One of the most frustrating things that you can run into on your path towards improving your life is when you make progress in a certain area and someone around you later has the exact same problem but they refuse to listen to your advice on how to fix it.

I’m sure you’ve been in a situation before where you’ve finally sorted out a problem in your life and all of a sudden you find other people who are having the same problem you just overcame.  Your first instinct is to jump in and say “Oh! I know exactly what you’re talking about!  I had the exact same problem, and here’s what I did to fix it.”

You share your wisdom and you expect the person to jump in joy while you speak the words of truth you wish someone told you when you had the problem. 

The problem is, that in most cases, the people around you won’t take your advice.  They won’t buy your wisdom.  They won’t take your advice.  Chances are, they will probably ignore your advice, continue to have the problem and whine about it to you while you sit there in frustration wondering why the hell they aren’t listening to you.  Maybe you’re not being clear enough, you think, so you try again from a different angle.  Nothing.  It’s like talking to a wall.  It can be very frustrating.

The solution is to realize that although there is nothing wrong with sharing your newly expanded awareness of a situation, you need to accept the fact that people will not change to match your current level of awareness right away.  If you could somehow quantify your level of awareness at 200 before you solved your problem, and now you’re at 205 after solving the problem, and your friend is at level 200 trying to get to 205, you might actually need to get to 210 or 215 or 225 before they will move up to 205.  Sometimes they will jump from 200 straight to 210 when you’re already at 225.

The only solution I’ve found is to keep moving yourself forward and almost like magic the people around you will follow along.  If advice isn’t working, you need to turn inwards and work on your current problem, not theirs.  It’s the only thing that will help them.

Here are some possible reasons people might not listen to your advice even though you just fixed the same problem in your life:

1) The lesson you learned from solving your challenge is different from the lesson they are to learn.  Maybe they are not ready to accept the lesson yet, so it’s the lesson they seek, not the solution to the problem.  It’s like you’re offering them the answers to a test they haven’t learned the subject matter for yet.

2) You’re not 100% over this problem yet.  You think you’ve solved the problem, but you really haven’t.  Maybe you figured out what you need to do in order to solve this problem you share in common, but you haven’t done it yet.  For example, if you realized that you need to exercise in order to lose weight, telling people this “Interesting Information” is pretty useless, unless you’ve actually gone out and started exercising and lost weight.  Once you DO what you learned, you convert “Interesting Information” into “Wisdom”.  People will intuitively listen to Wisdom, but ignore Interesting Information.

3) You haven’t moved past this new level of awareness.  Perhaps you’ve started exercising with your new level of awareness, but the next step is to give up your coffee, cigarettes or pop habit, but you’re not ready for that yet.  You might need to overcome these habits and a few more before your friends and family and others catch up to you.  Don’t expect people to take a step every time you take a step.  A lot of times people like to give others a few steps forward to see how things are going before they move forward.  It’s safer that way for them.  Usually they won’t allow you to move too far ahead though in fear of being left behind.  So don’t worry too much.  Just focus on moving yourself forward.

These are three little tidbits of “Interesting Info” I knew for a while, but didn’t actually convert to ”Wisdom” until yesterday.  I stopped worrying about where everyone else is and just focused on moving myself forward, and sure enough all of a sudden people around me magically want to catch up a few steps.  

Try this out and see what I mean.  If, for example, you quit smoking and your spouse doesn’t, maybe you need to take 3 or 4 more steps towards health like eating healthy, drinking water and exercising before they take 1 step and quit smoking.  You can spend your entire life judging people who refuse to listen to you, or you can just offer your advice when asked, and move forward yourself and allow people to catch up on their own terms.  The second path is much less stressful.

Remember, there are probably people 1 step ahead of you right now that you’re not listening to either, because you’re waiting to see them take a few more steps to see if they fall off a cliff, go backwards or change their minds.

-Paul

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