There is a moment I am not proud of. A few years into running my own business, Antoinette started building hers. She would come home and talk through the hard parts: a difficult client, a campaign that didn’t land, the low-grade anxiety of cash flow that never quite behaves. I tried to listen. I genuinely did. But somewhere in the middle of her speaking, I would feel something rise in me, a slow nudge behind the eyes. I recognised the terrain. I had been in business. I knew things.
So I would begin, gently, with love. I would reframe the problem, suggest a next step, offer a different angle. She never snapped back. She didn’t need to. Eventually the look would come. Quiet, steady, unmistakable. A gaze that stopped me mid-sentence and said everything without a word: I don’t need your opinion right now. I need you here with me.
I saw myself from the outside in that moment. Standing there with all my careful advice, all my good intentions, all my experience laid bare. None of it unkind. None of it exactly wrong. Just slightly off. Out of tune with what was actually needed.
That look taught me something I still carry.
Why advice lands badly
The impulse to advise is deeply human. We see someone struggling and something in us stirs. We want to ease it. We want to be useful. But research by psychologists Eran Magen and Bo Feng found that unsolicited advice tends to arrive most often in our closest relationships, and that the very closeness that moves us to speak is what makes the advice land hardest. What was meant as comfort creates distance instead. What was meant to help can feel, to the person receiving it, like being managed.
There is a name for the internal response people have when advice arrives uninvited. Psychologists call it reactance, a state that kicks in when we sense our autonomy is being crowded. Even well-meaning guidance can register as a quiet message: you can’t handle this. People resist the advice not because it’s wrong, but because it wasn’t invited.
A woman named Sarah, a young mother from Melbourne, wrote about this. She had finally let herself open up to a friend about the pressure she was carrying, the invisible tug-of-war between work and motherhood, the exhaustion she couldn’t quite name. She wasn’t asking for solutions. She just needed somewhere to put it down. Her friend responded with time-blocking strategies, meal prep ideas, and a list of meditation apps. “You just need to be more organised,” she said, smiling.
Sarah smiled too. But inside, something went quiet.
What changed when I stopped
I made a promise to myself around that time: no unsolicited opinions. At first it felt like withholding, like abandoning people I cared about. But something shifted. People opened up more. They stayed longer in conversation. They told the truth more freely. Not because I had better answers, but because I stopped reaching for any.
Here is what I had been missing. When someone is in the middle of something hard, the feeling of being heard has to come before anything else. Advice, even good advice, can’t land in a person who hasn’t yet felt received. You can offer the most precise and caring insight imaginable, and they will still leave the conversation feeling vaguely managed, slightly reduced, as though their struggle got compressed into a scheduling problem.
The hard truth, the one I had to sit with after Antoinette’s look, is that uninvited advice often serves the giver more than the receiver. It gives us a role. It makes us feel capable, needed, useful. And if I’m honest, it also came from my own discomfort. I was filling the silence because silence unsettled me. I was offering solutions because sitting with someone’s unsolvable pain felt unbearable. What I called empathy was, at least in part, a way of managing my own unease.
All of that is human. But it isn’t the same as listening. And over time, when someone’s experiences keep getting reshaped into problems to be solved, they stop bringing the real stuff. Not out of anger. Out of quiet self-protection.
Realising that changed things. Not all at once, but in the way mornings come into a room.
What people need instead
What people need, before any advice, before any insight, is to feel that someone is actually with them. Not organising their experience into something more manageable. Just there. Present. Staying.
The most generous thing I could offer wasn’t my experience or my expertise. It was my willingness to stay, without agenda, without needing to shape the moment into something more comfortable.
That’s harder than it sounds. It means tolerating your own discomfort when you don’t know what to say. It means trusting that your presence, without a solution attached to it, is enough.
Most of the time, it is.
My book “Shut Up: A Journey into the Lost Art of Listening” is available on Amazon if you want to go further with this.
