in the strongest and most favorable way possible; we begin with the assumption that they are rational and well-meaning. So, for example, sometimes people’s advice is useless or hurtful not because they intend to make us feel bad, but because they lack crucial information. If we remember that the person giving the advice is acting out of well-intentioned ignorance rather than malice, we will be less likely to feel criticized and more able to say, tactfully, “Thank you for the suggestion. I’ll think about it.” (And then we can secretly ignore the advice.)
Here’s a personal example: Readers may remember that I am a knitter. People tell me all the time that I should open an Etsy shop or sell my creations in a physical store. I used to feel criticized by these suggestions; I felt as though my friends thought I was being self-indulgent because I knitted for fun when I could be productively running a business. The principle of charity helps me see that my friends aren’t criticizing but are actually complimenting me; they think my knits are nice enough that people would want to pay for them. (Like Anticlea, they lack two important bits of information: First, it is a violation of US copyright law to sell knitted products for profit using patterns created by someone else; and second, I prefer to knit with high-quality hand-dyed yarns, which can be quite pricey. Most people wouldn’t be willing to cover even the cost of the yarn—which usually runs around $200—let alone reimburse me for the rights to the pattern and pay me for my time, no matter how pretty my sweater may be.)
The principle of charity also helps us to understand that our loved ones may be giving us unsolicited advice because they are worried about us and are experiencing their own pain when they see us hurting. The advice is their way of trying to wish our problem away or fix it for us. It’s likely that every one of us who has had career setbacks or has gone through a health crisis or a serious family conflict has been on the receiving end of misguided advice stemming from our loved ones’ worry and helplessness. If you think the bad advice arises from the person’s empathy and love, it’s ok to speak to the person directly about it: “I know you are feeling bad about this situation. I am too. I need to be sad about it for a while—can you let me? I promise that if I need advice I will ask you.” Alternately, since our loved ones won’t be able to solve our problem for us anyway, we can suggest that they tell us a joke instead to cheer us up. Everyone has at least one good joke in their back pocket!1
Maybe Give It a Try
Here’s a radical idea: If we know that the person advising us has our best interests at heart and actually might be able to solve our problem, we can try following their advice to see what happens. For example, when my son, Noah, was a baby, I had a hell of a time getting him to go to sleep at night. In an effort to tire him out, I would sing to him, take him out for a walk, let him crawl over everything, and boisterously play with him—and somehow it would be 9:30pm, and he would still be raring to go. Experienced parents are likely rolling their eyes at me. Believe me, now that Noah is an adult and these tribulations are long in the past, I am rolling my eyes at me too.
Anyway, we were visiting my parents when Noah was five months old, and my mom observed all this frenzied nighttime activity. She gently suggested that I try putting Noah to bed earlier, say at 6:30pm. Not to put too fine a point on it, but to me this advice sounded like it was coming from Opposite Land. If Noah was wide awake at 9:30, how could he possibly fall asleep three hours earlier? But it wasn’t like my approach was working either, so I figured I had nothing to lose and tried my mom’s idea one night. Readers will not be surprised to learn that it worked perfectly, and from that night on (until Noah became a teenaged night owl, that is), I never again had trouble getting him to go to sleep. Turns out that my mom knows something about raising children. Following advice, at least on a trial basis, can be a win-win: Either it works and we can say thank you, or it doesn’t work and we can say we tried and no dice. But in any case we are no longer stuck arguing with our loved ones about the merits of their unsolicited advice.
Show Them
Some advice is ostensibly supportive but is actually hurtful and belittling. When a person giving advice underestimates us, we may, if we’re lucky, get the chance to prove them wrong. My friend S is a highly accomplished violinist who holds herself to strict standards, so when a teacher advised her to give up, she dug in her heels and emerged triumphant:
A teacher I had (in junior high) told me that I should not play a recital because I messed up a few notes of my solo during rehearsal. . . . Of course, I nailed it during the recital. She apologized years later. But I never forgot that moment and am still a bit angry about it (I’m fifty-five years old!).
Here’s another example: When my friend L was five years old,
a language teacher told my mom that I would never learn a foreign language and was incapable of learning one. I went on to study six of them and became fluent in two! The teacher apologized to me my senior year of high school when I won the departmental award for foreign languages.
