Ep 51: You Can't Take Everybody's Advice (Even When It Comes from Love)
In this episode, I get radically honest about my own four-year transition out of California and full-time legal work. I break down why the people who love you most will often give you advice designed to keep you safe rather than help you grow, how to filter through outside noise, and how to build the muscle required to trust the unique blueprint of your own vision.
When you’re in a major season of transition, it’s completely natural to feel restless, unsure, and a little bit blind to your next move. But when we look outward for constant validation, we inadvertently open the door for others to build a ceiling over our lives.
Key Takeaways
External advice cannot solve internal transformations: Asking your friends and family what to do when you are unsure only dilutes your power. You must make your own decisions, the ones that are right for you, according to your dreams.
Limitations can be born out of love: The people closest to you project their own relationship with fear and safety onto your life. Their desire to protect you shouldn't become a ceiling that limits your expansion.
Trust how the advice lands in your body: If a piece of advice does feel right, it will never work out the way it was intended to. Your body's reaction is the key to knowing what's right for you and what isn't.
Be fiercely choosy about who speaks into your life: You do not have to stop loving your family or friends, but you do have to recognize who has the capacity to hold your vision. Your future is worth pouring into, and it deserves protection.
Chapters
(00:00) - Navigating Advice in Times of Transition
(05:12) - Understanding Your Own Guidance
(10:51) - The Limitations of Well-Meaning Advice
(15:10) - Protecting Your Unique Vision
Resources:
Ubuntu Design, a Human Design platform written for the African Diaspora: https://ubuntudesign.life
Join Love Notes:
If you're in Lisbon, join RESET, a 2-day retreat for black women in transition.
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Asha (00:00.846)
Mm, today I want to talk to you about the fact that you just can't take everybody's advice. I know we probably say that, we probably recognize that, but I've realized in my life when I'm in a period of transition or when I'm unsure about something, I will often seek out outside advice or confirmation or input. And I have found that the times
When I follow somebody else's advice, even if it doesn't land all the way right in my body or in my spirit, I guess you could say, as we like to say, it doesn't didn't land right in my spirit, it it never really works out the way that it's intended to work out. But sometimes it's so hard to trust your own guidance and your own direction because you don't even know where you're going.
So today I really want to talk to you about you can't take everyone else's advice. So let's talk about that. There has been a period of transition that I have been in for the last four plus years. It really started after the pandemic, early into the pandemic, where I began to get restless and started understanding that the life that I was living in California,
working full time as a college professor just wasn't fulfilling me anymore. And I didn't want to go back into practicing law full time. And when I look back, I realize I've been steadily moving away from law, but didn't have the courage or even the exposure to take a full leap away from law all at once. So I'd made tiny steps, tiny moves and ended up teaching, running a paralegal program. And then at some point that didn't feel like it was aligned for me.
anymore either. And I had become aware of the fire movement and which is financial independence retire early. I had started following and becoming a part of different entrepreneurship communities where people were talking about time freedom and location independence and all of that sounded really good. I knew that I wanted to build a business that could bring me independence and bring me freedom and not keep me stuck. And
Asha (02:22.35)
I suppose I had some idea of how to do that, but in those building stages, in those transition stages, I ended up listening to a lot of probably good advice, but not good advice for me. I ended up taking in a lot of recommendations that were kind of the industry standard or that had worked for the people who were giving me the recommendations. It was understandable why I listened to them.
But oftentimes I would get advice that really was counterintuitive for me. But the thing that made it tricky is that it made logical sense, but there was something within me that felt like this is counter-Asha. This doesn't sit quite right with me. And I would do a really good job of questioning myself and wondering why I couldn't just.
Follow the advice or why I would follow the advice and it just wouldn't work. I even had some coaches that were a little bit gaslighty in their experience. Instead of questioning or being curious about what didn't sit right with me, it became a test of what my will was and my determination and whether I really wanted it bad enough to do the thing that made me uncomfortable. I also met with people who
You know, unbeknownst to me and probably unbeknownst to them didn't know how to make room for nuance, didn't know how to really look at the people that they were talking to because they would apply the advice universally. And at that point in time, I didn't have enough personal trust to say, this doesn't really sit right with me. This is not for me. Let me go my own way. And some people are born with that kind of internal compass right away, and they learn how to trust it and they know.
At the end of the day, they're gonna be content because they're the ones who made the decisions. I didn't have that. I've had to develop that over the years. And even now, even though I know that, there's still a part of me that questions whether or not I really know what's best for me. I am someone who has been traditionally a rule follower. Not to the point of follow the rules at all costs and nothing else matters, but follow the rules.
