Selfalot

Daily Quote: “When others come to you with an unprompted idea or suggestion, stop what you are doing and listen with your eyes, ears, and heart.” Mitch Thrower

How often have you ignored feedback? And what were the consequences of that? There are easy examples such as getting lost, or catching the wrong bus. There are some really serious ones where you damaged your health because you followed the wrong diets or had an accident because you were talking on your mobile while driving.

Probably the most obvious situation is when you ignore the instructions to find your way to where you want to go to. You have checked the map but it didn’t look right. So you asked somebody and they told you the same way. It still didn’t feel right, so you ignored all advice and followed your instinct. Many hours of driving in the wrong direction later you finally decide to turn back.

There are many times in your life where you take no notice of feedback or advice given to you. In particular some laws are broken more often than not because people see no point in them or want to buck authority. Many instances they do themselves a lot of harm because of this attitude.

Other times you are given advice by a coach or teacher and you think you know better and follow your own advice and ideas on how something should be done. Sometimes these situations work out alright. But in many more instances you will find that your progress is very slow if there is any at all.

Not following advice and feedback is really counter productive. Why not listen to words of wisdom when they are offered? Why be stubborn and only decide that you want to do something your way?

You will find that it takes you much longer to complete a task if you don’t read the instruction manual. How often have you tried to work out how a new gadget functions by just playing around with it? If you had checked the instructions you might have found it to be a much quicker learning process. But then nobody tells you anything. You know better.

Have you ever watched a person tune out all advice and go their own way? Have you seen how they trip over small hurdles because they didn’t feel they needed to listen to any advice? Have you wondered how this person could be so stupid?

Now look at yourself. When did you do this yourself? Can you remember a time when you decided that you did not want to listen to somebody, when you definitely knew that you had all the answers and did not need any help? And how did that work out for you?

In all probability when you tried to go ahead with a task and you did not listen to advice you found the going much more difficult than if you had actually taken some advice on board.

We feel that by listening to somebody else tell us what to do we think that we are not competent. We think less of ourselves because now we had to get help. We couldn’t do this on our own. How bad is that?

As much as one can understand this attitude, at the same time it is a very limiting belief. It can mean that in many instances during the course of our lives we end up struggling far more than we should because we just don’t want to listen to any advice.