Advice Gone Wrong!

Ahh.. the advice you wish you had never given .. and the advice you wish you never received.

Take this opportunity to vent, and I'm willing to bet that we can all learn from it.

For instance, I was speaking with Laurie this week about advice and she related a great story to me.

Laurie works for the federal government, in a bilingual position, but is English. She recently sent out an email in both official languages that she had written herself. She is bilingual, but written French is not her strength. She didn't have time to send the email to translation and relied on her own abilities.

Apparently they weren't as good as she originally thought.

After sending out the email she received a fairly nasty email back telling her that her French was embarrassing and she should have never sent out the email.

Instead of just accepting this unsolited advice in a negative manner, Laurie sent an email back to the sender telling her that this piece of advice was not useful and to help Laurie out, she should have told her where her mistakes were. This way she would learn and not likely repeat the mistake.

That is turning negative advice around to learn something!

What did I learn from Laurie's story? If the advice isn't helpful, ask the person to reframe it for you. It will take nerve to do so, but I think not only Laurie learned something, hopefully the person giving the original advice learned something too.

Great work Laurie ... now the rest of you.... your stories please.

Rhonda