Why Can't We Stop Offering Good Advice?

Or, what I learned from following #SophieFromRomania

Photo by Simon Hurry on Unsplash

This week’s newsletter features the story of a beautiful rescue dog and some chat about diabetes. It also talks about how easy it is for us to feel we need to help or to offer advice. This newsletter really encourages helping others, it’s what it is all about in fact! However, if you feel the need to offer advice following this newsletter, rather than acting on that feeling I encourage you to sit with it and ask yourself why. And if it helps, you can scroll the #SophieFromRomania hashtag and look at pictures of a very beautiful dog while you’re thinking.

I first heard about #SophieFromRomania on Instagram. As I aimlessly scrolled through stories, more and more pictures popped up of a beautiful dog with huge ears. These pictures were accompanied by many heart-eyes emojis and comments like, “Sophie made it out to the garden, yay!” or “Oh no Sophie, back behind the sofa again?” As someone who has purposely curated her social media feed to be 90% heart-warming tales of dogs, at first I didn’t pay Sophie - or to give her her official title, #SophieFromRomania - too much notice. But then I read her story.

In case you’re not lucky enough to have a social media feed full of fellow dog obsessives, Sophie is the Romanian rescue dog of Cambridge economics professor, Diane Coyle, and her husband, the former BBC tech correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones. Sophie arrived into their lives the day before Christmas, completely traumatised from a three day journey across Europe. She’d been living in a barn after being found abandoned on the streets as a puppy. While you might have thought that life with a nice couple in Ealing would be an upgrade on this, Sophie was deeply suspicious of it all and fled behind the sofa. It has taken her weeks to emerge and three months later she is still too scared to go for a walk or even have a collar put on her. Rory started posting updates on her progress on social media and very quickly #SophieFromRomania gained cult status.

Each morning thousands of people await an update on how Sophie is doing that day. Has she decided to come out from behind the sofa? What has she dug up in the garden? Will she allow Rory or Diane (aka, The Prof) to give her a little tickle under the chin today? When will she finally go for a walk? And I am there with them. Each morning I check the #SophieFromRomania hashtag to see what has happened that day. I have watched the interviews Rory has given about her progress to various news channels, I listened to Diane interview a fellow Cambridge professor about the impact dogs have on wellbeing and I have even gone as far as to follow their dog behaviouralist on social media. Each time I see Sophie make a little progress I want to give a cheer. And each time I see something difficult I want… to offer advice.

#SophieFromRomania threads are filled with advice. Well-meaning dog fans suggest; getting down on the floor with her, bringing in another dog to calm her, forcing her outside for a walk, absolutely not forcing her outside for a walk, changing her food, trying a different grooming brush, going into the garden with her, ignoring her, petting her… the list goes on and on. And when I started reading these comments I found myself getting very annoyed. Surely the 2457th person commenting, “have you thought about getting down to her level” must have seen the 2456 comments like this that went before it? Why bother saying it again? I became very defensive on Diane and Rory’s behalf and so did lots of other people, to the extent that actually some of the comments got a bit “can you just back off already?!”. And yet, the two people who didn’t get defensive were the couple themselves.

Rory put out a nice Tweet saying how much they appreciated all the advice and while they were going to stick with following what their dog behaviouralist suggested, they were always open to new ideas. Diane tweeted that she was sorry she couldn’t respond to all the comments and suggestions but she very much appreciated them. They responded with a patience and kindness that was missing from me. So, I had to ask myself, why was I so narky about this? Why did I mind so much about someone I didn’t know offering advice to someone else I didn’t know? Particularly when I myself had been desperate to jump in with a helpful idea too?

I think the answer lies in Sophie herself. In the interview Diane did with her fellow professor, she asked him why he thought everyone was so interested in the tale of #SophieFromRomania. He suggests that it’s because after years of bad news and feeling like the world is turning against itself, we all need some proof that there is still kindness out there. I agree with this but for those people who found themselves triggered by the “have you tried…” comments, I think it goes a bit further. After years of bad news and feeling like the world is turning against itself, I think what we all want is to be told it’s ok to be scared. We’re all looking for a sofa to hide behind, while a nice couple feeds us a charcuterie plate, and tells us we can come out when we’re ready.

Recently my diabetes has been playing havoc with my body. After a good few months of stability and finally feeling like I’d started to get a handle on managing it, diabetes did what it often does and decided to change tack. The tricks I’d been using to manage it, stopped working and my blood sugar graph started to look like a new ride at Alton Towers. My body started to show the toll this was taking. My skin dried up and started cracking again, my face and ankles got puffy and I stopped sleeping. When I looked at the dark circles under my eyes each morning I was reminded of how I’d looked just before my diagnosis. How I’d looked when my body had been dying. It’s not a reminder anyone needs at 7am.

I talked to my doctor and the naturopath that I work with about it and we made some changes. With diabetes nothing works fast. You have to constantly experiment. You keep track of how your body is behaving and then you change one small thing to see what impact that has. If nothing changes, you try something else. You keep going until you find something that works. What I didn’t do, however, is tell anyone how I was feeling about it because I just didn’t want to hear all the good advice that would inevitably follow. This is one of the hallmarks of any chronic illness, I’ve learned. People always have a piece of advice to share. And I can’t blame them, I used to do it too.

When I trained to be a coach the first thing we were taught was, “your job is to ask questions, not offer solutions.” This is the hardest thing about the job and something I often forget. I listen to my client work through a problem and I find myself thinking, “I know what the answer is! Ask me! I know!”. The funny thing is that sometimes they do ask, and I’ll tell them my very clever fix. Nearly always their response is,

“No, that won’t work for me.”

And so we go back to discussing what they’re feeling about the problem instead and I remember why it is good coaches don’t offer solutions.

In my experience, when we’re scared or worried about something we don’t want solutions. We want support. We want to be able to say to the person opposite us, “I’m really scared right now” and have them respond with, “I know, I’m sorry, I’m here for you.” Solutions might be useful later down the line, when we’ve sat with the fear for a bit and are able to be with the problem without being overwhelmed by anxiety. But in the moment, what we really need is to have the feeling acknowledged and accepted. Like Sophie, we want patience and support, as well as the faith that this too will pass.

When I found myself getting defensive at the advice being offered to #SophieFromRomania, what I was really feeling was my own fear. Instead of talking about it or asking someone if they could just listen while I had a rant about diabetes, I bottled it up. This is classic hyper-independence - we believe we won’t get what we actually need so we don’t ask for it in the first place.

But if we want support then we have to be brave enough to put out a statement that says, “I’m grateful for the advice and when I’m ready for it, I’d love to hear it. What I really need right now, however, is just good wishes and your understanding”. When we do that then we can admit that we’re scared and that we’re going to hide behind the sofa for a little while. And we can ask people to be there for us when we’re ready to go for a walk again.

---

We Can’t Do It Alone is a reader supported publication. If you enjoy these newsletters and would like to support them, then you can become a paying subscriber here. Subscriptions start at £5.45 a month and there is also the option to become a founding member, where you get all the benefits of subscribing plus a 1-2-1 coaching session with me. This newsletter will always provide free content so if you’re not able to afford to be a paying subscriber at this moment in time, don’t worry. You can still support me by sharing any newsletters you particularly enjoy. If you’re sharing on social media, do tag me @harrietminter and I’ll make sure to reshare.