You know what? What I need isn’t fewer guns to my heads. It’s more guns to my head.
I should add:
Of course, then I’ll listen to her advice. Absorb it. Understand it. Internalize it. And then I’ll run it through my checklist, and probably end up not acting on it. And she *hates *that about me.
I can’t speak for your friend, but the times I don’t take advice are when I don’t understand it (or, at least, don’t understand it sufficiently well to turn it into action). There have been time, although I can’t think of any specifics right now, when I’ve managed to get over some problem, and I remember some of the advice I was given and think “okay, now I see what they were getting at”. There’s a difference between not understanding advice in any form, and not understanding particular pieces of advice.
It’s a little like something that occurred to me when I was taking a German class. It started with simple phrases that a person might actually need in Germany, like “where is the train station?” At some point it dawned on me that the question wouldn’t do me any good if I couldn’t understand the answer. It’s no good asking “where is the train station” if the answer is “go down this street four blocks, then turn right at the bakery, but not the pastry bakery, the bread bakery next to the fishmonger, then it’s three blocks and turn left on King Street and you can’t miss it.” Even once I started learning the vocabulary, when I heard someone speaking German at normal speed I could only pick out a few words. The first phrase they should teach you in a foreign language isn’t “where is the train station”, but “speak slower, please”. You need the tools to understand the answer before you ask the question.
This is how I got in to smoking meth.
The idea is to ask 5 DIFFERENT people for advice.
“Different” means they are not all druggies, not all religious, not all criminals, not all the same types of people.