I have a lot to say but no time. I hate getting advice! Eventually I feel like I have to just dismiss their unsolicited opinions, but I know that has annoyed people at times.
This makes a ton of sense to me.
I always recommend people get a fecal transplant. I think that works as practical advice and as close to empathy as I'm getting these days.
I suppose that reassures them that you don't think they're already full of shit.
3: Do you nag them about it? Every time they complain about something, you ask if they got the fecal transplant yet? Then, shrug your shoulders, "Well, I guess you don't want to live a more vibrant and fulfilling life."
Which is kind of what it sounds like to me when people say 'some people don't want solutions, they just want to be heard'. I'm pretty sure almost anyone with a problem would want a solution, if one that was actually going to work were on offer.
I wouldn't say "some people don't want solutions" - I mean, I'm sure it's the case sometimes, but when someone wants to be heard, I assume they usually both want to be heard and also want solutions.
Concrete example: my wife is not happy at her job. She complains to me about it a fair amount, often phrased as a request for advice about either job-hunting or resolving personality conflicts with co-workers. I give her advice when I can, based on what I know about her and her office, what I read about workplace problems, and "common sense." But I think we're both aware that I'm not an expert on that stuff, and there's no miracle way to get a better job and/or make her current co-workers stop being assholes. Hopefully my advice gets her to a better job slightly quicker or more easily than she would have otherwise; in the meantime, I think she also appreciate a figurative shoulder to cry on.
"Want to be heard" != "doesn't care about fixing the problem, just wants to wallow in self-important misery". Assuming so would be kind of assholeish. (Not saying LB is assuming that, just that you're taking the position more seriously than I would? Or something.)
Context matters a lot. I have come to think that even fairly vapid writing about making interpersonal interactions better (like the dozens of articles you mention-- basically anything up to BUT NOT INCLUDING Dr Phil) is worthwhile-- for me at least because I tend not to think that way.
For some people, talking through some problem they are having in a diffuse way is just a style of communication. Unless they're actually self destructive or worse, a friendly listen is a harmless mitzvah.
In the musical play Hamilton, Aaron Burr gives the basically sensible advice "smile more talk less" to a rational problem solver.
IME you can usually tell when somebody wants advice because they ask for it, or say yes if you ask them if they want it. If they don't ask for it, or say no when asked if they want it, there's a clue that maybe it wouldn't be welcome.
And I do think most people are fine with getting advice under most circumstances if it's either actually helpful, or delivered with full explicit recognition of the fact that it probably won't be actually helpful, but it's meant as an expression of support.
I don't know that 9.2 is totally true, but that may be because I'm prickly and overwhelmed.
I thought "people just want to be heard" was meant as time and context sensitive. They might welcome advice, even from you, but not right then.
10: Have you thought about just relaxing? You should try it.
Thorn and LB, here is a nice photograph of a beetle in lieu of advice, offered in a spirit of support and empathy. I cannot tell whether the beetle is male or female.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C6LCr_CWUAAIOLc.jpg
Very Dr. Seuss-esque feet on that beetle.
OK one more thing-- Dr Phil is hostile judgemental shit, whose typical written work output is basically diametrically opposed to any sense of compassion. Does he have something on Oprah?
Frustration and having emotions discounted/ disregarded is a problem and talking through it is a solution. Emotions aren't just noise surrounding the signal of rational concerns. (iRL I am a hardcore self-hating misogynist who apologizes for venting without purpose, in a vain attempt to solve the emotional problems I have created in my auditor.)
11: Kind of. The Deborah Tannen version of this, and I think the version that makes it an evergreen topic, is that some people recognize that people sometimes do and sometimes don't want advice, while others treat every situation as an advicortunity.
Indeed, while reading the OP, my thought was, "it's not that men give advice while women listen, it's that men are trained to be self-important, non-empathetic jerks who would rather expound form on high than figure out whether their interlocutor has asked for anything more than a sympathetic ear." That may or may not be too cynical, but I really do think that's the crux of the matter.
