Why Do We so Often Ignore Expert Advice?

”Experts agree that 80% of people will not read this post!”

OK, I just made that up. However, as a counselor, my job is to offer people advice. Or, at the very least, my job is to guide people in the direction of things they already know and are aware of, but perhaps they feel uncertain or maybe they feel like they need "permission" from an outside authority to follow through with.

In most cases, I get paid for giving advice.

I'd like to think that I give pretty good advice, and there is some evidence to bear this out in the sense that many of the people who follow my advice later report back to me that their lives got significantly better as a result of our interaction.

This is a large part of the reason I feel called to a healing profession: making a difference.

That said, one of the things a number of folks in this world often struggle with is seeking advice and getting advice from ostensible experts and then promptly ignoring it, often to their detriment.

So why do people not follow expert advice, particularly if there is a pretty good track record of it being helpful?

Conversely, why do so many people think they "know better," and they still seek out the opinion of an expert?

I mentioned permission above, and one of the truths of life is that much of the time we don't actually want expert advice, what we want is validation and permission to do things we want to do, even if those things are not in our best interests.

Of course, in many cases the "fault" in the situation like this doesn't actually lie with the client or the person seeking advice, it lies with the expert.

Many experts and advisors and counselors fail to build any sort of connection or rapport with their clients, resulting not in a beneficial partnership trying to solve a problem, but instead in a more adversarial us-vs-versus them situation.

I have had a fair number of clients come to me and relate that their previous counselor almost treated them like they were some kind of inferior species!

I suppose there is a temptation to position yourself as somehow "superior" if you have a lot of initials after your name, but you really need to pause and consider whether you're actually helping the people you are ostensibly in the business of helping.

Various therapeutic regulations aside, including taboos such as feeling an inappropriate connection to your clients, I quite simply prefer to work with people I like, and I prefer it when the people I work with like me as well.

The key here is that we tend to take the advice of people we trust and like, but not so much people we feel set apart from and who leave us feeling like we're not being treated with kindness, respect and compassion. And thus, focusing on building a connection with clients is really important.

Therapy is actually a deeply intimate process in which we tend to get (emotionally) naked with people... and so, we want to work with someone we feel comfortable with. If we don't? Then we'll likely be resistant to actually taking good expert advice!

Thanks for visiting, and have a beautiful week! Bright Blessings to all!

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