There’s a peculiar tension that emerges when someone offers us advice. Even when we’ve explicitly asked for it, even when we know the person cares about us, even when their suggestions are perfectly reasonable, something inside us bristles. We feel our defenses rising. We start forming counterarguments before they’ve finished speaking. And beneath it all runs a current of resentment that whispers: “Who are they to tell me what to do?”
This resistance isn’t a character flaw. It’s wired into how we experience ourselves as autonomous beings moving through the world. When someone gives us advice, they’re essentially saying “I can see a better path forward than the one you’re on.” And no matter how gently this is delivered, our psyche often translates it as “You’re not capable of figuring this out yourself.”
The word “controlling” comes up again and again when people describe advice they didn’t want to follow. It’s revealing that we use this particular word, because control is fundamentally about agency. When we perceive advice as controlling, we’re responding to what feels like an encroachment on our autonomy. The advisor becomes someone trying to override our decision-making authority, even if that’s nowhere near their intention.
This interpretation makes evolutionary sense. For most of human history, maintaining your ability to make your own choices was directly tied to survival. Being too easily swayed by others’ directions could get you killed or exploited. Our ancestors who were a bit skeptical of unsolicited guidance probably fared better than those who eagerly followed every suggestion. We’ve inherited that wariness.
But we’ve also inherited something else: a deep need to feel competent. Advice, even good advice, can inadvertently trigger shame about not having already thought of the solution ourselves. When someone points out an obvious fix to our problem, we don’t usually think “How helpful!” We think “Why didn’t I see that?” The advice-giver becomes a mirror reflecting back our perceived inadequacy, and we resent the reflection more than we appreciate the insight.
The problem intensifies when advice comes from people close to us. Parents, partners, and close friends often give advice from a place of genuine care, but their proximity to us means their suggestions carry extra weight. When your mother tells you how to handle a work situation, you’re not just hearing professional advice. You’re hearing echoes of every time she corrected you as a child, every implication that you still need guidance, every suggestion that you haven’t quite grown into full adult competence. The advice becomes inseparable from the relationship’s history.
Then there’s the asymmetry of the advice-giving relationship. The advisor gets to occupy the position of wisdom and clarity while the advice-seeker is implicitly in the position of confusion and need. Even in the most equal relationships, this temporary hierarchy can chafe. We want to be the person who has it figured out, not the person who needs figuring out. Accepting advice means accepting that role, at least momentarily.
We’re also remarkably good at motivated reasoning. When someone’s advice doesn’t align with what we already want to do, we can generate endless reasons why their suggestion won’t work in our specific situation. They don’t understand the full context. They’re not considering this important factor. Their approach might work for them but not for us. These objections might sometimes be valid, but often they’re elaborate defenses against changing course. We’d rather stick with a mediocre plan that’s entirely ours than adopt a better plan that came from someone else.The tragedy is that this resistance persists even when we desperately need outside perspective. Some of the most valuable advice comes when we’re too close to a problem to see it clearly, too emotionally invested to be objective, too stuck in our patterns to imagine alternatives. But these are precisely the moments when we’re most likely to perceive advice as an attack on our judgment rather than a supplement to it.
There’s also the uncomfortable reality that receiving advice well requires humility, and humility feels terrible in the moment. It means admitting we don’t have all the answers. It means acknowledging that someone else might see something we’ve missed. It means being willing to be influenced, to be changed, to let someone else’s thinking reshape our own. These are not easy concessions for creatures as ego-driven as humans.
What makes this especially difficult is that the people most eager to give advice are often the worst at delivering it in a way we can actually hear. They lead with judgment rather than curiosity. They offer solutions before understanding the problem. They speak with certainty about situations they’re not fully immersed in. Their tone suggests they find our difficulty puzzling or frustrating. No wonder we perceive them as controlling. They’re trying to solve us like a problem rather than collaborate with us like a person.But even when advice is delivered perfectly, with warmth and humility and genuine curiosity about our perspective, we still tend to resist it. Because the core issue isn’t really about the advisor’s approach. It’s about our own discomfort with needing help, with being influenced, with entertaining the possibility that our current thinking might be incomplete.
The path forward isn’t to eliminate our resistance to advice. That resistance serves important functions, protecting us from bad counsel and preserving our sense of agency. But we might benefit from noticing when that resistance is reflexive rather than reasoned, when we’re defending our autonomy against a threat that doesn’t actually exist. Sometimes the person giving advice isn’t trying to control us. They’re trying to help us gain more control over our own lives. And sometimes, letting someone else’s wisdom influence us is the most autonomous choice we can make.
