Maybe You Should Watch What You Say, Because Your Advice Is Telling On You

One of the more honest things you'll ever do is hand someone else a piece of advice. Listen closely to what comes out of your mouth. There's a decent chance the words were meant for your own ears first.

Think about that old lyric, "Take good care of yourself. You belong to me." You might sing it to someone you love. Flip it around. What does it say about the care you owe the person doing the singing?

Then there's the person who tells you that you talk too much, and he happens to be someone who never stops talking. Or the snorer who grumbles at a bed partner for keeping him awake. We don't always catch the irony in real time.

"Don't worry, be happy." When you toss that at a friend, is part of you just wishing they'd stop unloading their worries on you? And have you ever played the other role, the one doing all the unloading, without ever offering the cheerful line back?

Something I came across recently stuck with me: everything we know is already inside us. The trick is getting it to surface in a form we can actually recognize as ours.

The brain really is a strange and wonderful organ. It learns. It unlearns. It can open up capabilities you didn't know were available to you, and it keeps rearranging itself for as long as you're alive. You lose some of that pliability with age, sure, and illness or injury can throstle the brain's knack for adapting to new situations. Still, every one of them is one of a kind, shaped by what nature handed over and what life added on top.

Much of the criticism we aim at other people comes from somewhere less flattering. We don't want to own our own behavior, so we point. Or we're quietly envious of what someone else managed to get. Either way, we stare so hard at what everyone else is doing that we never look at what's sitting in our own hands. A skill being trendy, or wildly overpaid, says nothing about the worth of whatever you can do. Your own abilities, including the ones you haven't tapped yet, are not useless just because they aren't the ones getting applause this year.

The notion that the advice you give is really aimed at yourself points at how rarely we catch our own patterns. A structured personality measure does some of that watching for you. The Big Five, also known as OCEAN, groups the tendencies you act on without thinking into five traits and shows you where your defaults sit. If you have never put numbers to those patterns, you can read how the OCEAN personality test works and what each trait captures.