I Don’t Have the Answers to Your Life
"What do you think I should do?"
I’m sure we’ve all asked that of someone at least once in our lives.
And it’s a legitimate question when we’re genuinely looking for another perspective. We want to know what they see that we might be missing.
Maybe the person knows us well. Maybe they’ve been through something similar. Maybe they have expertise or experience we don’t have. Or maybe they simply seem more certain than we feel at that moment.
Whatever the reason, their perspective can carry weight.
But are there times when we say we’re asking someone for perspective but what we’re really asking them to decide what’s right for us?
I distinctly remember wanting to make a career change. I was a new dad, about two weeks from getting married and I went to the one person whose guidance I had always trusted.
My Dad.
A very pragmatic and practical man. I’d watched him calculate risk vs. reward my entire childhood.
I presented my dilemma and asked “what do you think I should do?”
His response still resonates today.
“Do what you feel is going to be best for you and your family.”
Not the answer I wanted.
But in his own way he was basically saying:
I don’t have the answers to your life.
Looking back, I’m not sure I was only asking for perspective. I think part of me wanted someone I trusted to tell me what the right decision was.
There’s something comforting about that.
Because if someone else can give us the right answer, maybe we don’t have to carry quite as much of the uncertainty that comes with choosing it ourselves.
But that creates a problem.
He could have told me what he thought I should do.
He couldn’t actually know.
And I think that’s something I understand much better now that I’m the person people sometimes come to with that same question.
What do you think I should do?
I can have an opinion. I may see something the person sitting across from me may not see yet. I might challenge what they’re telling me.
But I’ve become increasingly comfortable admitting:
I don’t have the answers to your life.
And I’m not sure I’m supposed to.
That might sound strange coming from a coach.
Outsource Expertise, Not Your Life
Look, I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t seek advice or listen to people who know things we don’t. There are plenty of situations where relying only on ourselves would be foolish.
I want my doctor to know things about my health that I don’t. I want an attorney to understand the law better than I do. If I’m making a complicated financial decision, I want advice from someone who understands the implications.
Those are areas of expertise I’m happy to outsource. But I’ve found that there are some decisions that belong solely to me.
As I began building my coaching business, I hired coaches, bought programs and invested in people who had accomplished things I wanted to accomplish. I sought out people who had already built successful businesses of their own and were teaching others how they had done it.
It made sense to me. They knew things I didn’t know. They had figured out how to attract clients, market their services, package what they offered and build businesses that worked. Many had taken what they learned along the way and turned it into a framework or process that other coaches could follow.
So I tried some of them.
Some of what I learned was valuable, and some of it still influences the way I think about business today. But following someone else’s process didn’t necessarily produce the same results for me.
For a while, I approached that the way I think many of us do when something seems to be working for other people but isn’t working for us. I wondered what I was doing wrong.
Maybe I wasn’t executing well enough. Maybe I hadn’t followed the process closely enough. Or maybe I needed to work harder, be more consistent or simply give it more time.
And some of that may have been true.
But eventually I started wondering whether I was asking the wrong question.
Instead of only asking why their approach wasn’t working for me, I started wondering why I assumed it should.
Their approach had grown out of their experience, their strengths, their personality, their audience, their circumstances and the way they wanted to build their business. Even if I followed the same steps, I couldn’t reproduce all of those things.
That doesn’t mean what they were teaching was wrong. Their experience could still teach me something. Their expertise could help me avoid mistakes, expose me to possibilities I hadn’t considered and challenge the way I was thinking.
But maybe I was asking their experience to do something it couldn’t do.
Give me my answer.
I think that distinction reaches well beyond the programs I bought or even coaching itself.
Maybe that’s because an answer from someone else can offer something perspective alone cannot.
It can offer relief.
If someone I trust tells me what I should do and I follow their advice, I’m no longer carrying the decision entirely by myself. If it works, I made the right choice. And if it doesn’t, there can be some comfort in knowing I listened to someone who seemed to know more than I did.
But making the decision for myself requires something different. I can gather all the information available to me, seek advice from people I respect and listen carefully to perspectives that challenge my own, but eventually I have to decide what I’m going to do.
And with that decision comes ownership.
That doesn’t mean believing we always know best or ignoring good advice because we want to prove we can figure everything out ourselves. It means recognizing the difference between allowing someone to contribute to our thinking and allowing them to do our thinking for us.
We can outsource expertise. We can seek perspective. We can learn from people who know more than we do.
But getting help is not the same as outsourcing ownership of your life.
Because eventually the conversation ends. The people we’ve asked for advice return to their own lives, and we return to ours.
We’re still the ones who have to live with what we decide.
The You Factor
There’s another reason I don’t believe someone else can give us the answer to our lives.
They’re missing a pretty important variable.
You.
You can gather all the information available to you. You can seek out the best expertise you can find, talk to people who have faced similar decisions and listen carefully to people who know you well. You may even find someone whose circumstances look remarkably similar to yours.
But none of them is you.
That may sound obvious, but I’m not sure we always account for how much it matters.
Two people can receive exactly the same advice and make completely different decisions with it. They can follow the same process and get different results. They can be presented with the same opportunity and see completely different possibilities because what each person brings to the decision is different.
Our experiences are different. So are our responsibilities, relationships, resources, tolerance for risk and the things we’re willing to sacrifice to get what we want.
