Once, a mother came to a counselor and asked him to tell her son to stop eating sugar. The counselor told her to come back in seven days. When the woman returned, the man told the boy to cut back to such-and-such amount of sugar. The woman asked the counselor why it took him seven days to say this to the boy. “Because,” replied the counselor, “first I had to see if I could do it myself.” From that moment on, the mother did not ask things of her children that she was not willing to do herself.
How easy is it for us to tell others what to do? “You should do this…” “You should do that…” “You shouldn’t do that…” We are filled with ideas about how others should or shouldn’t live, what others should or shouldn’t say, and what others should or shouldn’t do. “If only my friends, and family, and everyone else would just listen to me,” we think, “the world would be such a better place.”
And although that sounds like silly nonsense, I can reflect on countless people who have either outright said this to me in counseling sessions, or at least alluded to it. The world is a big, scary place, and it makes sense why we want to believe that we have the answers to life. After all, if what we know about life is true, then that makes things a whole lot less scary for us; so we continue to fool ourselves into believing that we have it all figured out.
The problem, however, is that we don’t have it all figured out. No one person or group has the monopoly on truth. No one person or group has the answers to life. Still, we all, at times, seem to believe that we do. We ask things of others that we are not willing to do ourselves, because whereas we are willing to excuse our inability to follow our own advice, we are less compassionate with others who do not live the way we want them to live.
Emotional management involves having both self-awareness and self-control. Be mindful of your urges to tell others how to live, and execute the type of self-control it takes to live rather than “preach” the message you want others to hear. Although fewer people are listening to you than you would like, many more are watching you than you realize.