Is Giving Advice Helping Others’ Vertical Development or Stealing Their Learning?

Every time you give advice, you steal someone’s learning.

The first time I heard this statement from my first coaching mentor, many years ago, I was shocked. What do you mean by ‘advice giving is stealing’? Isn’t it helping? Isn’t it showing the person a path forward? Isn’t it the gift of your lived experience put in the service of others’ growth? How about when people really want your advice and explicitly ask for it?

I was also more than a little embarrassed. I had been a master at solution-finding and advice-giving. I took pride in what I knew and was eager to contribute that knowledge any time someone asked for it. And more than a few times when they didn’t.

My biggest gain from years of coach training, exams and certifications and tons of uncomfortable feedback has been unlearning my addiction to giving advice. Over time, and with lots of trial and error, I’ve started to pay closer attention to the mysterious process by which people struggle with a challenge, problem or dilemma and noticed that not all paths to a resolution are made equal. Some paths are more conducive to growth than others.

And sometimes, in our desire to help, we end up taking away others’ power, robbing them of a precious learning experience and, paradoxically, robbing ourselves of the gift of learning something new - as nothing new is ever learnt when we simply playback to others what we already know.

Often clients bring their challenges into coaching alongside a need to be heard. Many of them, particularly at the beginning of a coaching process (and especially if they had not received coaching before), also explicitly seek advice from the coach. “What would you do in this situation?” is a question I’ve heard in coaching many times. “What would you lose if I shared what I would do?” is often my follow-up question.

It’s a question that baffles clients because the first answer is “Nothing. I want to know your opinion”. But the truth is something very precious would be lost: a developmental opportunity that only comes about from the friction in the client’s mind, from them facing their feelings, sitting in confusion, stretching into a different perspective, the discomfort of feeling lost and then figuring something out - all through their own efforts and stimulated by a combination of deep listening, timely mirroring and curious questions from the coach.

So how exactly does offering advice steal someone’s learning? And how does it hinder their vertical development?

Vertical development describes a very specific aspect of human growth. It is not WHAT you know, but HOW you know. It occurs when your current worldviews, beliefs, assumptions, and ways of being in the world do not make sense any more. When the context changes, when life doesn’t go our way, when massive change comes about that forces us to change in turn - that is when people are confronted with disorienting dilemmas. There is a gap between who they are and who they need to be. Or a big shift in identity. Or a crossroad of some sort where they are facing what seems like an impossible decision.

With the disorienting dilemmas come very challenging emotions - the kinds that researcher Kaisu Malkki calls “edge emotions”. These are the hard emotions - fear, confusion, anxiety, grief, shame - that arise in that very moment when the old scaffold of our thinking cannot hold anymore. It is in-midst of these emotions that people seek help - from coaches, mentors, and friends. And in that seeking lies an urge to be rid of these emotions.

We seek advice as a way to alleviate our edge emotions, to get ourselves back on safe ground again, to a place where the world makes sense once more. But the funny thing is, in seeking to be rid of these emotions, we start to step away from the edge of growth itself.

Read the rest of this article on the Vertical Development Institute Blog