Advise yourself as you would a friend
Ask what you would tell a friend in exactly your situation — then take your own advice.
Key takeaways
- What it is: Ask what you would tell a friend in exactly your situation — then take your own advice.
- Why it works: Solomon’s paradox describes how people reason more wisely about others’ dilemmas than their own. Framing your problem as a friend’s recruits that same outside wisdom: distance reduces the ego threat and emotional load that narrow your own reasoning, so you access the broader, more balanced thinking you already apply to others.
- Evidence: Backed by randomized trials / meta-analyses.
- Avoid: Slipping back into self-justification halfway through, so the "advice" just rationalizes what you already wanted to do instead of giving the honest counsel a friend would.
Why it works
Solomon’s paradox describes how people reason more wisely about others’ dilemmas than their own. Framing your problem as a friend’s recruits that same outside wisdom: distance reduces the ego threat and emotional load that narrow your own reasoning, so you access the broader, more balanced thinking you already apply to others.
How to do it
- 1State your problem out loud as if a close friend brought it to you.
- 2Answer in the role of the wise friend: what would you genuinely advise?
- 3Write the advice down and commit to following it as you would expect them to.
What the evidence says
RCT / meta-analysisGrossmann and Kross showed that reasoning about one’s own problems from a distanced perspective eliminated the wisdom gap captured by Solomon’s paradox, raising measures of wise reasoning to the level people show for others.
Honest caveat: Measured on reasoning-quality scores in experiments; whether better reasoning reliably translates into better real-world decisions is less directly tested.
- — Grossmann & Kross (2014), "Exploring Solomon’s paradox", Psychological Science
Common mistake
Slipping back into self-justification halfway through, so the "advice" just rationalizes what you already wanted to do instead of giving the honest counsel a friend would.
IX Coach prompts the friend-frame explicitly and then holds you to the advice you generated, surfacing it again when you start to talk yourself out of it.
Practice this with IX Coach →