When someone approaches you for advice, it is often a challenge to help without hindering or driving the situation. The risk is in making a decision on behalf of the person that you are trying to help, either knowingly or unknowingly. Here are a few tips to help put you in the right frame of mind:
Eliminate Expectations
You can’t independently council or advise someone if you have expectations of the outcome. It gets even harder if you prefer one outcome over another. When you come in with expectations, there is a subconscious tendency to influence the situation to your benefit. Putting aside expectations is not an easy task; it requires you to tap into your inner wisdom rather than your ego.
Listen
Seems obvious, and it is. So why do we have so much trouble doing it? I’m not talking about waiting until your friend is done talking and then responding; I’m talking about thinking about nothing else except what is being said while your friend is talking. Listening means not anticipating the next word out of their mouth, forming your response before the statements are finished, or searching your history for a “time when that happened” to you.
Don’t Offer Advice
Didn’t see that one coming, did you? Instead, offer questions. In most cases, it is impossible for you to know what’s best for someone else. To one of my earlier posts, you shouldn’t can’t solve someone else’s problem. Inner wisdom, or Judgment, in alignment with spirit will empower you to ask the right questions. Well formed questions provide greater context in which to consider. Remember though, you can’t ask the right questions until you’ve eliminated expectations.
Individuality and personality are often confused in todays culture, in my opinion. Individuality is perceived as a product of one’s personality. “What makes him such an upstanding individual, is his outstanding support for charity,” for example; charity is an aspect of his personality. The missing link is whether or not he is being charitable out of a divine sense of “I AM” or if he is being charitable due to a motivator – like fame or respect. Individuality, on the other hand, is driven by Spirit and an understanding that one is One. Aspects of personality, in my opinion, still shine through for an Individual – but they shine through out of a sense of Order and Purpose aligned with Spirit.
I have spent the past few weeks in silent self-observation as a means to help me become aware of my various personalities, and used this awareness to try to ascertain which of them are expressions of my Individualness and which are not.
One revelation I had during this process, is that I went into the effort assuming that my personalities would coincide with my various roles – one personality for Parent, another for Husband, a third for Employee, and so on. In actuality I found that my personalities appear across these roles, largely dependent on my perceptions of my actions or the actions of those around me. I found, and continue to find, this disturbing because it implies that some of my “darker” personalities can and sometimes do surface in some of my most loving and caring roles.
I plan to post more about this in the future, as I’m still figuring out what to do with this information. It’s nice to know I’m not alone in this though; there is plenty of evidence around that many suffer from “multiple personalities”.
