A few years ago I had a thinking partnership with an amazing woman – Dawna Markova - and one of the first questions she asked me was, “What have you been teaching people lately?” I thought about it and gave her my list of advice. She then told me that the advice we often give to others is really for ourselves.

Think about that for a second. How cool is that? We have this amazing mirror held up to us every day to teach us about what we need to be doing to be more aware and successful. I had been telling my friend that she really needed to be adding more structure to her business…and, low and behold, that’s exactly what I needed myself. You can’t see in someone else what you don’t already have in yourself.

I go in and out of remembering this pearl of wisdom.

This weekend I was at an event and one of the entrepreneurs asked a group of us for feedback. People came out with incredible advice which really ran the gammit and the entrepreneur was really psyched with the feedback. I then jumped in and said, just to be clear, the advice we have just given you is really all about us, so take it with a grain of salt. Laughter spread through the room as people wrote down the stuff they’d been dishing out as advice and put it on their own to-do list.

If you can keep this in your consciousness, it can be a really great tool for self-coaching.