When I was a teenager, better yet, since adolescence, trusting my own judgement was not a thing. I lacked confidence in my decision making. This followed me into young adulthood. Eventually, I noticed a glaring trend and my late father pointed it out. He loved to give his babygirl advice, but I would somehow manage to completely bypass it and “learn the hard way”. This has been the new norm for me. I have realized the infiltration of advice as beautifully paradoxical. Oftentimes, taking advice won’t necessarily be a life or death situation, however, if you take a step back you will realize advice has its place but just can’t always be relied upon.
If you are a lifelong learner, you gain joy in doing it yourself. Figuring things out as you go becomes a welcome challenge in your journey. I know that has been the case for me. Sometimes I find with advice, I just truly become embarrassed when I have to say “I didn’t listen to you”. Only for the advice giver to provide a commentary whether good or bad. Perhaps their advice would have helped, perhaps it would have hurt. Either way, your following it or not becomes something you live with as an “intended” consequence. I realize that our journey is so unique! We are in the information age and everybody has an opinion or something to say. Not always a bad thing. The issue that I have found is that we are so far down the rabbit hole we are googling things such as “do I like him”. Huh?! Imagine that…wisdom says if you are googling that, you don’t. While this is an amateur example, it is still a very common occurrence on most life decisions we make from personal to professional life.
However, since there is a theme with This Mamas Journey being the ever evolving growth of a woman starting out her journey as a Single Mom, I will focus my energy on this blog post there. I used to be a notorious advice seeker when it came to who I chose to date and get serious with. I would share photos, provide all the details about a person to ask “so what do you think?”. Here is the thing, they don’t live with it…I do! We know when we ask for advice we don’t provide every single detail. You might, but for me I am a meticulous observer much like the CIA…so there is no way anyone in my life can possibly know every detail about my love life but me. My besties, bless their concerned hearts…as much as I share still only know the half. With that said, I did something different as my love life got more complex.
I stopped asking for advice and started to “feel”. I started to educate myself to develop my confidence and trust my intuition. Very scary and hard to do when you feel like you have seemingly made awful decisions around love. At the same time, I had to ask myself how am I measuring awful. I mean, I can truly say when it has come to my choice in partners I have really genuinely selected two guys that were just toxic (both abusers). After that, I realized that people in general are just fallible and not perfect, me too! That gave me a glimmer of hope around decision making. I know I used to be passionate about telling people what to do. Judgement is a hard thing to give up, let’s be real here. Then you realize this is your one life and who gives a crap! Do you!
1. What would we do if know one was looking? Que Integrity
2. How do we treat others that can do nothing for us? Que Character
3. What is our foundation for how we view the world? Que Value System
As long as we are clear on those 3 things and understand how we operate in those, impacts us and the world, why do we care so much? If the internet and posting a dang picture for validation or approval or just to share your happiness online weren’t a thing, would you date ole boy? Like for real!? Our missteps are so publicized we shame ourselves shall we backtrack.
Doing inner work might just point out that you were the problem. Hello! It certainly did for me on more than one occasion. Guess what? You are also the solution should you learn from it. This is why we must take advice with a grain of salt. Our lives, our beautifully complex lives are our own divine ordering. Everyone and everything along our journey is a teacher in both small and large ways. However, we must learn to get comfortable with not seeking the advice and approval of others to justify our choices and decisions always.
In this Information Age treading lightly will benefit us greatly. We have a plethora of advice at our fingertips and if we go too far down the rabbit hole, so goes our inherent ability to make decisions, moreso our own inner voice.
