20 PIECES OF ADVICE WE'RE LEAVING BEHIND

When do you know bad advice is bad advice? Does it feel like it falls short, like it's not applicable to you and your situation? Or does it subconsciously reinforce harmful ideas in your head? Advice shouldn't feel like self-harm, and it shouldn't be rooted in living up to anyone else's expectations either. Before this year ends, here are 20 pieces of advice to leave behind:

1. It's always important to seek closure
2. Keeping the peace is more important than having conversations
3. If someone loves you, they will change 
4. Don't burn bridges
5. It is healthy to forgive

Good relationship advice should not ask you to infringe on your own boundaries. You should embrace your emotions - make room for them, instead of suppressing them to appease others. Let intuition guide you - not the expectations of others. Leave people pleasing in the past.

6. Work should feel like play if you truly love it
7. Your life right now is all about grinding
8. Push through when you feel like quitting
9. Say yes to every opportunity
10. The road to success is painful

Everything you consume through the algorithm and social media right now has subliminally put the idea of grinding for it in your head. It can start to subconsciously make you feel like you aren't doing enough. The blueprint to success should not be misery. You can build discipline in a way that builds you up little by little instead of leaving you feeling fatigued and miserable.

11. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger
12. You can't afford to fail
13. Everything in life is a learning experience
14. Pain is purpose
15. Learn how to save yourself

Your mindset is everything - how you think and react to situations says a lot about you. Without knowing it, you may have taken in advice that while, is universal, is quite ineffective when you try to actually apply it. We all have internalized messaging about how suffering makes us stronger. Sometimes, pain is just pain. It doesn't need to be fuel to motivate you or help you build character.

16. Happiness is a choice
17. Love yourself before somebody else can love you
18. Fake it till you make it
19. You should know exactly who you are
20. Pain is a part of the process

It's okay for you still have questions about your identity. Self-image is created through uncertainty - by giving yourself the grace to be not sure and coming out the other side with answers. Doubt and uncertainty are a part of the human condition, and you should not be expected to know yourself in definite terms.

At the end of the day, bad advice and generalizations can do more harm than help. Make you doubt yourself and reinforce damaging ideas about yourself or how the real world is supposed to work. You aren't a fake because you can't make bad advice work. You will feel much more liberated when you let these pieces of advice go.