We all know the saying -“Well, heres my 2 cents…”. Its one of those special constructs that opens a pathway for the delivery of advice. Before becoming a full-time coach, I liked to liberally sprinkle advice all over my conversations, and loved to hear advice from others.

I then thought it fascinating to see Austin Kleon tell us that “all advice is autobiographical”. It makes sense. It has to be. It’s one person sharing their opinion based on the experiences from their own life. Think of it like a “thought cookie” — a bit of fun, but don’t rely on it to maintain a healthy diet.

As it’s based on experiences, advice can often come from someones bad experiences, which can lead to bad advice. For instance, a bad business partnership might mean that someone would heavily suggest to you that you never get a business partner. “Go it alone” they might say, and to them, that makes complete sense. Its based in fact, but from a sample size of one, and their experience has literally nothing to do with your life and what’s right for you. The only time this might help us is that it can open a window into what we can learn from the mistakes of others.

So that left me wondering what to do as an advice-giver. We want to help, we want to contribute our hard-won experience, but we don’t want to skew the other persons reality in a potentially negative way. Its their race to run, and as a coach, we want to cheer them on, not surprise them and cause them to trip!

So what to do with that pocket full of those 2 cent “gems”? An antonym for advice is “question”, and thats a great place to start. What if we could catch ourselves reaching into our pockets for the tiny coin, and challenge ourselves to ask a good question, offering them real gold? What if a good question takes the other person on a tangent that we never could have imagined, instead of the cul-de-sac that our advice might take them? What if that tangent is where they realise something fundamental, a realisation that rocks their work and which is so powerful precisely because *they* came to that conclusion themselves? A good question has the power to be worth so much more than 2 cents.

Advice is free. A good question can be priceless.

(I mean, 2 cents isn’t even worth 2 cents any more. What's with that?)