Complete Guide to Mastering The Art of Giving Advice & Constructive Feedback

This is a comprehensive guide to giving advice and feedback that gets heard without damaging relationships or getting rejected.
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This guide explains how you can apply both concepts of effective communication and mindfulness principles to provide unsolicited advice skillfully and kindly.  Methods that can foster harmony, mutual respect, and appreciation in our interactions rather than erode them.

​Today, we are surrounded by a wealth of information online, yet many people either do or do not capitalise on it. Consequently, many individuals feel the urge to give unsolicited advice. While this advice can sometimes be helpful, when not delivered skillfully, it can lead to hurt feelings or conflict among friends, which is regrettable and preventable. When offering advice and constructive feedback, it's essential to come from a place of genuine concern and kindness instead of ego or aversion; this approach helps ensure that your feedback is heard and valued.

It's noteworthy that advice is generally best received by recipients from two specific groups:

1. Friends: individuals we consider our friends, who care for us, and whose opinions we trust and respect.
2. Teachers/Coaches/Mentors: individuals we view as trusted guides whose guidance we seek and appreciate.

When we encounter unsolicited advice from those outside these two groups, we often respond with defensive barriers and skepticism. This is an important consideration when contemplating offering advice to others.

​Offering Advice Skilfully and Mindfully

Providing advice can be constructive when done skillfully and with sincere intentions. For feedback to genuinely reflect our desire to assist others, it is crucial that our motivations stem from caring, compassionate, and thoughtful places. This approach not only fosters positive interactions but also establishes a framework for the advice to be received openly and thoughtfully by those receiving it.

​So, where do we start?

​Preliminary Steps
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Before starting, it's crucial to reflect on a few initial concepts to decide whether or not you should provide guidance in the first place. The following preliminary steps can act as a litmus test to evaluate whether your efforts are worth investing in and whether your insights should be shared.

Please consider the following points:

• Consider the reasons behind your desire to provide guidance. Are you genuinely motivated by compassion and generosity in helping someone, or are you reacting to something you dislike, driven by aversion or indignation and wanting to tell them to 'stop' or 'change'? Often, advice stems from our aversions rather than our generosity. Make sure your intention to give advice isn't rooted in emotion, impatience, bias, judgment, or an ego-driven need to assert knowledge or superiority. Understand and appreciate that we are all different and that we have our own ways of approaching what we do -- respect the individual experiences and differences between the two of you.  Allow other people to possess their own opinions and "right ways" of doing things; it's within their rights to do so. Before giving advice, ask yourself if this really matters, or if this is simply a matter of preference or individual approach.
• Take the time to ensure your understanding of the situation is correct, skilful, unbiased, and captures the entire picture, avoiding any out-of-context interpretations or misunderstandings of the situation as a whole. Consider whether or not you are the appropriate person to be offering this kind of advice or corrective guidance. As mentioned above, we have a natural tendency to only desire or approve of advice that comes to us from our most trusted and respected friends or teachers. If you do not fall into one of these two groups, take a moment to consider whether or not it is your place to offer your opinion at all.
• Reflect on how the person may respond before giving advice. Choose the most appropriate approach to share your guidance, ensuring it encourages open reception, reflection, and the possibility of change. Carefully rehearse or think through your words in advance. This preparation can help avoid misunderstandings or hurt feelings, which may lead to discomfort and discord, causing you to be viewed as an adversary instead of a supportive friend or colleague.
• Finally, relax your emotional state and soften your physical appearance. Be mindful of your body and of your feelings. How is your body language? What are your eyes communicating? Aggressive stances and disapproving facial expressions will send people's guards up in an instant. If you are feeling emotionally charged or intellectually irritated, now is the time to be mindful, take a deep breath, and center yourself. Ease your body, and most importantly, cultivate soft-eyes steeped in kindness and compassion for the person you are about to speak with.

​Non-Delivery (Retreat!)
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If the preliminary considerations and conditions cannot be adequately met, the most skillful and beneficial choice is to maintain your diplomatic silence. In this state, you can silently extend your good wishes, positive affirmations, and prayers of compassion and kindness towards others, hoping they achieve their future growth and enlightenment as soon as possible.

This method is called skillful acceptance, recognising that while others have flaws, we too possess our own imperfections. Just as they carry the seeds of flaws within them, they also harbour countless seeds of potential personal growth and enlightenment, just as we all do.

This method serves as a practical way to embody patience, acceptance, and tolerance toward the differences in others in our daily lives, fostering harmony, humility, and sound perspectives despite the frustrations and challenges we encounter each day.

​Wisely and skillfully choosing to not speak up can sometimes be a potent form of presence and one that should not be quickly dismissed or overlooked.   

