Advice

​I often refer to incidents rather than people by name (when I remember them).  It is not the personalities involved that matters to me but the life lesson.  I am sure that I have taught others a few life lessons by my actions.
I heard a story about a guy who got a flat tyre at night out in the sticks.  He needed a jack.  He saw the light of a farmhouse off in the distance and decided that was where he needed to go.
While he was walking there, he was having a discussion with himself.  He determined that the farmer was probably asleep and a knock on the door would be a most unwelcome interruption to his sleep.  As he got closer, he decided the farmer probably had kids and the last thing he would want is them disturbed by the knock on the door by a complete stranger.  He was almost there when he thought maybe someone is crook and the farmer and his wife have just managed to get them off to sleep.  He arrived at and knocked on the door.  When it was opened, he blurted out “you can keep your jack!”
So often it seems people can talk themselves out of stuff.  They imagine all sorts of scenarios.  Their thinking is based on how they think and not how another thinks.  They apply their own thoughts to someone else.
I have no doubt done it, but I have at times been agog at the thinking of others.  They apply all sorts of motives to me that are not there.  I have been stunned to hear their thinking and occasionally found it almost laughable.  Something may be available the whole time, but people talk themselves out of it based on their own thinking, rather than that of the person they are approaching.
I need to constantly be on my guard not to talk myself out of something.  I may never have been to some place before and be breaking new ground.  While I will always take appropriate precautions and as much as possible not be caught out, I need to hold on to what I think is right.
It may be challenged, and it may be hard, but I must avoid listening to negativity in myself.  There are times that what I am thinking is right for me seems totally foreign to me.  In so many ways it would be right to think “no way.”  Yet I have a conviction it is the way for me to go.
Too often though I received the advice of others based on their experience only.  They have not been where I am going so it must be wrong for me to think it is the way for me to go.
Advise is good to get and many a time it has kept me from doing something that I thought was good but was doomed to failure.
By the same token not all advice is good.  It often depends on if I am intent on doing what I am going to do and “blow you Jack” (there is that jack again).
If however it is the way for me to go, there will be those who see it.  There are many voices but thankfully I normally know which ones are speaking what is best for me.