That said, I read Tannen 25 years ago, and have always tried to be conscious and empathetic on this subject, but I still find that I'm basically terrible at the sympathetic ear thing because I don't really know what to say. I mean, as when somebody dies, I have a few stock phrases, but if someone is going to spend an hour talking about their problems, and I'm not allowed to suggest any solutions, then I run out of things to say pretty fast. I feel like a moron saying "that's terrible, I'm so sorry" over and over.
4: no -- he thinks they're full of the wrong sort of shit already
I feel like a moron saying "that's terrible, I'm so sorry" over and over.
And yet, so often that's all there is to say.
I think that asking for advice is often really "help me brainstorm stuff about this situation", where the point of "advice" is more to help set the parameters on the problem.
If I say to someone "I want to lose fifty pounds" and the conversation is successful, it might go like "what about X?" "Now that I consider X, I realize that it won't work for Y reason but has Z attractive aspect" "Well, what about this other solution that is better for Y but doesn't have Z?" "Actually, now I'm thinking that if Z were good, I could overcome Y..." "What about this solution with good Z, then?"
So in a good advice conversation, it's not really "advice" - it's more like someone else assisting you to analyze options and help you examine your assumptions about the options. Basically, what a therapist does.
Of course, this requires that the other person be extremely detached from what actions you take and how you think about your problem, which is perhaps why a trained professional who is getting paid may be better at this.
For me the other function of advice is a sort of emotional push. I may not be ready to make a change, but getting a bunch of advice tends to move me closer to being ready. My pattern is much more "ask for advice, do nothing", "ask again, do nothing again", "wait, ask no one, do thing".
Indeed, while reading the OP, my thought was, "it's not that men give advice while women listen, it's that men are trained to be self-important, non-empathetic jerks who would rather expound form on high than figure out whether their interlocutor has asked for anything more than a sympathetic ear." That may or may not be too cynical, but I really do think that's the crux of the matter.
Well, kind of. That is, I think the framing that "some people are the sort of people who want advice, some people are the sort of people who just want to vent" is a face-saving way to explain to someone who is always or sometimes a self-important, non-empathetic jerk why it is that when they advise people, the people get upset. It turns it into an idiosyncrasy of the advisee (they just don't like having their problems solved) rather than a flaw in the way the advice is delivered.
20: Right, I think that's a good description of how I ever find advice useful. From sensible people, it's interesting, and often ultimately helpful, but I am very rarely going to actually be able to productively take it immediately.
I read Tannen 25 years ago
Laydeez...
To some extent, it's the type of problem that varies, and not just the person, right? For some types of problems, I'm looking for a solution, and if a friend has one to present to me, great, I'll take it. Like, I'd like to learn Italian, but I don't have a lot of time or money right now. If a friend tells me about a free phone app that can get me started on language learning until I have time to attend classes this summer, great! I'll take that advice.
Other problems are more intractable, and I've tried to solve them, but haven't been able to, because the circumstances are complicated, or because the solutions are too hard, or because the problem is simply not solvable. I love my job, but there's this one co-worker who is really making my day-to-day life intolerable. I've considered various solutions, but none of are really viable for a million different reasons. In that case, there are actually two problems -- the first, insoluble co-worker issue, and the second, which is the emotional toll that the first problem is taking on me. The second problem is actually capable of amelioration, which I'm trying to do by going to my friends and seeking emotional support. In that case, it doesn't help to tell me that I should confront him or try to get him fired, because believe me, if I thought that would help I would have done it already. Just be a pal.
So, first an amusing follow-up. I asked for advice here whether to tell the boyfriend's mother that my mother has Alzheimer's. He did, without me, and told her I was very upset and didn't want to talk about it. The funny part is that every month or so, she peppers HIM with questions! Apparently, he hedged quite a bit, making it sound like a new diagnosis, because she asked him recently whether Mom was having any symptoms (um?). She also congratulates herself to him about how she's not mentioning it to to me. So, great advice, all! I win! And even though he got what he wanted, it sucks in pretty much the way I was fearing for me, but I don't have to deal with it!
