Authenticity and Advice in the Now
There is something I keep noticing across social work, coaching, and lived experience: we are really quick to give people advice.
Someone tells us they are unhappy at work, and we start brainstorming new jobs. They are struggling in a relationship, and we immediately have thoughts about what they should say or do. They feel stuck, and suddenly we are offering a five-step plan for becoming unstuck.
Most of the time, it comes from a good place. We want to help.
But I have been thinking lately about how often helping someone well actually requires doing less.
One of the ideas woven throughout my master of social work education is self-determination. In social work, there is an ethical responsibility to respect a person’s right to make their own choices. That sounds obvious on paper. In practice, I think it asks something much harder of us: trusting that another person can be the expert on their own life, even when we can see possibilities they cannot see yet, or when we might make a different choice ourselves.
This overlaps beautifully with what originally drew me to coaching.
Good coaching is not supposed to be someone else designing your life for you.
It is easy to assume that when we feel stuck, what we need is an answer. Sometimes we do. But oftentimes we already have more information than we realize.
What we actually need is enough space to hear ourselves think.
This is also one reason Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now has stayed with me. One of the ideas I took from the book is how rarely we are completely present with what is actually happening. Our minds are incredibly good at jumping ahead, replaying what already happened, imagining what other people might think, or trying to solve a future that has not arrived yet.
Sometimes slowing down enough to return to the present changes the questions we ask.
There is a very different feeling between someone saying, “Here is what you should do,” and someone asking:
What do you think you need?
What feels most important here?
What are you afraid might happen?
If nobody else had an opinion about this, what would you want?
What would make this decision feel more aligned with the person you are becoming?
Those questions do not magically make complicated decisions simple, but they can shift where we look for the answer.
Instead of immediately looking outward, we get curious inward.
And I think that matters because constantly receiving advice can sometimes make us less confident in our own judgment. If every difficult moment requires someone else to tell us what to do, eventually it becomes harder to recognize our own voice among everybody else’s.
That does not mean we should never seek guidance. Other people can offer perspectives, knowledge, support, and possibilities we genuinely could not access alone. There is wisdom in letting ourselves be helped.
The difference, I think, is whether support expands our agency or subtly replaces it.
That distinction shows up often in my work at Rewoven Life Coaching ✨. Sometimes a client comes into a conversation wanting to figure out what comes next. My role is not necessarily to produce the answer. Often, it is to slow the conversation down enough that we can notice what is already there: values, contradictions, fears, hopes, patterns, strengths, and possibilities.
Sometimes the most meaningful moment is when someone says some version of:
“I think I actually know what I want.”
We live in a world with an enormous amount of input. Podcasts tell us how to live. Social media gives us routines to aspire to. Friends and family have opinions. Experts have frameworks. Even our past selves can have surprisingly loud expectations about what our lives were “supposed” to look like by now.
All of those voices can contain something useful.
But none of them have to become louder than your own.
Maybe the question is not always, “What should I do?”
Sometimes a better place to begin is:
“What do I already know?”
Looking for support on your own journey?
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