Asha (04:44.288)
Maybe make them fit you, but still follow the rules. I'm not someone who's jumped completely out of the system, or maybe now I have, but that wasn't me as a kid, it wasn't me as a young adult. Like I knew the path, I followed the path, and I would make the path kind of work for me. But in this realm of entrepreneurship or in this realm of deciding that I was going to build my own life, I was still looking for the rules to follow and hadn't gained trust in my own voice yet.
So I had a number of experiences of following advice that just wasn't for me. And you're maybe you're asking, well, how do you know if it's for you and if it's not? There's a couple of things here that I think need to happen so you can figure out what is for you and what's not. One is to begin to know yourself. Understand what your yeses feel like and understand what your no's feel like.
You can do this a couple different ways. One by getting quiet and just inventorying. What is it that I'm feeling? What are the emotions that I'm feeling right now? What are the sensations that I'm feeling? Just in general, before there's even any stimuli, when you get do it when you get up in the morning and just take inventory of how you feel. And then when you think about this is how I feel when I'm happy. Where does that sit? What is that sensation in the body? What do you feel like? What do you feel like when
Someone has angered you or upset you or situation has crossed a boundary. Notice what that feels like. What does it feel like when you are happy, sad, all of these things? Just notice what they feel like in your body. So then when you're out in the world and interacting, you can recognize the sensations that come back up because you've sat with yourself to take an inventory of what they feel like in your body before they're activated by something else.
Another thing that you can do if you're not quite there in that somatic practice, or even if you are and want to add something else, is take a look at human design. I learned a lot about myself through human design. And if you want some information about it and want a platform that you can use, one of my besties created a human design platform that does use AI because we were spending so much time downloading our charts.
Asha (07:07.21)
Asking Claude to help us interpret our charts, that she ended up creating a platform that does it all in one. And as a black woman, she decided to code the platform with this Ubuntu philosophy so that you're learning about yourself, but you're also learning about how you fit into the collective. It is called Pillar, it's called Ubuntu Design on the Pillar Platform. So it's Ubuntu.design.
I believe. I'm gonna write the I'm gonna give you the actual URL in the show notes below. Anyway, back to the point. I started looking at my human design to really understand how I operated and what things kind of felt good for me. And what the human design investigation did is it started to validate things that I was feeling that I didn't recognize or see in other people. Things unique to my design and how I show up in the world and how I'm made.
Which is based on how the planets aligned when I was born and the I ching and something else that's created with human design. It also looks at gene keys, which goes a little bit further, but it really helped me to understand what I was feeling inside. It gave a voice. Now, some of you have been listening to the podcast for a little bit, and maybe I have named for you, I've given a name for you to something that you were feeling inside, but you didn't know how to articulate. That's the same thing that human design did for me.
It gave a name or an explanation for something that I was feeling inside that I didn't know how to articulate. One of the things that it would say that as a sacral generator, meaning I feel yeses and no's in my gut, in my sacral space. I didn't really know what that meant. I mean, I knew what it meant in theory. and it would say, like, your yeses are hard yeses and your no's are hard no's. And
I would ask a little bit more about like help me figure out how this is. And I got the information, but what really dropped into practice was when I was listening to somebody explain an idea to me, and I realized, like human design says, my yeses are usually really strong yeses. My no's are what I had trouble identifying because I will hear an idea or or something will be presented to me.
Asha (09:27.308)
And I don't hate it necessarily. And I go, hmm, okay. Yeah, maybe that could work. And then I start thinking about it. I start trying to figure out how it could work. I start trying to like massage it to see if it could feel a little better. But it's not an outright no. It's not this no. It's something like, let me see. Now human design did say like when you go, mmm, that's a no, but it was really hard to spot in practice.
So I remember meeting with an acquaintance that I have here, and he was giving me these ideas about how we could do this and how we could do that at the studio. And I was just looking at him like, mmm, I am not interested. I am not interested at all. And that's when I realized that when I go, mmm, or yeah, maybe that could work, or when I start thinking about how I could change an idea to make it fit me better, that's actually a no for me.
And that is valuable information. That's almost more helpful than knowing what my yeses are because more things are a no for me than they are a yes. So when you are getting pieces of advice and information from people, it's really important to understand how your yeses or how your agreement shows up, but also more importantly, how your no's or disagreements show up so you can hear the advice and determine whether or not it applies.
For you. Super, super valuable. Another reason why you can't take just everybody's advice is because, especially with friends and family, they'll give us advice that is well-meaning and they'll give us advice with their best intentions. And it'll be from their perspective and their experience and their limitations. And particularly if you're getting advice from parents, parents, healthy parents, want to protect you.
They want to protect you at all costs. And so they might not be able to see the opportunity in something because they want to keep you safe. And anything that is unfamiliar in our lizard brains is unsafe. And so along the way, I had to realize where my own parents' experiences stopped and where my experiences.
