Maybe just listen.

Do you feel a need to contribute?

Maybe a need to be heard?

I’ve found that this is often my motivation for giving unwanted advice. There’s a certain energy that comes after we share advice with someone; we feel useful, we feel valuable. Sometimes we even feel better about ourselves. But what our useful selves aren’t seeing is that the person we gave advice to didn’t need it.

What they wanted was someone to listen - to hear what they were saying and to sit with them. We miss opportunities all of the time to support our friends and family because we’re too focused on sharing our own thoughts.

Instead of prizing the words coming out of their mouths, we prize the words coming out of our own.

I’ve left plenty of conversations feeling misunderstood and hurt because the person I was talking to didn’t listen. Instead,

they pushed their agenda,

they gave their opinion,

they promoted their method,

and they told me what I should do

I left those conversations with walls up, instead of with a deeper connection.

I think part of the issue is, we live in a loud culture. The volume of social media and other news outlets, makes it very difficult to hear our own thoughts. We often get caught up in the currents of proving, debating, and promoting what we believe, so much so that it weakens our ability to listen.

We often forget an important thread that connects us within relationships: listening.

We should check in with ourselves if we have a constant need to give advice - specifically when we’re not asked to give it.

There is power in hearing the people we love. Who knows what would happen within our relationships if we listened well. I’m working on this within my own relationships and let me tell you, it’s a process (and that’s okay!)

A goal of mine is to be more mindful in conversations. If we can do this in at least one conversation a week, we might be surprised by the impact it has in our relationships.