How to ‘Hush’ Other People’s Opinions in Personal Discernment (Part 1 of 3)
Do you overemphasize what other people think about your life?
A quick note: welcome to all new readers! It’s great to have you here. I’ll be addressing this question in three parts over three weeks: the first two will be free for all subscribers to read, to help you get a sense of whether joining as a paid subscriber is a good fit for you at this time. (Right now, it’s only £5/ month.) Paid subscribers will get an audio version of these essays as well the other regular perks: weekly essays, journaling prompts, all of the archives, quarterly Q&As, and wonderful, friendly discussions in the comments sections.
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Once I had a client share with me that she’d like to work on learning how to “drown out” other people’s opinions. This can be a very difficult skill to develop if you’re the type of person who sometimes struggles with being overcome by the opinions and advice of other people.
Maybe you have no trouble with other people’s opinions. If it’s really easy for you to brush off someone else’s suggestions, or to take their advice with a pinch of salt, then you’re probably not in need of ways to quiet the outside voices. Although, I do hope you read along, because chances are that you know someone who is inclined this way, and maybe you can learn a bit about how to help them.
How Do I Know if I Tend to Be Overwhelmed by Other People’s Advice?
Do any of these sound familiar?
When faced with a decision, you ask everyone else what they think you should do.
When someone tells you what they think you should do, you spend a lot of time thinking about it.
Sometimes you let the advice of others direct your own actions, even if you actually wanted to do something different.
When someone asks you how you’re feeling about a decision, you start talking about things other people have said about how you will feel. (“Everyone assures me it will be great!” / “Everyone said it was a bad idea.”)
You like experts: you listen to their podcasts, read their books, and follow them online. You like knowing the ‘right’ way to do things.
You have a strong sense of what you ‘should’ want (usually stemming from cultural norms or family expectations.) You feel guilty when what you really want clashes with what’s expected.
Often, you’re not exactly sure what you do actually want.
If you’re nodding along, you might be the kind of person who tends towards regularly favoring the ideas of other people over and above your own. You might need a season of silencing the voices around you, so you can hear God better and learn to listen to the sounds of your own soul.
A Christian Context
Let’s put this in context, though. None of us was designed to discern apart from community. Community (whether that be marriage, family, friendship, etc.) is part of the Christian life. God didn’t make us to be little monadic hermits who always make decisions independently of everyone else.1
Moreover, God has given us guidance about things that are harmful to our soul (sins and vices) and things that will allow our souls to flourish (virtues and acts of goodness.) If someone says “you shouldn’t commit murder”, that may be their personal opinion, but it’s not merely their personal opinion. It’s an objective statement: no one should commit murder.
But there are plenty of things in this world that don’t generally fall along objective moral lines. Usually things like adopting certain dietary restrictions, forms of exercise, or job opportunities require a personal, prudential decision. Often, these things require wisdom in discernment, which comes from life experience, including the life experience of other people.
It’s important that we not become so arrogant that we think we have nothing to learn from others. But if you felt like the list above described you, that’s probably not actually your struggle.
Why Have a Season of Silencing?
As human persons, we tend to fall along a spectrum: some tend toward the extreme of never listening to anyone else; others tend toward the extreme of letting other voices carry far too much weight.
Aristotle taught that virtue lies in the mean (middle) between two extremes, so that if we find ourselves at one end, we actually need to aim at the other end, and in so doing, will inevitably fall short and find ourselves in the happy middle. If we start at one end and aim at the middle, he says, we’ll fall short and still be too close to the same extreme we started from.
So this series is for people who find themselves leaning towards one end of the spectrum: a tendency to overemphasize the voices of other people in your own discernment and decision making.
When my client talked about developing the skill of “drowning out” other people’s opinions, she wasn’t asking about how to never listen to anyone else. She was asking about how to make those voices more of a background murmur than the thing that sends the needle spinning.
Think of it like this: an interior decorator talks about the value of “hushing” a room before redecorating it. Hushing the room means taking just about everything out - knick-knacks, side tables, throw pillows, even art on the walls and rugs on the floor - to let the room ‘breathe’ and see how you feel in it. You won’t know what’s making it feel overcrowded (or what’s making it feel cozy) if you don’t take everything out for a time.
This is a great analogy for life. Sometimes we need to hush our interior rooms, especially if things are so noisy in there we don’t even know what we think! God’s voice tends to show up in the whisper, which is really difficult to hear if there’s a regular Greek chorus of outside voices.
But how do we hush wisely? How do we know if there are any voices that actually deserve our attention?
Over the next two weeks, I’ll offer a series of six questions to sit with. These are practical questions you can use both in the moment of receiving advice, and when you’re distanced from the moment and want to journal and pray about what happened.
Now it’s your turn: I’d love to hear from you about your own experience with advice-taking.
Do you tend toward over-emphasizing or under-emphasizing? Do you feel like it depends on the area or the person giving advice? Have you reached a happy medium in life, and if so, what helped along the way?
And even people who are called to be hermits in the Christian tradition usually end up with loads of people visiting them!
Thank you, Kerri, for writing about this vital topic. I benefited tangibly from exposure to your words and wisdom.