Sunday, September 30, 2007 Lim: Seek advice By Melanie T. Lim Wide Awake
FRIENDS often come to me for advice. Not on love, though. Oh no, not anymore. Most of my friends are long past falling in and out of love. For the 13-year olds reading this article, believe it or not, these moments actually arrive in your life.
These days, friends come to me for advice on matters less passionate but no less dramatic. Most times, they are caught between doing what they believe is right and what others believe is right for them.
My advice has always been, do what you must even at society’s scorn. So long as it is done without taking away from someone else, without stepping on anyone’s toes and without malice, injustice and deceit, follow your heart.
I find though that most people concern themselves too much with what other people say. They often ask, “Don’t you care what people say?” I do. But certainly not to the point of allowing them to dictate my decisions.
We can’t keep using the bar of public opinion as our guide in making decisions or we are going to end up extremely unhappy. For we can strive all we can to do what we think is right but there will still be people who will second-guess us.
No matter what choice we make, some people will still find fault with what we say or do.
I look to others for advice. But ultimately, I make my own decisions. And when I make up my mind, I never look back. I never wonder what might have been.
Right or wrong, I live with the choices I make.
I once went shopping with a friend. She’d ask my opinion on every item she liked and was considering buying. And this was fine. The problem was that she was completely incapable of making an independent decision. If for instance I didn’t concur with her decision on a particular item, then she would pass up buying the item—--no matter how much she liked it. This, to me, was ludicrous.
I, on the other hand, shocked her when I went ahead to buy something she disliked. “You’re buying it? But I don’t like it,” she told me. What she failed to understand was that while I asked for her advice, I was not seeking her approval.
Most people I realize seek approval rather than advice in their lives. When they go to friends for advice, they don’t really seek counsel. They seek validation of their actions. Or they wouldn’t as vehemently compel us to put ourselves in their shoes and make a decision. “If you were me, what would you do?”
“Well, if I were you, this is what I would do,” I tell them. “But the problem is, you’re not me. I can live with this decision. Can you?”
The bottomline is that we can ask others for advice. But we have to make our own decisions. We cannot keep measuring ourselves against what others might do in our place because we are not them and they are not us.
Seek advice. But in most cases, approval is not really required.
