You give great advice to everyone except yourself.

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My phone buzzes late on a Tuesday. It’s a former colleague (let’s call him Steve) who’s been offered a role at a startup that feels like a better fit than his current job, but it’s a smaller paycheck, and there’s a risk the company won’t survive the next funding round. Steve’s been turning for weeks, driving himself, his wife, and his friends insane. Now, it’s my turn.

I talk through the spiral with him: Is his current steady paycheck worth the poor fit, and is that steady income the same as a “settled life”? What are the real motivations for staying or going? Imagine yourself down each path two years from now: Which one would you regret not doing? Steve goes quiet for a few moments, says “that helps,” and we hang up.

It’s nice to have been useful to a friend. But then I sit there in silence because I have a decision of my own that’s been lingering for a month, a yes-or-no almost structurally identical to his, and I’ve been spiraling anywhere but up for a while. Why can’t I help myself in the way I just helped Steve?

Self-distancing

We have all experienced some version of this, where the advice we give to our friends is precise, wise, and targeted. We can see it all so clearly. For Steve, when the decision was his and not mine, I reasoned from a distance, weighed the trade-offs, and held up two futures side by side for him to choose between. I was a strategist looking at a problem, concerned and caring for my friend, but cold and calculated about the situation.

When the decision is mine, however, I’m not looking at a problem. I’m trapped inside one. It’s my identity, my fear, my loss, all swirling together to lay out what this will inevitably (and negatively) cost me and the ensuing wreckage I will need to clean up. It is this closeness that narrows the exact faculties good judgment is built from: the ability to see multiple perspectives, a comfort with uncertainty, and the humility to hold that I might be wrong. But the closer we are, the harder it becomes to access those abilities.

Want to go deeper on how to manage the voice in your head? Check out Ethan Kross’s lesson for Big Think members on Big Think Classes.

Adam Smith, economist and philosopher, saw the mechanism in 1759. We can only judge our own conduct, he wrote, by viewing it as “the impartial spectator” would, and yet we “are apt to be most partial when it is of most importance that [we] should be otherwise.”

If you’ve ever seen a relationship that you know is destined for failure, you possess access to this good judgment. And if you’ve ever been trapped in a bad relationship, then you know the struggle of the downward spiral.

One of the ways we can improve our lives is to step into that cool, indifferent spectator for our most important decisions more often, before we take action, not just after the wreckage. Good judgment and wisdom are situational, not a permanent peak state. Depending on where you stand and where you sit, the switch flips off and on.

Solomon’s Paradox

The psychologist Igor Grossmann gave this a name: Solomon’s Paradox, a reference to the ancient King Solomon of Israel, famed for his wisdom. People would visit Solomon from all over to have the wise king settle their disputes. Once, two women both claimed to be the mother of a child. King Solomon’s solution: “Cut the baby in half! That way, each of you can have part of him.”

One woman was fine with that. The other wasn’t, saying, “Give him to her. Just don’t kill him,” revealing herself to be the true mother. Solomon’s wisdom cut to the heart of the matter.

However, in Solomon’s own house, not all was well. Jonny Thomson, who runs Big Think’s Mini Philosophy column, has a great piece about this paradox, nailing a key point:

“In his own life, he was notoriously shambolic. His poor parenting gave rise to one of the cruelest tyrants in the Bible, his son, Rehoboam, who turned Judah into a pit of abomination and sin. Solomon had many pagan wives and concubines, with a likely host of illegitimate children. He was profligate and extravagant, and gave little thought to the temperate, sensible life. For all his sagacity when it came to others’ affairs, Solomon was woefully myopic when it came to his own.”

In the modern day, Grossmann and his colleague Ethan Kross took that paradox into the lab and found two things. One, people genuinely reason better about others’ problems than their own. And two, when people are prompted to reason about their own dilemma in the third person, the quality of their thinking rises to meet how they’d reason about a stranger.

So, helping yourself often means learning to temporarily reframe the problem such that you’re not the protagonist. What you need is to borrow distance on purpose to examine the situation, the players, and the moves with objectivity.

The next time a decision of yours has been circling longer than it should, write it down as though it belongs to someone else. Give that person a name. Describe their situation in the third person: Sarah has been offered a role that fits her better and pays less. Now advise Sarah. Out loud, or on the page, in the voice you’d actually use with a colleague you respect. Then read it back to yourself as instructions. It’s a move I use in my own life and now run with both coaching clients and executives who’ve been circling the same decision for months, and there is palpable relief on their faces when the answer arrives after we’ve whiteboarded the problem as if it belonged to someone else.

This exercise will feel weird at first. Talking about yourself in the third person is a certifiably insane thing to do in most circumstances. But done well, this exercise can help you step back to consider what Sarah needs. The situation becomes trapped on a literal or metaphorical page, which you may find easier to traverse than the infinite, landmine-ridden rabbit holes of our minds. Self-distance makes this possible.

After that Tuesday call, I wrote my own decision out as if it were a stranger’s. I gave this person a name: Nebuchadnezzar. And I gave some advice to old Nebby.

The answer I hadn’t reached in a month arrived soon after. It was remarkably simple, but I’d been standing too close to hear it. Incredible what a little distance can offer.

What decision are you carrying that you’d have already solved if it belonged to someone else?

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Danny Kenny is a behavioral scientist, a writer, and an Associate VP at InspireCorps, where he designs leadership programs and coaches executives at the intersection of performance, meaning, and wisdom. You can find Danny on LinkedIn, Substack, and his website.