We all have experiences. Sometimes, we share them, and sometimes, we project our experiences upon others. In the past months, this became even more evident to me. My wife and I recently brought to the world a brand-new and awesome human. With so many friends who are already parents around us, we received lots of prompted and unprompted advice. In that process, I found out that there are two categories people fall into as regards to giving advice:
- The ‘Projecters’: they project their experience about many aspects of having a newborn to a new parent and immediately jump to giving advice unprompted. This always comes with good intentions, of course. Nevertheless, it is unprompted, and some do not apply to every situation. Few of them even silently expect that one takes their advice without a second thought.
- The ‘Coolheads’: they congratulated us on our newborn, shared some of their experiences on stuff that came up in a conversation, and often asked a question like “How are you handling this?” not in an interrogative mode but more of a curious one.
There are more examples where the ‘Projecters’ versus the ‘Coolheads’ are at play, like giving career advice or health advice, but being in the position of a new parent has been very evident to me.
I learned that sharing one’s experience is much more useful than projecting one’s experience upon others. I have professional and life experiences, but refrain from advising unless somebody explicitly asks for it. Instead, I choose to:
a) share my experience if the context is something I can relate to. I use phrases such as “This is what I did and what worked for me” versus “This is what you should do”, and
b) ask questions if I don’t have a personal experience to help them get to the truth, such as “Why is this important?” or “What would you advise a friend to do in this very same situation?”.
