Mentavo
A friend talks about her job: a sour atmosphere, no path forward, eighteen months of the same thing.
The response comes without hesitation, calm and clear – that she can't change the situation from where she sits, that waiting isn't improving it, that a conversation is overdue.
Three weeks later the same person is sitting with a strikingly similar situation. Her own. And not one of those sentences arrives.
The same problem, two judgements
That people seem wiser about other people's affairs than their own is an old observation. In psychology it's discussed as Solomon's Paradox, after the biblical king whose judgement in other people's disputes was legendary and whose own household was considerably less well ordered.
One way it's been studied: people were given a difficult situation – framed once as their own and once as someone else's – and their reasoning was compared for how balanced it was.
The pattern that emerged: with other people's problems, participants more often took several viewpoints into account, weighed compromises and acknowledged the limits of their knowledge. With their own, both came harder.
What's notable isn't the result so much as the explanation. These aren't two different abilities. It's the same ability under two different conditions.
What drops out when it's yours
Three things change as soon as you're the subject.
The moment gets bigger. With your own problem, the current feeling takes the foreground – this morning's slight, last night's uncertainty. With someone else's, that feeling is absent, and what remains is the structure of the situation.
The outcome isn't neutral. If you're the one affected, you have a stake in how the weighing-up turns out. That nudges the assessment, imperceptibly, towards whichever option costs less.
You're under discussion too. With other people's problems, the subject is the situation. With your own, it's often additionally what the situation says about you – which narrows the room to manoeuvre considerably.
That last point explains why some questions stay open for years. The decision isn't the hard part; what it seems to claim about you is.
Why the advice is nonetheless there
The important thing about this finding is what it rules out.
It isn't that the right assessment is missing. It's present – it just isn't reachable while the perspective sits too close. That's where this connects to the piece on why the best answers are often already in your head.
This article answers the follow-up question: if the answer is there, why doesn't it come?
The answer is distance. And distance can be changed.
Three ways to create distance
1. Switch the perspective
The simplest version is the familiar one: put the question as though someone else had brought it to you. "What would I tell a person who described this to me exactly this way?"
The useful part isn't the kindness you usually extend in the process. It's that the situation has to be described – and in describing it, things drop out that only carry weight from inside.
2. Change the grammar
Less familiar, but striking in the research: talking or writing about yourself in the third person changes how a situation gets evaluated.
So instead of "I don't know whether to have that conversation": "She doesn't know whether to have that conversation." It feels odd the first time and produces exactly the intended effect – the thing moves a step away.
In writing it's easier than out loud, because nobody is listening.
3. Move the vantage point in time
A third kind of distance is temporal: how will this question look in a year? In five?
That isn't reassurance. It's a check on whether the present urgency matches the actual weight – which it often doesn't, as the piece on how strongly a single moment colours the view describes.
| Close perspective | Phrased with distance |
|---|---|
| "I can't go there right now." | "She's postponed it twice. What's against it, what's for it?" |
| "That was so typical of me." | "That's the third time in six weeks. In which situations?" |
| "I just need to decide." | "What information is still missing – and can it actually be obtained?" |
Where self-advice still fails
Distance doesn't solve everything, and two limits matter.
First, it does little when the difficulty isn't in the judgement but in the doing. Knowing exactly what should happen and still not doing it isn't a knowledge problem – that's the subject of self-awareness without change.
Second, distance can tip into avoidance. Permanently viewing your own life from the outside also means no longer taking it seriously. The aim is a temporary shift in perspective, not a standing withdrawal from your own experience.
Why writing works particularly well here
All three routes share something: they require the situation to be put into words.
As long as something is only thought, it keeps the shape it arrived in, feelings attached. Once it's written down it has to be put in an order, and in the process what's missing becomes noticeable.
A conversation does the same thing, often faster. In Mentavo, that's precisely the coach's role: not to supply the answer, but to require the formulation – while being able to draw on relevant earlier entries.
How vague thoughts get sorted in the process is covered in the piece on turning vague thoughts into a next step.
What this article doesn't claim
The findings on perspective and grammar come largely from controlled studies using presented scenarios. How strong the effect is with real, long-running problems is considerably less well established.
Nor does this piece claim that distance guarantees a better decision. It changes the kind of thinking you do – not necessarily the outcome.
And it is no substitute for professional support. For situations that weigh on you over long stretches, a shift in perspective doesn't replace help from outside.
In short: the judgement isn't missing, the distance is
Anyone who advises others well already has the ability – under a condition that doesn't hold when the problem is their own.
That condition can be rebuilt. Not completely, but far enough that your own sentences become reachable again.
