Tuesday, December 15, 2009

be clever while offering advice

yesterday while reading "THE HINDU" I found some interesting article about offering advice to anyone.I thought of sharing this with all of you.

When people offer advice on their own ,we tend to get annoyed.I suppose we all have this complicated attitude towards advice.That's not because of the advice itself..but because by giving me such advice , that person has suggested that they did not think I knew what I was doing, and they thought that I might not do a good job without the advice.

I'm sure we have all reacted similarly to advice at some point or the other.Since giving can be a such a complicated affair, we happen to have many clever methods of offering advice.

To simply say 'do this' , is offensive , and puts people off. So even though that is in fact what we want to say, we tend to offer advice disguised as polite suggestions.

Instead of saying 'you should do this' , or anything even close to that, we only can say 'I would do this' . Let me explain with an example. Instead of speaking to me directly and telling me to make the work done ,my friend could instead say,' if I was doing this ,I'd make like this way to make it done very easily'. It simply looks as if my friend is expressing her own views on how to do that work.Nothing to do with me and my work.

Since we all must offer advice ,the effort here is to make it sound as little like advice as we possibly can. So expressing your advice as an independent idea that supposedly has nothing to do with the person you are offering advice really works out

The 'I'd do this', formula is extremely handy for issuing warnings too. For example ,if you are at the library and some of your friends suddenly start talking loudly to you , you could warn them by saying "I'd keep quite if I were you"

This way of offering advice is slightly less intrusive than simply telling people what to do, but it's still good to remember that offering advice when people have not asked for it can be annoying regardless of how carefully you offer it.


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