Even what looks like the same outcome may mean something entirely different to two people.
That’s the part no framework, expert or well-meaning friend can completely account for.
I think back to some of the programs I talked about earlier. The people teaching them could give me the exact steps they took. They could explain why they made certain decisions and what happened when they did. I could learn from all of it.
But the moment I tried to apply that information to my life, another variable entered the equation.
Me.
I brought my experience to it. My strengths. My weaknesses. My personality. My resources. My expectations. I also brought my own ideas about what I was and wasn’t willing to do to build the kind of business I wanted.
That changes the equation.
And I think the same thing happens when we ask someone what they think we should do.
They’re answering from what they know. Their experience. Their judgment. Their understanding of the situation and, if they know us well, their understanding of us.
All of that can be valuable.
But they still have to imagine what it would be like to stand where we’re standing.
We don’t.
We’re already there.
Maybe that’s the difference between getting an answer and discovering your answer.
Someone else can give you information. They can offer expertise, perspective, advice and reassurance. They can tell you what they did or what they believe they would do if they were in your position.
But there’s one thing they can’t bring to the decision for you.
The you factor.
And maybe that’s why the question isn’t simply, “What do you think I should do?”
Maybe there’s another question that eventually has to follow it.
What do I think I should do?
My Answer Isn’t the Point
All of this has shaped the way I think about coaching and the responsibility I have when someone trusts me enough to let me into a decision they’re trying to make.
I don’t take that lightly.
When someone is trying to figure out what comes next, it would be easy for me to listen to their situation, draw on my own experiences and tell them what I think they should do. And there are certainly times when I have an opinion.
But my opinion isn’t the point.
What interests me more is understanding how they arrived at theirs.
Why do you think that?
What makes you feel that?
What makes this important to you?
Sometimes the first answer leads somewhere. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes what initially sounds like the problem turns out not to be the problem at all.
That’s part of why I ask questions.
I’m listening for what someone says, but I’m also listening for the things that don’t quite line up. Someone may tell me that something is important to them while repeatedly making choices that move them further away from it. They may say they want change while describing all the reasons change isn’t possible. They may have an answer they’ve repeated for so long that neither of us knows whether they still believe it.
I’m not there to catch them in a contradiction.
I’m there to help them see it.
There are also times when I’ll challenge what someone is telling me. Not because I’ve already decided they’re wrong, but because I think some beliefs deserve to be examined before we allow them to determine what happens next.
That’s different from telling someone what to do.
If I give you my answer too quickly, there’s a possibility that we stop exploring yours.
And yours is the one that matters.
That doesn’t mean coaching should be an endless conversation where we keep asking questions and never get anywhere. At some point, discovery has to lead to decisions, and decisions have to lead to action.
That’s why I use a framework in my coaching.
But I think there’s an important distinction between a framework and a formula.
A formula suggests that if we put the same things in, we should get the same answer out. A framework gives us the space to examine what’s there without deciding in advance what we’re supposed to find.
My framework helps create structure around the conversation. It gives us a way to look at what someone already has to work with, what may need to come into alignment, what deserves their focus and what they’re prepared to do next.
But it doesn’t tell them what they should want.
It doesn’t tell them whether they should leave the job, start the business, move, stay, retire or begin again.
The answers are the client’s to discover, and the decisions are theirs to make.
My responsibility is to listen closely and deeply enough to hear what may be underneath the answer, ask the questions that need to be asked, challenge the thinking that deserves to be challenged and provide enough silence that discovery can eventually become action.
I can bring my experience to that process. I can bring perspective.
I can bring everything I’ve learned from coaching people and from navigating my own life.
But I can’t bring the one thing we established earlier.
The you factor.
That belongs to you.
And maybe that’s why I’m increasingly comfortable saying I don’t have the answers to your life.
I’m not supposed to.
I’m here to help you discover yours.
Final Thought: The Answer Still Has to Be Yours
I think I understand my dad’s answer better today.
What felt unsatisfying to me then looks very different from where I sit now.
Maybe there was a certain amount of respect in not telling me what to do.
He trusted me to weigh what mattered, consider the people who would be affected by my decision and ultimately decide what I believed was right for my life.
I think that matters.
Because helping someone doesn’t always mean giving them an answer. Sometimes it means resisting the temptation to make their decision easier by inserting ourselves into it.
I’m learning that from the other side of the conversation now.
There are times when I could tell someone what I think they should do. But the more important question for me is whether giving them my answer would actually help them find theirs.
Those aren’t necessarily the same thing.
Maybe my dad understood that long before I did.
I asked him for an answer.
He gave me ownership.
Are You Ready to Discover Your Answers?
Sometimes you just need the space to examine what you’re thinking, challenge what you’re assuming and get clearer about your next step.
If this is you, I invite you to request a PR4LIFE Strategy Session.
Start With One Conversation.
TL;DR
Advice, expertise and other people’s experiences can help us see things we might miss on our own. But there’s a limit to what someone else can give us.
They aren’t us.
Our experiences, responsibilities, values, circumstances and willingness to live with the outcome all become part of the equation.
That’s the difference between getting an answer from someone else and discovering your own.
We can ask for help. We can seek perspective. We can learn from people who know things we don’t.
But the answers are still ours to discover.
And what we do with them is still ours to decide.
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