How to Be a Guru
Date Posted: January 30th, 2010
If there’s someone in your life you care about, I’d say it’s just about impossible to be ambivalent about their bad habits. We want our friends to be happy and healthy; bad habits prevent both of these. Wanting our friends to change isn’t a bad thing, but I think that most of us aren’t very good at getting them change. We either wait until we can’t take watching them anymore and just tell them off, or we tell ourselves their problems are none of our business and attempt to ignore them. Neither of these options does anything positive for our friends, so I’ll try to give you some insight into how to do what you really want to do: influence your friends for the better.
There are two parts to the process. The first is to be the kind of person who not only gives good advice, but gives it in such a way that it strengthens the relationship. The second step is to use the right words so they take the message the right way. In this post I’ll focus on cultivating the mindset. Next week’s will be on using the right words.
So let’s get to it! Below are things you can do to help yourself BE a better advice giver.
Ask your friend for advice
Chances are your friend has some area of expertise that they’re dying to give you advice on. Maybe they’re an excellent cook, and you have a complicated dinner party you’d like to prepare. Maybe they’re incredibly well organized, and you’d like to improve that in yourselves. Basically, humble yourself by asking them for advice. The idea here is that if your friend sees you humbling yourself, they’ll feel more comfortable doing the same with you.
One caveat: Don’t do it just to improve your chances at getting your friend to ask you for advice. That is, don’t ask them for advice on something you don’t need advice on. If your friend is a master chef, don’t ask him for advice if you have no actual interest in cooking. If you’re more organized than your friend, don’t ask them for advice on organizing… unless there’s something specific they do do that you’d like to do. Just be genuine when you ask for help.
If you aren’t being genuine, they’ll be able to tell, and you’ll get labeled as condescending, which… honestly… would be accurate. Your friendship can’t be very good if you can’t think of any area in which your friend can actually help you.
Again, the goal here is to be humble enough to ask for advice where you aren’t knowledgeable and to value your friend for what he/she is good at. It feels more comfortable to ask someone for advice if they owe you a favor and we like sharing/being valued for our passions.
Actively Work on That Area Yourself
Let’s say there’s something you specifically want to give your friend advice on, one of your first steps ought to do is to work on that area yourself. “Get the log out of your eye before telling your brother to get the speck out of his” and all that jazz. This has the benefit of establishing yourself as an expert (so you can actually give good advice), showing your friend that it’s alright to work on that area, and improving yourself in that area yourself. (If it’s good enough for your friend, it’s good enough for you, right?)
If you’re lucky you might even get some insight into why your friend is still struggling with it, although in my experience you probably won’t. You want to fix it right now, your friend doesn’t. Your experience will be fundamentally different. Resist the urge to get frustrated with them as that will make it harder to listen to them when they try to explain what’s stopping them.
Be Patient; Care But Not Too Much
Detach yourself from the situation. If the person you want to help sees that you care too much, they may avoid you even if you’re the best person to go to. Why? Because you’d put too much pressure on them to change, and not only to change but to do so at your pace. Think about it, why do many of us seek out self-help books or blogs instead of asking our friends and family for advice? One reason, of course, is that our friends and family don’t give great advice, but another is that they want too much for us to follow their advice. We don’t want to disappoint them if/when we fail the first time. We also don’t want to feel obligated to do it their way. Books don’t care if you disregard their advice.
When I’m trying to figure out who to go to for advice, I look for/expect three things in my advice-giver:
- They’ll be supportive.
- They’ll give me good, honest advice that’s in my best interest.
- If I fall they’ll help me pick myself back up and try again.
If I suspected any of these is false, I probably won’t ask… and I won’t appreciate it if they give me their unsolicited thoughts. (Although I am trying to work on the last part.)
The only way to meet all three conditions is to be detached. I can’t really be supportive if I’m clouded by my own expectations. I can’t give good advice if I’m basing it on what I think the situation is. I can’t help them when they fall if I’m too frustrated when they do.
Nurture Your Love
Common advice for married couples is to put some time and effort into keeping the feeling alive. Focus on the things you enjoy about your partner. Do fun stuff. If you don’t you run the risk of only thinking about the qualities in your partner you don’t like.
This advice can be applied to all of your relationships, especially those where you’re starting to see the other person’s flaws. It’s important to remind yourself why you care. Like your significant other, you run risk of focusing on the negatives with your friends too. In addition you might start seeing them as your project, someone you want to fix to give you an ego boost. This is not good.
By nurturing the love, you remind yourself why you’re friends with this person and that they are your equal. They have as much to teach you, as you have to teach them. You respect them.
If you do all of these things you can be pretty certain that your intentions are aligned with good things. I think if any of my friends embodied these qualities, that is,
- They were humble enough to ask for help
- They were experts in or were working on an area I needed help with
- They were detached from the outcome of my situation
- I knew the loved and respected me
I wouldn’t hesitate to ask them for advice, since by doing this they would meet all of the criteria I mentioned earlier. And not only that, if they told me out of the blue that I was doing something that was self-defeating there’s a good chance I wouldn’t see it as a personal attack.
So, next week, you can look forward to a post on how to use the right words convey your advice and how to give them unsolicited advice.