For me, I almost always want advice. Then again, my, main advice givers are very good at taking into account whatever constraints I am operating under. Also, I get really severe tunnel vision about problems and can't see relatively straightforward solutions. Like, I couldn't fire my awful coworker, but lots of people had pretty good advice about how to keep my head down, make sure his fuckups were documented, and be patient. I complain a lot these days, and I guess that's more in the venting mode, but then there's not much to be done about people with chronically unpleasant personalities who are "family." (And even then, unserious advice is fun.)
23.2: Mine got fired! It was the BEST. My boss did it on a day when I was out of the office, even, likely out of consideration for me! I hope you get this wonderful, overwhelming feeling of relief. He was awful. I have no advice but tons of sympathy. He was stressful, unsafe, and alarming in many ways that took a real toll on my ability to get work done.
Something I read on the local Twitter: "advice is just samples of someone else's anxiety". In other words, there's also the type of problem (mostly relationship-related) where the person is going through some personal unresolved issue which is a big part of their personality makeup. In those cases, giving advice is tantamount to telling them to be someone else. I personally end up being too much of a therapist in those cases (and in general, I think people who have gone to therapy sometimes end up unconsciously adopting therapist mannerisms in this type of situation).
I should learn to preview. The quote doesn't quite fit in to the rest of what I was saying, and now I'm too lazy to fill in the gaps. Pls advise on my growing inability to translate thoughts into words.
25. I am SO HAPPY for you! That is great. Good work!
Both problems I described in 23 are actually more-or-less-solved. My horrible co-worker recently announced his early retirement, for reasons not unrelated to his problematic behavior, and I've arranged to work elsewhere until that is effectuated. As for the first problem, does anyone else here have experience with Duolingo? It's ... somewhat adequate! The grammatical instruction leaves a lot to be desired, but as a way to waste time on my phone, it's way more satisfying than Hearthstone or Candy Crush.
26: "Be someone else" is probably good advice a lot of the time, just not going to get followed.
I'm with you on that (as is Trump's staff, probably).
Chris Y is exactly right in this thread.
First, his 8: IME you can usually tell when somebody wants advice because they ask for it, or say yes if you ask them if they want it. If they don't ask for it, or say no when asked if they want it, there's a clue that maybe it wouldn't be welcome.
If you ask someone, "Do you want advice or just to vent?" then their answer means you have their buy-in going forward. They're not going to be blurring those categories in the same way that they might have been, if you hadn't clarified.
In 19: I feel like a moron saying "that's terrible, I'm so sorry" over and over.
And yet, so often that's all there is to say.
Exactly. As Parodie has helpfully pointed out for me at times, bearing witness is a real thing, and it's a thing people need.
Is the empathy/advice thing Tannen? I always wondered where that came from. I read about it when I was in college in the early nineties and have since always tried to be a good guy and not give advice. Just a few weeks ago it occurred to me that there might be more to it. Unwanted advice is obviously bad, but listening to someone complain for an hour leaves me feeling incredibly helpless and depressed and I'm not sure it's helping the other person enough to be worth it. I mean, I do it because I care about people, but I understand why other people don't. And without generalizing too much, in just my own experience, my partners and female friends have not reciprocated when it comes to venting. I've been on the receiving end of, "Why are you telling this to me?" and "What do you want me to do about it?" enough to want to keep my problems to myself. If men want to cut off the conversation with advice it might be because they haven't had much experience of receiving empathy. (I read an essay sometime last year saying just the opposite, that men are emotional sinkholes and women should stop babying them, but I can't find the link now)
but listening to someone complain for an hour leaves me feeling incredibly helpless and depressed and I'm not sure it's helping the other person enough to be worth it.
The person who is venting can in fact exceed the boundaries of the person who is listening. The listener is not hostage to this situation and can/should end the venting situation if their patience has been exceeded.
