Beware Of The Advice And Where It Comes From
We all have those people in our lives that we trust and are happy to take advice from.
So far they have never steered us wrong. We feel like we can go to them for anything.
Then there are those people that we know, love, and trust but their advice may be influenced by outside factors.
Maybe they have experienced something in their lives that makes them feel a certain way about certain topics.
Little do we know about their past experiences, we just take the advice they give and adopt it into our own lives.
Here is a good yet simple example.
A woman used to cut the back end of the ham off before placing it in the oven. The woman had a daughter and the daughter watched what her mother was doing. The daughter never questions it, she just assumed that since her mother was doing it, then it must be right. So both the mother and daughter continued cutting the back of the ham off before placing it in the oven.
Many years later that daughter had a daughter of her own.
The granddaughter watched her mother cut the back of the ham off and one day asked why she cut the back of the ham off before putting it in the oven. Her mother stood there kind of confused and said she wasn’t sure. She watched her mother do it so she just did it too. The mother said let's call grandma and find out why.
They called grandma and asked why they cut the back of the ham off before putting it in the oven.
Grandma laughed and asked her daughter why she was still cutting the back of the ham off. “Because you cut it off all those years, so I do too.” The grandma replied, “I only cut the back of the ham off because the ovens back then were too small to fit the entire ham, that's it.”
We watch others and take advice so blindly.
Seldom do we find out where the advice comes from. If you are a parent reading this, think about the fears you have that you continuously place on your children.
For example, I didn’t learn how to swim until I was almost a teenager. I was afraid of the water. I now have a house with a pool and two children who are addicted to the water. It scares the hell out of me and I’m constantly telling them to back up from the pool, even though they can both swim.
My childhood fear of the water takes over. Think back to the time you ran too fast and fell. How many times do you tell your kids to “slow down or you're going to fall.” Sometimes they fall and sometimes they don’t, but you’re guiding them based on that painful feeling you had when you fell.
Of course we want to help and guide our children, our friends, and our families.
We feel strongly in our advice because of our past experiences.
But at what point do we help guide someone based on what could be good for their life, not from a point of our past fears and past misfortunes?
I heard a lot of negative past experiences and fears from people when I started telling people I was moving my family to Florida.
I heard things like, you have no family and friends down there. What are you going to do for money? You don’t know the area. How can you leave all of your family and friends like that? And the list goes on. On the flip side I heard some pretty powerful stuff too.
Some of that powerful stuff came from a place of past experiences too.
The next time you ask for advice or someone gives you advice, think about where that advice is coming from.
Is it coming from a place of childhood fears? Could be coming from a broken home or bad relationships? Could it be coming from someone who never had the privilege to fail at something?
