Taking your own damn medicine - or how to take your own advice

How often do you find you need advice, you reach out to people you look up to for help and their advice confirms everything you already knew, just in a clearer, unemotional way?

I realised this month that by using your experience, wisdom and mental modelling on others situations you can give great advice independently, maybe even to yourself.

Advice you give others:

• Has ​no emotional blurring of risk
  
• Is easier to build a plan with
• Allows you to give tough love
  

I also realised that this is a feature of my relationship with my wife. We ask each other for advice on issues and the advice is not too dissimilar to what we would tell a friend/mentee.

She is great at keeping objective on me and I on her.

So this month while helping/advising two different people, I realised I needed to take my own medicine. The situations faced are not identical but are parallel enough that the logic and mental modelling is the same.

By advising these two, I have actually been able to identify and give myself great advice.

This inspired me to talk a walk and try to give myself some more advice on the most pressing issue I was facing. I pretended I was talking to a founder asking for advice, I broke down the problem into MECE pieces and gave a coherent step by step plan on how to address the issue.

Neat!

Want to do this artificially? - if you're in a tough spot - pretend your child, friend, mentor or colleague is in that spot. How would you evaluate it? What would you advise?