✨ The Right Way to Give Unsolicited Advice

Someone needs your story—choose your timing well and you could change a life

Photo by Anthony Metcalfe on Unsplash

When I was barely out of my teens and in need of guidance but did not know it, an older and much wiser woman gave me some unsolicited advice. Her name was Leila Edwards.

She did it in the best, possibly the only way such advice can be a good thing: she told me about her own life. How when she was a very young woman, she’d set a pattern that had caused her grief and regret in the years to come. How she wished she could turn back the clock and stand up instead of sitting down, spoken up instead of remaining silent, been strong instead of weak.

Leila told me of her regret, and how much she wished she had acted differently all those years ago.

She was brave enough, bold enough and had suffered enough, to not want me to suffer as she had. And so she stood herself as a sentinel at the crossroads, warning a new traveler of the dangers of the path she had traveled and recommending a different road.

I can see now that while she really didn’t know me, or my heart, or my circumstances, her eyes of experience saw that I might be setting up the same pattern in my life that had caused her so much regret.

She never told me what to do, not once, but the intensity of her voice reached through the invincibility of youth directly to my heart. The seed she planted did not bear fruit immediately, but it was life giving when it did.

Her words and her warning have stayed with me for nearly forty years. I can tell you with relief and quiet joy that because of them, my journey has been less painful than it might have been.

Before I die I hope to do for someone else what Leila did for me.

It’s part of why I write.