Why don’t we follow good advice?
Think of a piece of advice someone once gave you. Good advice, sensible, the kind that felt right at the time. And that you never followed.
Keep it in mind. It’ll come in handy.
Focal Shift won’t give you a solution. No action plan, no method to apply first thing Monday. That may come as a surprise: when you go looking for help, you expect to walk away with an answer. That choice comes from my coaching practice, long before I knew about the studies that explain it. Co-Active coaching, the approach I trained in, starts from one premise: the person being coached is naturally creative, resourceful, and whole. In other words, the answer is already in them, and what I can do is help them see it.
What practice had taught me, psychology had measured long before.
Why don’t we follow the advice we ask for?
Outside of sessions, I do give advice sometimes. Sometimes even when nobody asked for it. I’m a coach, not a saint. And I’ve noticed a pattern: the advice gets brushed aside in the moment, politely or not, and a few months later the person tells me what they’ve decided. It’s the advice I gave them. They don’t connect the two; they got there on their own. And that’s fine by me. What matters is that they found it.
In 1966, psychologist Jack Brehm described a phenomenon he called psychological reactance. When we sense a threat to our freedom to choose, we try to win it back. Often by resisting whatever is being proposed, sometimes by doing exactly the opposite. A solution handed to you by someone else carries the seed of that threat, however kindly it’s phrased. Implicitly, it says: here’s what you should do. Part of you hears a decision made on your behalf, and starts looking for reasons it won’t work in your case.
That advice you thought of earlier? Maybe you asked for it. Nobody forced it on you. Research on advice taking shows that a different brake kicks in at that point. In 2000, Ilan Yaniv and Eli Kleinberger found that we consistently give less weight to other people’s opinions than to our own, even when we’re the ones who asked. They call it egocentric discounting.
Their explanation rests on an asymmetry. You have direct access to your own reasons: you know why you think what you think. The other person’s reasons stay largely invisible to you, and all you receive is their conclusion.
That mechanism explains a difference everyone has experienced without ever naming it. When your doctor simply tells you to be careful, the advice slides right off. When they show you the X-ray and walk you through what it reveals, the conclusion arrives with its reasoning, and you can check it for yourself. The advice has turned into a diagnosis that makes its own case. With a technical problem, the reasons that matter can be shown: an X-ray, a worn brake pad. With a personal situation, the reasons that matter are yours, and nobody else can show them. So even when it’s well argued, advice about your life always arrives without the reasons that actually tip the balance. Good advice isn’t short on accuracy. What it lacks is roots in your own reasoning.
Why does a solution you come up with yourself hold up better?
Elliot Aronson, one of the most influential social psychologists of the 20th century, devoted part of his career to what he called self-persuasion. His work suggests that a conviction you build yourself produces deeper, longer-lasting change than arguments you receive from others, however solid those arguments are.
The reason ties back to Yaniv’s. An idea you’ve put into words yourself is already connected to your constraints and to what you know about your situation, which nobody else knows as well as you do. It doesn’t need to be grafted on. It grew there. The solution someone suggested three times to no effect hits home the day you get there on your own. Same solution. What moved is your relationship to it.
That’s why restraint matters so much in coaching. If I handed someone an answer, I’d be robbing them of the work of building it, the very work that would have made it solid. Advice starts from good intentions and short-circuits exactly what makes change stick.
How do you find a solution when you can’t see one?
Paul Watzlawick and his colleagues in Palo Alto distinguished two kinds of change. The first plays out inside the frame: you try harder, or longer. The second changes the frame itself. Many situations where you keep going in circles call for the second, and a better answer changes nothing as long as the point of view stays the same. Advice offers an answer from the angle of whoever is giving it. It doesn’t shift yours. That’s probably what happens with the advice I mentioned earlier, brushed aside and then found again: in between, the advice didn’t change. Where the person was standing did.
I start from the premise that the person I’m working with already has the solutions in them. What keeps them stuck is the perspective they’re boxed into. My work is to open up other ones, and what they’ll find there, I have no idea.
Take visualization. Sometimes I invite someone to go and meet the person they’ll be fifteen years from now, someone who has already been through the situation, and to ask that future self what they make of it. I don’t know what they’ll hear. Sometimes nothing comes. Sometimes a sentence surfaces, a simple one nobody had ever said to them, and the way forward becomes obvious. To them. I couldn’t have given it to them; I hadn’t heard it either.
What they go looking for from their future self is, in fact, advice. Maybe the only advice they won’t argue with, because it comes with every one of their own reasons attached.
And that piece of advice you thought of at the start: what angle were you seeing the situation from when you got it, and what would come into view if you moved one step to the side?
Sources
Brehm, J. W. (1966). A Theory of Psychological Reactance. New York: Academic Press.
Yaniv, I., & Kleinberger, E. (2000). Advice taking in decision making: Egocentric discounting and reputation formation. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 83(2), 260-281.
Aronson, E. (1999). The power of self-persuasion. American Psychologist, 54(11), 875-884.
Watzlawick, P., Weakland, J. H., & Fisch, R. (1974). Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution. New York: W. W. Norton.
If something in your life keeps going in circles right now, that's exactly the kind of situation Focal Shift is for. A discovery call is often enough to feel what a shift in perspective can change, and your decisions stay yours from start to finish. If you'd rather start on your own, at your own pace, the Focal Shift AI Advisor asks the same kind of questions, available whenever you are.