In this episode of “5 Minutes,” Dr. Robert Svoboda explores the karma of giving advice and discusses the importance of understanding when, how, and why advice should be offered.

There is karma in everything you do, no question about it. But it is good to remember that giving advice can give you good karma if you give good advice to people and if they actually do something about it. The number one thing you want to do if you want to minimize the karma of giving advice is not to offer advice to anyone. Let people come to you and request advice.

That is number one. If they come to you and request it, they have initialized the karma. All you are doing is responding. There is a big difference between these two things.

Of course, parents frequently have to keep biting their tongues because they want to give advice to their teenagers, but the teenagers do not want advice. They have an obligation to give advice, but they have to give it in such a way that they can have some reasonable hope that the teenager might take it or at least listen to it.

That is a different situation. Now we are talking about people whom you are not obligated to give advice to.

The number one thing is to make sure that they ask. The number two thing is to try to have a sense that you have an appropriate rananubandhana with that person. Remember, rananubandhana means the binding of karmic debt.

It means that you have the kind of relationship with that person where it will be meaningful for you to offer the advice and meaningful for them to receive it.

The third thing is to only give advice on subjects that you can meaningfully give advice on. If someone asks you something that you really cannot offer a meaningful answer to, say, “Honestly, I do not know what to tell you about that because I just do not have the capability of giving a meaningful answer.”

The fourth thing is to make sure that they are serious about it too. They may be asking something generally, but they may only be asking in a superficial kind of way. You may suggest something that may bounce off something within them and have a different effect because they are asking in a superficial way.

It should be a serious and meaningful kind of thing that you can answer in a serious and meaningful kind of way.

When you are going to offer someone advice, make sure that you do it in such a way that they can understand it. Make sure that they are not going to be either overly enthusiastic about it or offended by it. It should be something that you have thought through, not just with your head, not just emotionally, but with your intuition also.

You can use your head to do some calculations. You can use your emotions to feel into it. But you have to use your intuition. You have to use your inner sense to make sure that what you are going to say is truly the appropriate advice at that moment.

Also remember that sometimes, and I have had this happen to me more than once, I have been working with someone and given them all kinds of opinions that I think were good, reasonable, genuine, and valid. But it is that thing that comes to me at the last minute, almost as an offhand comment, that sometimes people will come back to me many years later and say, “That is the thing that really had a transformative effect on me.”

Sometimes it is really about getting out of your own way to allow whatever needs to be spoken through you to be spoken through you. That is really the kind of advice that is worth giving.

Of course, it is not necessarily the kind of thing that you will be able to give at that moment. Unless you are always trying to position yourself to be open, not to offer your opinion, but to act as a vehicle through which the supreme reality and intelligence of the universe can manifest itself at moments that will be beneficial for whoever is trying to listen to you.