What If I Disagree With My Mentor's Advice?

You did the hard part. You found a mentor, you worked up the nerve to ask them a real question, and they gave you a straight answer. And now you're sitting there with a knot in your stomach, because their advice feels wrong to you. Not confusing — wrong. Every cell in your body wants to nod politely and then go do the exact opposite. So which is it: are you the young hotshot ignoring hard-won wisdom, or the one person in the room who actually sees the thing your mentor is missing? Here's the honest answer — sometimes it's one, sometimes it's the other, and the whole game is learning to tell which.

Let me tell you where I'm coming from. I've been the young guy who thought he knew better — and sometimes I did, and a whole lot of times I really, really didn't. I started working at 17, owned a home and was a dad by 23, and spent a career on factory floors and in the offices of some very big companies. Now I'm 63 and I sit on the other side of the table as an executive coach, giving advice to people who don't always want it. So I've felt this exact knot from both chairs. And the thing I've learned is that disagreeing with your mentor is not the problem people think it is. Handled well, it's one of the most important skills you'll ever build.

Disagreeing Isn't Disrespect

First, let's kill the guilt, because I think that's what's really got you frozen. Somewhere along the way you picked up the idea that a good mentee agrees. That pushing back is rude. That if this generous person took time to help you and you don't take their advice, you're throwing it back in their face.

Nonsense. A mentor is not a boss handing down orders, and they're not a guru you owe blind obedience. A mentor is a more experienced person lending you their perspective so you can make a better decision. The key word is you. You still have to make the call. If you just do whatever they say without thinking, you're not being mentored — you're being remote-controlled, and that helps nobody.

Here's the part that surprises people: most good mentors want the pushback. When I give someone advice and they just say "yep, sounds great" and walk off, I have no idea if anything landed. But when they say "hmm, I'm not sure that fits my situation, here's why" — now we're actually working. Now I get to see how they think. The mentees I've respected most over the years weren't the ones who agreed with me. They were the ones who wrestled with what I said, took the parts that fit, and told me straight when something didn't. That's not disrespect. That's exactly what I was hoping for.

First, Assume They See Something You Don't

Now, before you go feeling too good about your right to disagree, let me pump the brakes, because there's a trap on this side too. The fact that you can disagree doesn't mean your first reaction is right. Usually your first reaction is just your first reaction.

Your mentor has stood where you're standing and walked further down the road. When their advice hits you wrong, the very first move — before you argue, before you decide anything — is to assume they might be seeing something you can't see yet. Not because they're always right. Because they've got the one thing you don't: the view from twenty steps ahead.

I can't tell you how many times younger me heard advice, decided it was old-fashioned or overly cautious, blew it off — and then six months later smacked into the exact wall the advice was trying to steer me around. The advice wasn't wrong. I just couldn't see far enough down the road to know why they were saying it. So ask the question out loud: "What are they seeing that I'm not?" Sometimes the honest answer is "nothing, they're just wrong about my situation." But you have to actually look before you get to claim that. Most people skip the looking and go straight to the deciding.

The Real Question: Is It My Gut or My Ego?

Okay, here's the heart of the whole thing, and if you take one idea from this article, take this one. When advice feels wrong, you're feeling one of two very different things, and they feel almost exactly the same from the inside.

The first is your gut — real, informed instinct. You know your situation, your people, your constraints, and your values better than any outsider ever could. Your mentor gives you general wisdom; you live the specific details. Sometimes their good advice genuinely doesn't fit your actual life, and the discomfort you feel is your gut correctly flagging the mismatch. That's worth listening to.

The second is your ego — and it's a master of disguise. Ego is the voice that resists advice not because the advice is wrong, but because it's hard. Because it means admitting you've been doing something poorly. Because it bruises your pride, or asks you to be patient when you want it now, or points at the exact weakness you've been hiding from. Ego doesn't announce itself. It shows up dressed as your gut, using the same certain voice, so you think you're honoring your instincts when you're really just protecting your pride.

Telling these two apart is the entire skill. And you can't do it by feel, because they feel the same. You have to get honest with yourself, and that's uncomfortable work. Ask: "Do I disagree because this genuinely doesn't fit my situation — or because it's going to be hard, or embarrassing, or slow?" If the advice is asking you to do something that would clearly backfire in your specific world, that's your gut, trust it. But if the advice is basically sound and the only thing you can say against it is that you don't want to — that's not disagreement. That's resistance, and resistance dressed up as principle has wasted more potential than bad advice ever did. I've watched people, myself included, torch good counsel just to protect a version of themselves that wasn't worth protecting.

