Give Yourself the Advice You’d Give a Friend

There’s a book called The Enchiridion that is a sort of manual of advice from a Greek philosopher named Epictetus. It was written in the 2nd century and still holds a lot of great advice.

I got to thinking about it yesterday on a long drive, and one passage that stands out to me is about giving yourself your own advice. It’s strange that we can give solid advice to a friend when they’re going through something, but when we’re going through something similar, it’s a lot harder to give ourselves the same advice.

Somehow, when you’re telling it to a friend, it’s pretty straightforward and you believe it’ll work. When we’re in the same shit, it’s a lot harder. When we’re in it ourselves, we’re clouded by the stress or other emotions around what we’re dealing with. When you’re seeing it from an outsider’s view, in the case of the friend receiving your advice, it feels so much easier.

How is this passage helpful? If we’re in the middle of it and we find we can’t take our own advice, it’s because we’re lacking the ability to detach.

This is where the lesson is helpful. When you detach from the emotions and objectively look at the solutions—the advice you would have given a friend—the path forward becomes a lot clearer.

Detach. Think of what steps you’d tell a friend. Then do the steps.

— Bus