If men want to cut off the conversation with advice
It's just that this is not a good way to do it, unless the other person is open to hearing advice from the man. It's better just to exit the situation - express sympathy, and then exit or beg off.
An assortment of OP-relevant thoughts that I am too lazy/busy to fuse into a single coherent point:
I have noticed through years of one-on-one training/mentoring in science that if you don't have a mental model of what your trainee knows about the subject/skill at hand, you won't be very effective at helping them improve, or troubleshooting their problems. The only way to form that model is to shut up and watch what they do, listen to what they say, and ask questions. Bench-side training that consists only of me talking and trainee listening is never effective.
The other side of this in the context of technical training is that trainees are usually more interested in actively learning the skill by doing it than listening to me anyway, and my advice is just distracting noise until they run into a problem. So I find it more effective to let somebody fail and get frustrated first before I come in with a, "you know, if you're having trouble with that, one thing that might help is..."
I appreciate advice when and only when the advisor gives me signs that they have actually listened to what my problem is, even sought further information. Which happens almost never. Otherwise, the process of receiving advice is either a tiresome wait through a bunch of unhelpful advice on the way to an actual solution, or just a waste of time that has impeded finding one on my own.
I have a work colleague who is quite knowledgeable and is a great resource for problem-solving around the lab *except* that every question releases a flood of answers to questions that I did not ask, and I have to stand there waiting for him to take a breath so I can redirect him and eventually get to the answer. This is paradigmatic bad advising: the answering of questions that were not asked.
I think what's behind the whole people want empathy instead of solutions thing is simply that if you're not going to get a solution anyway, which you usually aren't, you'd rather not first be aggravated by not being listened to on the way to no solution. Being listened to feels a lot like being empathised with. And all the more so if at some level you know there is no solution to your problem and so articulating it and maybe getting a little empathy is all you're ever going to get.
Shorter this comment: nobody listens.
That is, I think the framing that "some people are the sort of people who want advice, some people are the sort of people who just want to vent" is a face-saving way to explain to someone who is always or sometimes a self-important, non-empathetic jerk why it is that when they advise people, the people get upset. It turns it into an idiosyncrasy of the advisee (they just don't like having their problems solved) rather than a flaw in the way the advice is delivered.
Yeah, but it still circles back to men being jerks. Why? Implicit (maybe explicit?) in Tannen is that complaining men want advice, which is why men offer advice. But that can't be true*: men complain about stuff all the time without expecting concrete advice back ("Well, if your ex is crazy, then maybe you just need to..."). But men listening to men understand which situation is which, because they pay attention to other men. But they don't care enough about women to learn when they're venting and when they're advice-seeking.
Agreed that 20 is a good description of how advice-seeking and -giving can actually be IRL productive.
*to be super-generous to annoying advice-givers, it could actually be true that men are somewhat more likely to want practical advice because of socialization
that if you don't have a mental model of what your trainee knows about the subject/skill at hand, you won't be very effective at helping them improve, or troubleshooting their problems. The only way to form that model is to shut up and watch what they do, listen to what they say, and ask questions
Some of the best math teacher training is about training teachers to do this exact thing: watch the students and ask questions to get attuned to how the student is thinking about the concept, and then asking questions to further their understanding and letting them wrestle with the details in real time.
Yeah, I would think this is especially true for math and conceptual skills; it's easy for a student to get ahold of a wrong idea that then gets in the way of further progress, but until they reveal it to you, there's nothing you can do about it.
17: advicortunity
Did you know that the Chinese use the same word for Robocop and opportunity? Think about it.
(True to the same extent as the other)
38: In the WTF thread I just coined BernieBrobot.
there's nothing you can do about it.
You mean other than jabbing your chalk at the equation and saying, ever more loudly, "How do you simplify this?"
I LOVE to give advice, though I also at least attempt to be sensitive to whether it's actually desired in any given circumstance. I also try to let people (especially students) know that I'm not at all invested in whether they actually follow that advice.
