Advise yourself as you would a friend

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.

How to do it

1. State your problem out loud as if a close friend brought it to you.
2. Answer in the role of the wise friend: what would you genuinely advise?
3. Write the advice down and commit to following it as you would expect them to.

Evidence

Grossmann 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. (rct)

Measured on reasoning-quality scores in experiments; whether better reasoning reliably translates into better real-world decisions is less directly tested.

Sources

• 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.