Why is it that sometimes you feel that you need advice? Is your experience insufficient? Do you wish that you’d stuck with that MBA programme?

Maybe your business is growing too fast for you to keep up, or you’d simply like to have a sounding board.  Maybe that’s why you’d like an advisor; someone or something that would give you information you could rely on. A source you could trust. What that really amounts to is settling for less; and the fact of the matter is that you shouldn’t have to. In fact, you don’t need to, and you shouldn’t give yourself permission to accept anything less than what you expect.

How do you do that?

Nature of the advisor

The first thing is that you need to think about the nature of the advisor. It’s all too easy to assume that the advice you receive will always come from a person, when in truth it may come from an organization or even a piece of equipment. This is important because the expectations you have regarding the source of your advice must match the capabilities of that source.

Let’s say that you apply for a job. If you get it, chances are that you’ll get a personally written letter inviting you to join the company. If you don’t get it, you may receive a generic letter from what you know to be the HR department that is either unsigned or signed by a machine, or you may not receive anything at all.

What does that letter or lack thereof, say about the trustworthiness of the organization? If you’re one of those who receives a generic letter, then you may decide (legitimately) that such behaviour belies its claims to care about people, and that therefore the company can’t be trusted.

In other words, that organization isn’t a reliable source of advice, and that’s because it’s incapable – by virtue of its policies, procedures, or sheer incompetence – to be anything else. In other words, the fact that you can’t trust them to honour what they say about people may also cause you to distrust anything that they have to say about their products. 

Semi-permanent

The second thing to realize is that your advisors are rarely on duty all the time. It’s not unusual to think of them as being a bit like the White House Chief of Staff – just outside your door – or like a hybrid of you, grafted to your side like a new Chelsea rose.What that means is that it’s up to you to either schedule regular meetings with them or to take responsibility for obtaining the advice when you need it. It would be unreasonable for you to expect the source of that advice to be at your beck-and-call, unless you had retained it for the purpose. Equally, it would be wrong for you to assume that the provider of that advice would intuitively know when you needed it.

Take for instance your tax accountant. Is your business big enough to require an in-house advisor, or do you outsource that function? If you outsource it, how often does that person actually visit your office? Every month, every quarter, or only at the end of your tax year? What if you only needed your tax advisor at the end of the quarter, but found that person showing up every week? Would you feel a bit smothered? Would you feel that that person was simply looking for a way to fatten his or her billing hours?

The wrong expectations can sour the best relationships.

Wanting what you get

Perhaps you’ve been let down so many times that you’ve given up hope of ever getting what you really want. You’ve resigned yourself to the idea that things will only get to be so good. Maybe you’ve been dealing with a particular company for many years and, while their advice isn’t great, it’s better than nothing. And so it’s meant that you’ve had to live with a substandard service.

Your willingness to leave things as they are means that you’ve persuaded yourself that what you really want is what you’ve been getting. It also means, however, that there’s no point in complaining about the way things are because you have only yourself to blame for not changing them.

Let’s look at this unreliable company from another perspective. Why is their advice substandard? Are they still thinking inside the box while pretending to look outside of it? Do they wait to see what everyone else does before advising you what to do? You probably won’t like the answers when you think about them because they all have something in common: they demonstrate conclusively that the company isn’t trustworthy; that it is at the very least lying to itself, if not to you. That’s because they are pretending. It’s that pretence that proves that their message is not the genuine article.

They wouldn’t call it lying, but as Sherlock Holmes has so famously said, “When you remove the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

When trustworthiness is removed, however much you dislike the implication to the contrary, then what remains must be falsehood.

An accomplice

There’s another facet to this falsehood, and that’s your part in it.

When you pretend that your source of advice is trustworthy when it isn’t; when you expect advice that your source is incapable of providing; when you learn to want what you get because it’s too much trouble to get what you want, then you become an accomplice to its falsehood as well. It’s because you have persuaded yourself that the truth is a lie, and a lie is the truth; and that is a very slippery slope.

Solution

The solution, of course, is to decide on the nature of the advice you want, find someone or something that can give it to you when you need it, and then create the relationship that will make it happen.

Only you know what this looks like. Take the time to figure it out, and then search for it until you find it.

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