In my job, I am blessed to have the opportunity to help people reach their goals by clearing the barriers standing in their way. All of which most often are internal.
One of the internal barriers that I often need to address is all the advice clients get from other people before coming to me. They are well-meaning advice coming from a place of caring, but they are a disservice. They amount into a cloud of complexities, which swallow up my clients. Swoop – and they are covered by a cloud of :
And the bottom line is they don’t follow their heart and reach their goal.
The problem with advice is that the only one who knows what is the best for you, is you. And I find that most people know this is true, but few practice it due to a lack of trust in themselves and their ability to hear their own inner truth. Instead they ask family, friends or colleagues for advice. But people give advice based on their own fears, self-doubt, experiences and insecurities. And what you are left with is another person’s version of your life. And your story is not their story. Your truth is not their truth.
If you take on other people’s advice you never get to experience the empowerment of taking a leap and making your own choices, and finding out that you can much more than you thought. Or in truly learning from what went wrong, because you cannot blame it on bad advice, but have to take full responsibility for your own choice.
Ideally, I want for everyone to be his or her own trusted advisor. It’s a good place to be, and it sets you free. I know because I have been in that cloud of complexity myself and I have managed to lift it. I was depending so much on other people’s opinions and advice that I wasn’t living my own life. Or even when I did, it didn’t necessarily feel so great because someone had the opinion that I did something wrong, so I felt wrong. But the more you learn to listen to yourself, trust yourself and build courage, the more free and easy life becomes.
And I know from personal experience that it takes getting to know your self really well, it takes courage and it takes practice. But IT IS WORTH IT. Because what you get is full personal empowerment.
And if you sometimes feel like you need to talk things over with someone, pick wisely. Don’t necessarily pick a person you trust. Pick someone who has faced the same situation as you. And ask what THEY did. NOT what YOU should do. Find a few of these. Learn from the things they tell that resonate with you, discard the rest, and go out and live YOUR life.