Listening to Advice

Have you ever found that if you ask two people who you trust for some advice, you tend to get two completely different answers? Both people are sincere, and as far as you can tell, genuinely want to help you. But their advice differs completely.

Most people find this experience extremely frustrating. A simple ask for advice has now become a problem to solve. ‘Who's right?’ you think to your yourself.

But here's a different way to look at it: the contradiction isn't something to fight against - it's something to embrace. Because in reality, it’s the world reminding you that the decision ultimately belongs to you and no one else. The question isn't ‘which of them is right?’, but rather ‘have I developed the filter to know what to listen to?’

Every person who offers you guidance is doing so through the lens of their own experience, their own unresolved decisions, and the story they've built about the choices they've made. This isn't a character flaw - it's simply how human beings work. The colleague who stayed at the same company for fifteen years and made it work genuinely believes that loyalty and patience are the answer. The one who left, took a risk, and never looked back genuinely believes that boldness is the only way. Both are telling you the truth. But it is their truth, which can be a very different thing from your truth.

The psychologist Leon Festinger called the discomfort of holding conflicting beliefs ‘cognitive dissonance’, which is the discomfort that arises when our beliefs and our choices don't quite line up. And one of the most reliable ways people resolve it is by unconsciously adjusting their advice to match the choices they've already made. Nobody wants to believe they took the wrong path. So they convince themselves that they didn’t. And when they advise you on something, that belief comes with them.

This isn't cynicism about mentors or the people who care about you. It's simply an honest account of how advice works. Once you understand it, you stop being confused by contradictions and start being curious about them. The more useful problem to solve isn't ‘is this advice right?’ It's ‘how much do I trust the advisor in this particular domain?’

To show this through a contemporary example, consider someone like Hannah. She's a mid-level manager who’s sharp, ambitious, but navigating a genuinely complex career decision. She has a mentor who she’s followed into commercial negotiations with hundreds of times without hesitation. His read on stakeholder dynamics, on when to push and when to hold, is almost always right. She's seen it play out enough times to trust it completely.

But recently, she found herself in a different kind of conversation. The promotion she'd been working towards had finally come through, and with it a role that would demand considerably more of her time and energy. So, she did what most people do in that situation and went to the same mentor. His advice was immediate and certain: take I - opportunity doesn't wait.

But something didn't sit right with her.

Not because he was wrong, exactly. But because she realised that he had always chosen his career over everything else in his life, which in turn had cost him things he'd never quite admitted to. He didn’t explain how the cost of choosing roles impacted the relationship with his son. He failed to mention the health problems he had dealing with the stress of a higher-paying role. Even though his career choices had a negative effect on certain areas of his life, it didn’t mean his advice was wrong. For some people these trade-offs are worth it. And to him they were, so the advice he was giving was built from his priorities, and his idea about what a life well spent looks like.

Hannah didn't dismiss him. She just adjusted her lens.

On commercial decisions: his advice was invaluable.

On the question of what she wanted her life to look like: his advice was interesting data, not instruction.

That's the filter working!

The hard thing to realise is that this filter isn't fixed for your whole life. What resonates with you at 28 will not necessarily resonate at 42. Not necessarily because you were naive then, or because you're wiser now, but because you are a different person, with different priorities and different values. The advice that felt right at one stage of your life might feel hollow or even slightly wrong at another, and that dissonance isn't a sign that something has gone wrong. It's a sign that you've grown.

This means that developing your filter isn't a one-time exercise. It's an ongoing, active relationship with your own values — a constant revision of your map of reality. The people who navigate this well aren't the ones with the most mentors or the most advice. They're the ones who have mustered the energy required to undertake the painful task of remapping their view of reality. Those who learned to check in with themselves regularly and challenge their own thoughts and beliefs enough to know where they currently stand.

You have to constantly think: What do I actually believe right now? What matters to me at this point in my life? Does this advice resonate because it's genuinely right, or is it just comfortable and I respect the person saying it?

Those questions aren't quick to answer. But learning to ask them is the skill.

This is where listening fits in, because at its core, this is a listening problem. Most people listen to advice the way they listen to instructions: passively, looking for someone to make up their mind for them. The key skill is to listen through the advice being given, and to notice what the advice is telling you about the other person and their experience. Once you’re able to see that, you can separate it from what your situation actually requires.

When you start listening that way, contradictory advice stops being a problem. It becomes a richer picture. You're not trying to find the one right answer buried somewhere in what people tell you. You're triangulating - gathering information, filtering it through where you currently are, and forming a view that belongs to you.

That's not the same as ignoring advice. It's the opposite. It's taking it seriously enough to dissect and challenge it.

If you'd like to understand how your listening patterns affect the way you receive and process information — including the advice you act on — you can take The Listening Assessment.

You'll receive a personalised analysis of your current listening habits and the specific areas where your filter might be sharpening your judgement or quietly distorting it.

3 minutes. 10 questions. 24-hour personalised feedback.

[Take the Assessment →]

P.S. Next time you receive advice that doesn't quite sit right, pause before dismissing it. Ask yourself: what does this tell me about this person's experience?