Why We Give Better Advice Than We Take

Dana Whitfield

It-it-it happens to me, I want to say, at least twice a week. A customer sends this... this really tricky, slightly passive-aggressive email about a custom order, or maybe the foot traffic in the shop is dipping and I'm trying to decide if I should slash my margins for a flash sale. And I just... I stall. I loop on it. I write a draft reply, delete it, stare at the floor, rewrite it. It's like my brain just completely locks up. But then, literally thirty minutes later, a friend who runs the boutique down the street walks in, tells me she's facing the exact same dilemma, and without even blinking, I give her this beautifully clear, perfectly rational, step-by-step advice. And she loves it! She goes and does it, and it works! Why on earth can we solve other people's lives in five seconds, but we get completely paralyzed when we're the ones standing in the fire?

Dana Whitfield

Well, it turns out there's actually a name for this, and it goes back a lot further than my little retail shop. Psychologists call it Solomon's Paradox. And yes, it is named after *that* King Solomon--the biblical ruler who people traveled from thousands of miles away to consult because his wisdom was supposedly unmatched. He could settle the most impossible disputes with this brilliant, razor-sharp clarity. But when it came to his own life? Absolute train wreck. He made disastrous personal choices, ignored his own teachings, and basically set his own kingdom up for a massive collapse. He was a genius for everyone else, and completely clueless for himself. And in 2014, a researcher named Igor Grossmann at the University of Waterloo decided to actually test this in a lab to see if this "self-other asymmetry"--which is just a fancy way of saying "I'm smart for you but dumb for me"--is a universal human trait.

Dana Whitfield

So, what Grossmann did was, he took a group of people and put them through this incredibly uncomfortable exercise. He asked them to imagine a scenario involving infidelity. But here was the catch: half of the participants were told to imagine that *their own* partner had cheated on them, while the other half were told to imagine that their best friend's partner had cheated. Then, they had to talk through how they would handle it. And the researchers coded their responses for what they called "wise reasoning." We're talking about things like recognizing the limits of what you actually know, looking for compromise, and considering different perspectives. And the results were just... stark. The people analyzing their friend's crisis scored through the roof on wise reasoning. They were objective, they were balanced, they saw the big picture. But the people who imagined themselves being cheated on? Their wisdom just evaporated. They couldn't see past their own nose. It proved that when we are emotionally immersed in a problem, our egocentric bias completely hijacks our brain.

Dana Whitfield

Now, when we get stuck like this, our immediate instinct is usually to look outward. We think, "Oh, I need a consultant, or I need to hire a business coach, or I need to find a mentor who has figured this out." But what Grossmann's research actually suggests is that we don't necessarily lack the wisdom. The wisdom is already sitting right there in our heads. We just don't have the psychological distance to reach in and grab it. We're too close to the screen to read the words. But here is the cool part: Grossmann run a second study, and he found that you can actually trick your brain into creating that distance with a shockingly simple linguistic hack. It's called self-distancing, and all it requires is changing your pronouns. Literally.

Dana Whitfield

Instead of sitting there asking yourself, "Why am I so stressed about this supplier contract? What should I do if they don't lower their minimum order?" you actively force your internal monologue to shift to the third person. You use your own name. You say, "Why is Dana struggling with this supplier contract? What should Dana do next?" It sounds incredibly silly, right? It feels like you're acting like some weird cartoon character. But cognitively, it is like opening a pressure valve. By changing "I" to "Dana," you instantly lower the emotional heat. You're shifting your brain from a state of threat and panic into the role of an objective observer. You become the advisor instead of the victim.

Dana Whitfield

And if you're thinking, "Well, surely this is just something you get better at as you get older and get more experience," think again. Grossmann's study actually looked at age, comparing younger adults, twenty to forty, with older adults, sixty to eighty. And what they found completely debunked the old myth of the wise elder. When it came to reasoning about their *own* personal conflicts, the older adults were no wiser than the twenty-somethings. Wisdom doesn't just automatically accumulate like dust with age. If you're in the middle of the storm, seventy-year-old you is just as prone to making a mess of things as twenty-year-old you, unless you actively zoom out. I know that's definitely true for me in the shop. I've been doing this for years, and I still get just as tangled as a beginner if I let myself get sucked down into the weeds.

Dana Whitfield

So, here is my challenge for you today. It takes exactly five minutes, and you can do it on the back of a receipt or a scrap piece of paper. Think of the single most stressful, annoying decision you are trying to make right now in your work or your life. Write it down. But write it as if you are describing a character in a book. Use your name. Write, "is trying to decide whether to do X or Y because..." Spend just two minutes writing out the dilemma using only third-person pronouns. And then, at the very bottom, ask yourself this: "If your best friend walked into your office right now with this exact piece of paper, what is the very first thing you would tell them to do?" You'll be amazed at how quickly the answer just shows up when you stop standing in your own way. Give it a shot. Talk soon.