Asha (11:51.502)
Expanded beyond their own. For example, traveling. My dad was not very well traveled, but he was adventurous in Oregon. My mom was well traveled across the United States. And I think the two of them together had gone to the Bahamas, the obligatory black American trip from the 70s that people used to do, but not so much international travel.
And somehow I fell in love with international travelling and getting to know different cultures, learning different languages, and I wanted to see the world. And I remember telling my dad, you should come along with me on this trip. I think you would really like it. He'd be like, Why? And I was like, Okay, well, I'm gonna go. And interestingly, he didn't really tell me not to go, but he he couldn't be.
The cheerleader that maybe I had wanted because the experience was beyond what he was comfortable with. But he didn't tell me not to go. But I knew that if I wanted to go someplace maybe where the language was completely different or where I had never been before, I needed to connect with somebody who had been so that they could not just tell me about their experience, but also encourage me along the way, especially when I would have doubts or questions come up. My mom
Is a career educator and she followed the script and it has paid off very well for her. So when I was thinking about leaving education, leaving my tenure job, leaving the perceived stability of being an attorney to move abroad, she never told me not to go. But I also knew that I couldn't work out my doubts and fears with her because her advice would skew towards staying in the US.
staying in the same job or moving to a job that was equally as quote unquote "stable", I guess you could say, because that's what she knew. And that system had provided stability for her that allowed her to provide the life for me that she provided. So and there's nothing wrong with either one of their experiences, but I had to realize that I was going in a direction that they
Asha (14:13.486)
couldn't necessarily guide me in because of their own limitations and experiences. And I don't mean that in a bad way. We all just have our own limitations and experiences. I cannot guide somebody on moving to Japan or China because I have never moved to Japan or China. And the fears that I have, I should not be putting on someone else who is excited to go and wants to go and knows that they can make it.
So you have to be careful about taking advice from people who have not been where you were trying to go. And also recognize that people will often give you advice, particularly family members, that is meant to keep you safe, that is not always designed to help you expand. And it's not because they don't want you to be all that you can be, but it's because of their own experience and their own limitations. And lastly,
You can't take any old body's advice because somebody, the divine God, spirit, intuition, your guides, your ancestors gave you a vision for whatever it is that you want to do. And that vision is uniquely yours. So you have to tap into that vision and tap into your energetic and emotional and spiritual resources.
To help you grow that vision. Now, there might be some people along your way who are spiritual guides for you who can help you tap into that vision, but be careful taking advice from people who didn't give you the vision. Because they didn't write it in you, they can't tell you how to get there and they may not understand it. And again, there's nothing that's wrong with that, but they didn't give you the vision.
That division, that division, That vision was uniquely implanted, downloaded, given to you by spirit, by design, by the cosmos, by the universe, by God, by whatever name that you want to call this creative energy that's here on earth. And so when you have a vision for yourself, when you have a purpose, when you have a desire, you have to protect.
Asha (16:39.97)
That desire, or grow that desire with the people who can actually pour into you. And we are all limited by our own experiences, by our own beliefs. And so you have to be careful about taking advice from people who cannot see your vision, who did not give you your vision, or who are scared by your vision. That could be anybody from your parents, your friends, your partner.
People on the internet, right? It is important that you choose to learn from and grow from people who are where you are or who are further down the path that you are going on. And I don't say any of this to be like you just can't listen to people and it's a solo journey. I'm not saying that at all. I'm just telling you to be careful to be choosy who you listen to. Engage in conversation.
Take it all in, but at the end of the day, you have to decide what makes sense for you. You have to know your body's signals, know your yeses, know your no's, know the limitations of the people who are pouring into you. Limitations can often be born out of love. And remember that your vision, your goals are uniquely yours. And so people may not understand it, and that's okay, but don't allow
People who don't understand you or understand where you're going to be a limitation. Don't allow them to speak into or speak over your life in a way that doesn't grow you. Doesn't mean you can't be friends. Doesn't mean you don't love your family members. It just means that you recognize that you're gonna be choosy about the advice that you take because you are worth growing. Your vision is worth pouring into. You deserve everything that you want.
And as you get there and help yourself, your vision, your goals also help all the people around you. All right. Look for the link in the show notes for the website, the human design website that I mentioned. also let me know if you have any questions. I will be back here next week with another episode. I love you all.
Asha (19:04.37)
please also let me know if there are any topics that you would like for me to cover in the upcoming weeks. I'm thinking about doing a series on grief. So it's marinating in my mind and in my spirit, in my energy. So whatever topics you would like to know or like to talk about or to share as friends, please, please, please certainly leave me a message. You can leave it in the comments on the show notes or find me on Instagram at @ashawilkersonesq
And send me a message. Alright. Ciao, ciao.