Dealing With Low Confidence? Learn the Art of Giving Advice Giving advice is one of the most important traits of a leader but nobody thought it could be used to their advantage
By Nidhi Singh
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We are flooded with options from clothes to food and career to apps, there's a lot to choose from. If you struggle to make decisions then a friendly advice could be of great help. Instead, give advice to someone. According to a new research from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business in the US, people struggling with motivation will benefit more from giving advice than receiving it.
Giving advice is one of the most important traits of a leader but nobody thought it could be used to their advantage. In the paper , "In Giving We Receive: A Counterintuitive Approach to Motivating Behavior," published in the journalPsychological Science, Chicago Booth professor Ayelet Fishbach and University of Pennsylvania's Lauren Eskries-Winkler and Angela Duckworth say that people struggling to achieve goals incorrectly assumed that they needed expert advice to succeed, when, in fact, they were better helped by giving out advice.
The research highlighted that giving advice motivated people by raising their confidence, a reality that people struggling to reach their goals failed to anticipate. The findings were consistent across a series of experiments including improving study habits, saving money, controlling tempers, losing weight and looking for jobs.
"In the process of giving advice, advisors may form specific intentions and lay out concrete plans of action— both of which increase motivation and achievement," the authors wrote. According to the researchers, the reason that giving advice may boost motivation starts from a bump in confidence that comes with simply being asked to deliver the advice.
"In order to give advice, you need to sort through your thoughts and make a recommendation. That requires givers to search their own brains for examples of behavior that has worked successfully for them in the past, an exercise likely to boost confidence as well," said the researchers.
The act of giving the advice makes the giver feel powerful and confident, an effect the predictors of behaviour didn't account for, the researchers wrote.
Giving advice also restores some of the confidence lost when people have routinely fallen short of goals. Confident people set higher goals for themselves and remain more committed to them over time, the researchers say.
Conversely, "when people lack motivation, receiving advice may actually be harmful. Receiving help can feel stigmatizing because it undermines feelings of competence," the paper states.
