Unsolicited Advice is NEVER Welcome

Unsolicited: “not asked for.” Similar words: uninvited; unsought; unprompted; unwelcome.

First, let me speak to the ones who are out there delivering these hot takes that no one asked for: STOP. JUST STOP. NO. I MEAN IT. If someone didn’t ask you to give them advice on something they created, built, made, worked on, spoke about, or thought, then your “advice” on how they can do whatever it is they have done or are doing “better” just to “help” them is NOT WANTED. It’s not needed, either. Because if they needed your advice, they’d likely have come to you and said, “hey, could I have your help with this? Could I get your perspective on something?” But in the absence of that, just DON’T.

Similar to looking for where people find the audacity.

Before I go on, I suppose I should give some background. Ever since I started to run my own business, people I don’t even know or barely know just come at me in the DMs or through friends to come at me to tell me how to run my business “better.” In every instance, I not only didn’t ask them specifically for help, I didn’t ask anyone to give me advice at that time. I won’t bore anyone with the details, but suffice it to say that in each instance, the person was spouting off a ton of what they called constructive feedback that essentially tore apart so much of my work, and they did so with NO basis for making the judgments. There were tremendous assumptions made about me, my expertise, what I offer to clients, my client demographics, my web presence (assumptions were made about that without even looking at my ACTUAL business web page), etc. In both cases, the same sort of “script” was used: the person began by telling me they thought I had some really interesting content, some good ideas, they liked what I was trying to “go for” with my business, but that they “just wanted to see me succeed” and so to that end, they hoped I didn’t mind but they were going to give suggestions.

I DID MIND. OH MY GOD did I mind. But I never got a chance to say so because they launched right into the advice portion of their message and all of this came in a single email dump. I was completely blindsided.

As a newbie small business owner, I’m incredibly proud that I’ve done so much on my own. It has saved me money, I’ve learned tons of new marketable skills, and I have loads of control over my content and brand. With that said, I do sometimes seek out professional assistance. Or I barter with someone: my expertise for yours. But the one thing I never, ever do, is sit in my house thinking to myself, “hmmm…..I wonder if some person I didn’t ask for help will fall into my DMs today telling me everything I’m doing wrong, all while reassuring me that they really are doing this to HELP?” Nope. I never do that because that’s self-abusive.

And this is why I am so incredibly angry at the people who do this kind of thing: it’s because it is extremely triggering to people who have ever encountered emotional abuse, degradation, and been the unfortunate recipient of the blame game, particularly from narcissistic people. Even if people have been through a ton of therapy to deal with different types of emotional abuse, having someone just start tearing down something you’ve built all while saying things like “hey I like what you’ve done here BUT” or “hey I hope I’m not being a jerk here when I say this BUT” or “trust me I’m just here to help you BUT you are doing just about everything wrong (according to the narrow metric I’ve applied)” is beyond just upsetting. It’s short-term damaging when it’s one comment, but longer-term if it’s more or comes from many people. Because people still trying to learn to heal from that kind of abuse will beat themselves up and internalize the unasked-for comments and start tearing themselves (or their work) down, and people who are more healed from it will still end up with a fight/flight response because of the reminder of trauma (probably fight) which is distressful in its own right. My heart goes out to anyone who has had to deal with this kind of thing, especially on the regular, and it can’t help much when people toss it off as “oh that’s just them” because that’s like…legitimizing it as ok. Well no, it’s not. And these people need to be called out.

I am a huge fan of a friend of mine who adopted an interesting practice: when she wants to vent or talk about something, on social media, she will say in the post, “BTW I’m not looking for any advice here, so please refrain.” It’s beautiful. I love it. To me, that means “we can discuss this topic I’m bringing up, or commiserate if we have similar difficulties, but don’t you dare come on my page and start with your advice-giving because now is not the time or place.” Of course this won’t stop people from sliding in your DMs and doing it, but nothing can stop that really, I suppose, other than awareness.

Awareness means: we see you, you unsolicited advice-givers, and your comments are not welcome. As Elyse Myers says, “[We] do not receive that.” And maybe more of us have to start to talk back to these people, tough as it may be, stand up for ourselves, de-friend, or start doing like my friend and practice saying out loud any time we mean it that we are not looking for advice. Maybe the more we say it out loud, the more they will think twice and keep their “help” to themselves.