What's the best wax-on-wax-off-style advice you've heard that you can attest as being helpful in certain situations?

“Confidence coffee”.

Let me explain; when you go on stage, you’re nervous and you need some water because your mouth dries out. Bring water in a mug/travel mug.

It’s self regulating. The dryer your mouth is, the more you need to drink water. The more you appear to sip coffee while publicly speaking, the more relaxed you look.

Compare to swigging from a water bottle; your nerves are on public display.

Confidence coffee=water in an opaque coffee container.

I wonder why water indicates nerves and coffee indicates confidence. It totally makes sense to me but I have no idea why.
- Yeah I can’t explain it either. But it’s just the way.
Could you just actually drink coffee? I mean I guess the caffeine isn't necessarily the best for situations of anxiety, but I find a cup of coffee really relaxing and if it helps when it looks like you're drinking it I wonder if really drinking it wouldn't help similarly.
- Depending on your level of caffeine tolerance/dependency actual coffee might be even better.
  
  Alternatively: Decaf.
- Personally I drank coffee once and I'm never doing it again. I thought I was about to die, lol. I'll probably stick to water. I however really like the idea of signaling that I'm having coffee although I'm not

When a person tells you that a loved one has passed, ask what the their name was and say it back. It can be awkward when that comes up and you might not know how to respond best. I’ve found that most people don’t want you to feel bad for them, but them saying their name and having a chance to talk about them is often a nice thing.

I’m in healthcare so death comes up a lot. “David. That’s a nice name. Where was he from?”

This.. Might not be as helpful as you think it is.. My dad died 6 months ago, and If someone asked me what his name was and then said 'that's a nice name' I'd feel like it was a superficial and bad reaction. My father was a lot of things, and for someone to sum it up in 'that's a nice name' as a form of sympathy would make me pause and struggle to find a response to such a.. Simple and child-like reaction. I feel like that's a response you could maybe get away with people's pets, but not a human loved one.
- Don’t get caught up in the phrasing, which should be tailored to each individual need in the moment. Instead, look at what they’re saying, just ask questions and actively listen. They should do more of the talking and people love to tell stories, especially of loved ones. This isn’t going to be the best approach for everyone but it will be for most people.
- How about: I'm sorry to hear that, are you holding up ok?
- My Dad died about 4 years ago now and I still think about him almost daily. It was hard at first, but I’m not sure which I would’ve wanted, for people to have asked about him or to have not asked about him. Part of me wanted to crawl into a hole and not talk to anyone and part of me wanted people to have cared and know about him.
  
  While it’s true you can’t sum up a person with “that’s a nice name,” they’re trying to make conversation, they probably don’t know what you know about him and if you want them to know, you’d need to correct them. My Dad really wasn’t social much throughout his life, so it kind of felt like just nobody cared at all, maybe half a dozen people in total ever really asked anything about him after he passed.
Also healthcare here. I do something similar, both for already dead family members and critically ill patients.

I don't so much focus on the name, but ask a general "can you tell me about them?"

It reinforces to people that you care and helps forge a connection.

Not sure if this applies, but “You can never love someone else until you love yourself” was a lesson my dad taught me from a very young age.

If you don’t like yourself, you’ll almost inevitably end up with someone who is taking advantage because you won’t be able to stand up for yourself and you won’t speak up when they hurt you.

There are the very rare exceptions, but they are the ones who help you help yourself. Someone who truly helps you will not shower you with gifts or compliments, but rather will help you recognize and change what you don’t like about yourself. In other words, “Only a true friend would be that truly honest.”

“If you can't love yourself, how in the hell are you gonna love somebody else?” -RuPaul
Well there are different love languages and not everybody has it in themself to being able to help you change yourself.

Also I think someone insecure about themself would not necessarily be the one being oppressed, I guess they can also end up being toxic.

But I agree with you generally
Reminds me of a verse from Social Distortion's "I Was Wrong":

"And I think about my loves, well I've had a few

Well, I'm sorry that I hurt them, did I hurt you too?

I took what I wanted, put my heart on the shelf

But how can you love when you don't love yourself?"

"Don't be a protagonist in someone else's story" You shouldn't make decisions for someone else, nor prevent the results for their actions. You can help, advice, but should not intervene without permission.

(Except if the someone in question is a kid, then you probably should intervine)

Don't be a side character is someone else's story either

First pants, then shoes.

-Gary Larson

Learn to take care of yourself, before you take of others.

“People buy based on emotion, not logic.”

Great advice for the sales world. And let’s face it, everyone, including you, is selling something.

Don't do good things that look bad.

Parents told me that when I was young. It made more sense as I became older.

What does that advice mean to you, in practical terms? Like with an example?
- Like helping someone commit a crime

Make your bed every day.

An order I received from a friend helping me out of a dark place. Asked why and was told to just do it.

There's a TED talk on that
- The apocryphal story by the military man?
I started to do it to keep the dog dirt out of my sheets. It's the first time I have ever done this in my life. I now feel like an adult.

I didn't understand the question so came to read the replies out of curiosity but couldn't work it out so searched the web for what wax-on-wax-off meant. Now I think nobody else understood the question either.

The phrase is a reference to the original karate kid movie. Rather than immediately teaching Daniel karate, Mr miyagi made him wax a bunch of cars, paint fences, sand floors, etc. The repetitive motions were actually training for particular karate moves, so rather than instructing the move, he already had it committed to muscle memory.

Pretty sure the context of the post means "non-obvious advice." Something that clicks later.
- It was about doing something seemingly unrelated and simple that helped to learn something more profound. Not seeing it in most (any?) of the answers.

Read the manual and if something's broken, give fixing it a shot even if you end up breaking it more.

When you read the manual, you learn things (often including how to fix them without breaking them more). The more things you know how to fix, the more everything starts to look familiar. This is how those people who seem to be ridiculously good at fixing everything learned to be good.

I know two that are about relationships:

"Long distance is the wrong distance"

and

"Crazy removed fuck like tigers"