Hello and welcome to Five Minutes in Nature with me Liz Scott and I'm just up from my house.
There's a little area that's got trees around it and there are some freshly planted saplings as well and I'm just listening to a bit of bird song in the trees.
You might hear the occasional car go by.
I'm actually in my village so it's a quiet village but this is the time of day where people come back from work so I think you'll probably hear a few cars going by and I'm just looking at the grass which has got a layer now of leaves that have fallen from the trees,
Crispy leaves on the grass but the leaves,
The beech trees and there's a sycamore tree I can see,
They're still clinging on to their leaves at the moment.
I think this could be a slow leaf drop this autumn.
And today my reflection is all about giving advice.
I was prompted to share this with you after a conversation I had recently with a friend and I'll tell you a little story.
It's a very small tiny incident but it does illustrate what I want to say quite well and it's all about the perils of giving advice or why giving advice is not a good idea.
The illustration is that I at the moment am going to the gym,
Started going to the gym and I am experimenting with going to the gym at different times of the day.
I want to get a walk in,
I want to get my breakfast in,
I want to find if I can get a good routine and rhythm that feels comfortable for my lifestyle.
So at the moment I am experimenting and going to the gym at different times and just seeing you know what works best.
When I told my friend this I was greeted with a whole range of ideas and advice about what she thought I should do when it came to going to the gym and getting everything in my day sorted out.
So this is when I should have breakfast and this is when I should go to the gym and if it was if it was her she would do this.
And it was really interesting being on the receiving end of that advice because what I noticed is that I felt this kind of bubble of frustration within me and it was like she doesn't know what's best for me and yet here she was giving advice trying to solve a problem that didn't need solving.
I was working it out on my own.
One of the things I know for sure when it comes to listening and I'm a professional listener,
I'm a coach and if you're interested in well-being listening there is a course on well-being listening on Insight Timer.
You might enjoy having a listen to it.
But one of the things that I know about listening is that the most powerful information and solutions that anyone can access is solutions that they see for themselves and listening is a catalyst.
It's a way of people hearing their wisdom speak within them.
So when I'm listening to someone as a coach and if that person is telling me what's going on for them and they've got a problem I never tell them what I think they should do and I know for sure I have no idea what I think they should do because ultimately it's their life and I don't know what's right for them.
So when I listen and a client says to me you know this is my way forward thank you for showing me the way I have to make sure that they realize that I didn't show them the way.
I didn't give them an idea.
I didn't give them any advice.
All I did was listen and they were then able to hear within them the solution that they needed to hear for themselves.
So today is just a reminder that 99 times out of 100 people do not want advice.
Even if they say tell me what you think I should do they don't want advice.
They want to work it out for themselves.
There are very very rare occasions when people do need your advice but they are rare.
So a sort of rule of thumb is assume that if someone comes to you and they want to talk something through they don't want you to give them a solution.
They want you to listen so that they can start to hear the solution that is waiting to be prompted by their own intuition and wisdom.
And when you're able to listen like that it opens up a whole world of possibility for the person that you're listening to.
So just remember don't give advice,
Listen.