Imagine being a teacher who decides a five-year-old child is incapable of learning! And notice, too, how such discouraging, destructive advice has haunted both of my friends for decades. If someone advises us that a task lies beyond our capacity, and we succeed in spite of them, it’s important to inform them that they have misjudged us; this is useful information for them and may even cause them to think twice before they undermine someone else.
In Extremis, Pull an Elizabeth Bennet
Anyone who has ever been an awkward wallflower at a party can relate to Elizabeth Bennet’s experience at the beginning of Pride and Prejudice. For readers who are somewhat less obsessive about the book than I am, here’s a quick reminder of how it went down. Elizabeth is sitting on the sidelines at a ball, when she overhears Mr. Bingley urging Mr. Darcy to ask her to dance. Mr. Darcy replies, “She is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me; I am in no humor at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men.” Yikes! You and I might crumple into tears and flee the room, but our girl Elizabeth stands tall and makes straight for her friends, to whom she repeats Mr. Darcy’s snooty remark. They all laugh at how ridiculous Mr. Darcy is, and Elizabeth feels better.
What is “pulling an Elizabeth Bennet”? I came up with this term for our regrettable tendency to run to our friends and allies when someone does or says something awful to us. Instead of confronting the offender directly, we vent and rant to others about how horrible the person is. Pulling an Elizabeth Bennet is usually a destructive way to behave; I believe we would all be better off if we stopped trashing people behind their backs (ahem: Twitter) and chose to discuss our problems like civilized adults instead. But once in a while the behavior or advice is truly egregious, or is repeated constantly despite all our efforts to make it stop, or the advice-giver has so much power that s/he is immune to constructive dialogue. In cases like these, we may well need a reality check and moral support from friends. If a person claims to be giving advice but is in fact being insulting—and is too pusillanimous to admit it or have a conversation with you—go ahead and pull an Elizabeth Bennet. At least you’ll get a laugh out of the situation.
How about you, readers? How do you deal with unsolicited advice? Have you come up with a particularly effective response? What happened? Please share your thoughts in the comments!
The Tidbit
I can just hear the goats of the world grumbling to themselves, “All this talk about sheep and wool! What are we? Chopped liver?”
So, for this week’s tidbit, enjoy these fun facts about goats, which I found here and here.
Do you see Caspar’s eerie eyes, with their rectangular pupils? Goats and many other ungulates (hooved animals) have rectangular pupils, which give them the ability to see 320–340 degrees without moving their heads. (Humans can only see 160–210 degrees.)
Goats can learn their names and will come when called.
Abraham Lincoln loved goats, and when he was president, two goats, Nanny and Nando, lived at (or, probably, outside) the White House. They used to pull the First Son, Tad, around in a little cart.
The stereotype that goats will eat anything, including the laundry off the clothesline, is a vile slander. Goats are actually quite picky eaters. For example, they will refuse to eat hay if it has been trodden on by other animals or is old and stale.
Goats were one of the very first domesticated animals. Humans have herded goats for more than 11,000 years.
According to Ethiopian legend, goats discovered coffee. A goat herder noticed that his goats became especially bouncy after eating the berries from a particular bush, so he tried the berries for himself and liked the result. Thank you, goats!
Oh, ok, if you insist.
So, a blind guy walks into a bar and says, “Hey, bartender, want to hear a blonde joke?” The bartender leans over and says, “Since you’re blind, I’ll cut you a break. I’m blonde, and I’m also a former Navy SEAL. The two blonde women at the corner table were on the US Olympic karate team. Sitting on one side of you is a blonde lady who is a world champion kickboxer, and the blonde on the other side of you is Chuck Norris.” The bartender adds, menacingly, “Now, do you STILL want to tell a blonde joke?”
The blind guy thinks for a moment and then says, “Well no. Not if I have to explain the joke five times!”
My brother, who is blonde, told me this joke.
That blond joke is really funny.
The other side of this: sometimes I have (in retrospect) needed advice, but didn’t seek it or receive it because I either didn’t know I needed it (like before I initiated my “starter marriage” when I was young and clueless), or because I didn’t know who to ask (like when I was struggling to decide on an undergrad major).
There is also an art to perceiving when a friend or associate needs advice, and taking the risk of offering it. I think this is part of good mentoring, a role which I find myself in pretty often as a university professor in a professional undergrad program.