How to Push Back Without Blowing It Up

Let's say you've done the honest work and you still disagree. Good — now you disagree for real reasons, not reflexes. So how do you say so without wrecking a relationship you worked hard to build?

Lead with curiosity, not a verdict. Instead of "I don't think that'll work," try "Help me understand — what makes you confident about that?" You might learn something that dissolves your objection entirely. And if you don't, you've shown them you actually considered it, which buys you the right to push. Then, when you do push, own it as yours: "Here's where I'm landing, and here's why, given my situation." You're not telling them they're wrong about the world; you're telling them how it looks from your specific spot in it. Big difference. One picks a fight; the other keeps you both on the same team, looking at the same problem.

And here's the move most people miss: sometimes you honor the advice by testing it small. You don't have to bet the farm on their way or your way. Try their approach in a low-stakes corner and watch what actually happens. Reality is a better referee than either of you. If it works, you learned something and you're glad you didn't dig in. If it doesn't, you've got real evidence for your next conversation, and now your mentor is watching you think like a grown-up instead of just arguing like one. Either way you win — and the relationship gets stronger, because nothing builds a mentor's trust like watching you weigh their advice seriously and then own your own decision.

Why This Is Really the Law of Awareness

One of John C. Maxwell's 15 Laws of Growth is the Law of Awareness, and it says something simple and heavy: you must know yourself to grow yourself. You can't get where you're going until you're honest about where you actually are — your real strengths, your real blind spots, and yes, your real motives.

Do you see how that's the whole ballgame here? The question "should I take this advice?" quietly turns into a harder one: "do I know myself well enough to tell my gut from my ego?" Because both answers to a disagreement — blindly obeying and reflexively rejecting — are failures of the same thing. Blind obedience means you don't trust your own judgment enough to weigh anything. Reflexive rejection means you won't examine your own resistance long enough to see what's driving it. Both skip the self-knowledge. Both let you off the hook of actually knowing yourself.

The mature move sits right in the middle, and it's built entirely out of awareness. You take the advice seriously and you take yourself seriously. You look hard enough at the counsel to learn what they're seeing, and you look hard enough at yourself to know whether you're resisting from wisdom or from wounded pride. That double honesty is exactly what the Law of Awareness is asking of you. And here's the quiet payoff: every time you sit in that discomfort and sort out your gut from your ego, you don't just make a better decision — you get to know yourself a little better. You learn what actually sets you off, where your pride hides, when your instincts are sharp and when they're just scared. Over 63 years, three marriages, real loss, and a career full of advice I both wisely took and stubbornly ignored, I can tell you the disagreements taught me more about myself than the easy agreements ever did. Your mentor's advice is a mirror. The disagreement is where you finally look into it. That's the reason I ended up writing Leadership Between the Lines — the important stuff isn't in the advice itself, it's in what you learn about yourself deciding what to do with it.

Reflection Questions

Sit with one or two of these before your next conversation with your mentor:

1. Can I say my mentor's advice back to them in my own words? If not, I don't disagree yet — I just don't understand it yet.
2. What might they be seeing from twenty steps ahead that I can't see from here?
3. Honestly: is this advice wrong, or is it just hard? Those feel the same and could not be more different.
4. If I strip away my pride, what's left of my objection? If nothing's left, it was ego, not gut.
5. Could I test their advice in a small, low-stakes way instead of accepting or rejecting the whole thing?

The Bottom Line

So what do you do when you disagree with your mentor's advice? You slow down before you decide. You assume, at least for a minute, that they're seeing a wall you can't. You make sure you actually understood what they said. And then you do the hard, honest work of asking whether your resistance is your gut telling you the advice doesn't fit your life, or your ego telling you the advice is too uncomfortable to swallow. Get that one question right and you'll rarely go wrong.

Here's what I'd do before you next sit down with them: pick the piece of advice you're wrestling with and finish this sentence out loud — "I disagree because ___." If the reason is about your actual situation, trust it, and bring it to them as a question, not a fight. If the reason is really just that you don't want to, thank them, and go do the hard thing anyway. You don't owe your mentor blind obedience. You owe them, and yourself, an honest look — at their advice and in the mirror. That's how ordinary people grow into people worth listening to. No cape required.

This ties back to The Law of Awareness — one of John C. Maxwell's 15 Laws of Growth.