I also like to complain about stuff, as a way of venting and working through my feelings. Mr. Robot has gotten better at listening rather than offering advice, though it's been a bit if a process getting him there.
it's that men are trained to be self-important, non-empathetic jerks who would rather expound form on high than figure out whether their interlocutor has asked for anything more than a sympathetic ear.
I resemble LB's remarks and it's often perceived as reflecting the view above, but boy does it feel from my vantage point--whether socialized or not--like brainstorming solutions or coping mechanisms is a thing a helpful person would try to do!
if someone is going to spend an hour talking about their problems, and I'm not allowed to suggest any solutions, then I run out of things to say pretty fast.
And this, exactly. It's so hard for (non-empathetic) me to conceive of how mere repeated expressions of sympathy can be a valuable contribution (but I'm getting better at doing it anyway because Chris Y is undoubtedly right).
Have you tried exactly what I suggested in the original post? Offering solutions, if you have to, with the explicit understanding and acknowledgement that you don't expect them to be any use, you're just talking because you want to feel as if you're being helpful?
If the advice doesn't seem insulting ("Like I wouldn't have thought of that already") or aggressively useless ("Oh, god. Now I'm going to have to explain why that won't work, and if the explanation isn't good enough, he's going to keep pushing.") I bet that just offering some input wouldn't be a problem.
I have! With limited success. For a time I was still making a lot of wrong assessments about whether the person was at all receptive to problem-solving responses.
My daughter tells me explicitly if she's venting and I should just listen and say "poor baby" and "that's awful" at intervals or if she's looking for problem solving. Having no need for mind reading is so very, very nice.
On the endless repeated offering of sympathy:
1. It's not a hostage situation. You can and should exit the conversation when your patience is up, before you get too annoyed.
2. If you want to stay in the conversation but don't know what to say and are bored with the venting, use that to guide your sympathy: "wow, it sounds like you keep seeing the same situation over and over. Really repetitive." Or if you're overwhelmed by the size and intractability, "wow, this is overwhelming and intractable." Just name your own emotional reaction to the story for the other person. No creativity needed. "You must feel like a broken record, because I keep being struck by what a pattern of repetition you're describing." Or "wow, there are a lot of moving parts to this story. It's confusing just to hear."
On the endless repeated offering of sympathy:
1. It's not a hostage situation. You can and should exit the conversation when your patience is up, before you get too annoyed.
2. If you want to stay in the conversation but don't know what to say and are bored with the venting, use that to guide your sympathy: "wow, it sounds like you keep seeing the same situation over and over. Really repetitive." Or if you're overwhelmed by the size and intractability, "wow, this is overwhelming and intractable." Just name your own emotional reaction to the story for the other person. No creativity needed. "You must feel like a broken record, because I keep being struck by what a pattern of repetition you're describing." Or "wow, there are a lot of moving parts to this story. It's confusing just to hear."
The important thing is to start every sentence with "wow".
The important thing is to start every sentence with "wow".
It sounds like you keep seeing the same situation over and over.
Everybody wants to get into petroleum geology.
'Or if you're overwhelmed by the size and intractability, "wow, this is overwhelming and intractable." Just name your own emotional reaction to the story for the other person. No creativity needed.'
That's good advice.
If you had emotional reactions you could share with other people that weren't insulting to them, you probably wouldn't be wondering about how respond to people being emotional about stuff.
I hear.
Anyway, none of this is at all useful if you're trying to see when it's safe to make a pun.
54: Not at oil prices like these they don't.
Not everybody is all about the Benjamins.
I'm just here for two things: solutions and empathy, and I'm all out of solutions.
20 is of course spot on. The best general advice leaves the person taking it thinking they did most of the heavy lifting themselves. And often they did.
There is also specific advice, where the advisor has some specific skills, formal or otherwise, they can bring to bear. Frex, Mrs y has an awesome track record of helping other people get jobs, because she's incredibly good at understanding how forms should be filled in, and at giving mock interviews and feedback. But this is a case where the advisee has almost always come looking.
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