Asking for Advice

Asking for advice is a great action to take when you are stuck, don’t know how to get started, or you need an outside perspective.

Advice won’t solve all of your problems, however. Advice might not even help with your specific problem. The wrong advice can be discouraging, knock you off course, or lead you down the wrong path.

Some questions to help you determine if advice is really what you need:

• Are you asking for an opinion or a fact?
  • If you ask for an opinion, try looking for at least 2 other opinions. This can prevent you from being unknowingly stuck in one person’s viewpoint.
  • If you are asking for facts, where else can you find them? Is your question something you can Google? Example: “How I Started My Business” is a topic that many successful entrepreneurs have covered. If you go through some of those resources first, you might be able to ask for more targeted advice.
• Are you actually looking for advice, or are you looking for reassurance?
  • If you aren’t clear on this, a trusted friend could list cold, hard facts at you when what you really needed was encouragement to take a risk.
• If you ask for how-to advice and they critique the premise, how will that make you feel?
  • For example, you ask for advice on starting a business and the advice-giver says it’s a bad business idea in the first place. If that feedback would crush you, maybe wait to ask for advice.