​Principles of Effective Communication 

(a brief overview)

Now that you've reflected on the preliminary steps, you can be confident that your intentions are wise. Next, let's evaluate the other person's capacity to receive your feedback by examining the content and tone of your approach.

First and foremost, when we communicate, particularly when addressing others' sensitive feelings, we must pay attention to five essential qualities of effective communication.

These qualities include being truthful, helpful, unselfish, kind, and timely. Although I could elaborate extensively on these five aspects of communication, let's keep it concise and quickly overview their high-level meanings.

1. Is it honest?  Are you being truthful? Furthermore, are you considering the truth from all angles? This is your chance to evaluate your comprehension of the situation, behavior, or action you aim to enhance. There is a possibility that you might be misinterpreting what you observe or lacking complete context. It's also possible that you could simply be mistaken, making it essential to honestly reflect on whether you might be wrong.
2. Is it helpful?  Is the advice that you wish to offer intended to help them improve and become a better part of the community, the organisation, the relationship, or as an individual as a whole, or is it coming from someplace else and perhaps not entirely necessary and/or in fact potentially harmful?  Is it worth it?
3. Is it unselfish?  Is your desire to instruct or correct arising from a mindset of generosity or personal benefit? From a mindset of compassion, or irritation? From a heart that is open or closed? Ensure that your intentions are not selfish, mean-spirited, or driven by your ego or aversions before you speak.
4. Is it kind?  Is your tone kind, thoughtful, and considerate? While you can still be firm, it's beneficial to make an effort not to speak harshly, condescendingly, or pedantically, lest you run the very real risk of leaving them feeling criticised, embarrassed, or angered.
5. Is it timely?  Is this the right time, the right environment, and in front of the right audience? Is the person receptive, or are they emotionally involved, attached, or excited? For instance, immediately after a public speech, you might be asked, "How did I do?" This is not the appropriate moment to provide skillful criticism. 

​Delivery
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So now that we have principles of effective communication in mind, how do we construct and deliver our feedback skilfullly?
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• Prepare and rehearse what you plan to say. If the situation requires you to provide feedback in real-time, think quickly but carefully about your words before you speak. Once spoken, words can never be unheard or "taken back." Therefore, consider the specific words and phrasing you will use, and imagine how you would feel if someone spoke those words to you.
• Seek permission. Being respectful and asking if they would like your feedback in the first instance will help establish trust before you speak. No one appreciates a know-it-all, particularly one who offers guidance without an invitation. If they decline, show respect and accept that they do not wish to receive your feedback, at least for now; you can always approach them again later when they may be more open to considering your thoughts. Communicate the behaviour that you observed and acknowledge how you understand why the person may have felt correct in doing so. Showing empathy and acknowledging the other person's perspective and understanding of things can go a long way in helping them feel safer in advance of your feedback.
• Provide your feedback. Be specific, clear, and concise in your suggestions and in how those particular changes can enhance their experience and outcomes moving forward. Make it straightforward to understand, easy to digest, and simple to transform into tangible change. Avoid vagueness and refrain from speaking in generalities. Unclear advice is challenging to implement and too easily dismissed.
• Summarise. Respectfully outline the potential undesirable outcomes of not changing, providing compelling reasons that encourage improvement. For instance, emphasise the detrimental effects on their work, relationships, success, and overall happiness and satisfaction, alongside how others may perceive them if no changes occur.

​Post-Delivery
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Listen to their thoughts, opinions, and feedback with an open and non-judgemental mind. Receiving feedback from others can be difficult for people, and therefore, offering unsolicited advice to others is a precariously treacherous endeavour.

We can never truly be certain of how someone will react (externally or internally) to our altruism, so we must be willing to accept their reaction, whether skilful or unskilful, with a mind imbued with patience, understanding, kindness, compassion, empathy, and equanimity.

Remember, receiving constructive criticism isn't always easy. Regardless of whether a person is receptive enough to our advice to hear or appreciate it, we should be mindful to be grateful for the opportunity to help another with compassion and kindness in our hearts and minds.

As long as we offer advice and feedback with humility, guiding others is an excellent way to practise compassion and make a genuine effort to cultivate meaningful relationships in our lives. Finally, if the advice we offer is not well received, or if we inadvertently cause offence or provoke defensiveness or anger within them, we should apologise and acknowledge their right to feel as they do. Later, we should take the time to reflect on what we said or the manner in which we said it, and how it may have caused them to react as they did, considering how we can improve our ability to guide others in a way that is more conducive to harmony and peaceful relations. Perhaps it may be our turn to seek out the advice and feedback of others so that we, too, can learn, grow, and develop. :)