The self-help trap to misery
If you ever bought a self-help book, paid a life coach or attended a seminar you are definitely someone who aspires to become better and succeed in life. Losing weight, creating better relationships, gaining self-esteem, becoming rich or finding happiness are just some of the areas in our life where there is always a place for improvement. But how come something that is supposed to make us feel better ends up making us feel miserable instead?
You wake up in the morning, open your social media and there it is: the super fit model you would like to look like and your school mate who doesn’t look that great but has three kids already while you have none, your friend who spends his money traveling around the world carefree and your rich cousin bragging about his new car. The truth is, we live in a time where feeling crapy and confused about our life makes sense. And if that was not enough, the self-help industry feeds itself on that. How would it sell if not? I mean, if we would fully accept who and what we are we wouldn’t be much interested in it, right?
However, humans have an innate need for improvement. And while that pushed us to come a long way from migrating on foot from Africa 2 million years ago to building cars and planing rocket flights across continents it is also the same reason why the self-help industry reached 10 billion in sales in 2018.
The state of incompleteness is a built-in mechanism in our brain. We can’t fight it. The problem is when it is used against us.
Capitalism marketing together with many self-help gurus tap into our misery, make us compare ourselves with others or with them, expose our flaws and then come up with the solution. And it works. Over and over again people follow self-help like a religion, trying to live up to it but most of the time with no tangible change. So, we end up feeling miserable but proudly showing off the number of books we read.
Don’t get me wrong. I love reading and I watch a lot of personal development porn. But what I learned over time is that it is very important to understand why you think you need self-help, how it really makes you feel, how to curate the content and when you should stop.
This is maybe one of the first questions you should ask yourself when paying for that course or buying that book. Are you doing it because you want to fix something or because you want to grow? There is a difference in it. A lot of self-help disciples have somewhere deep inside, many times unconsciously, a belief that something is wrong with them. And when we think that, we have a strong impulse to fix it so we can prove to ourselves we are actually ok. But the truth is we don’t need fixing. We are whole already. We are whole and growing. A caterpillar is not less whole than a butterfly, it is just at a different stage of development. Feeling unfulfilled in a certain area of our life is a calling for growth. And growth always comes from within and not from external sources. If we initiate an improvement from the belief that something is wrong with us we look outside of us for solutions and we trap ourselves to misery. On the other hand, when we accept we can never be perfect but we can become better and we are in the driver’s sit then the improvement is nothing but a challenge.
A lot of self-help work out there is just motivation in disguise. But how do we differentiate it? Well, it’s quite simple. Motivation is supposed to trigger emotions while real self-help is about giving you tools. Motivational self-help will give you a feeling, but that feeling fades away and then you are back to yesterday. Next thing you know, you feel miserable because you didn’t accomplish your goals. Motivation will make you feel good for the 5 minutes you watch it. Real self-help provides you with life-changing tools that will help you for the next 50 years. So next time you spend your time or money on any material think longterm and choose based on that. Also, think about what you’re feeling and understand that feeling great does not cultivate greatness in you.
If you didn’t spend a lot of time on personal development it might be difficult to curate content and most probably you wouldn’t read my article anyways. Generally, personal development should help us create a deeper relationship with ourselves and make our life more meaningful. If anything you are reading, listening or watching disempowers you and leads you into following someone else’s path and not your own, they’re just tying you up to their profits. You’ll end up spending a lot of money with no real results. Tricky but true! Best self-help out there helps us really make it our own. Another thing to consider is if you really need help in the specific area of your life. If you are a hoarder, Marie Kondo’s book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up might be useful, but if you’re not, regardless of how much buzz it gets, why to spend your money and time on it? You also need to do a critical check on the authors. You should not take advice from any random person on the internet, including myself. Make sure they are legit and not just preaching. I’m generally not a judgemental person, but if you have a big belly and try to motivate me to put my life together, I’m really not buying into it.
If every time someone mentions a book you already read it but you still live with your mum trying to make it till your payday, rethink what you’re doing, for real! Self-help only works when you put up the work. You’ll never get fit by spending hours on learning how the treadmill functions. You need to get on it and be consistent. If self-improvement keeps you tied to education, then you are really not improving yourself. Everything in life resumes to taking action. Knowing something is not enough, you also need to apply it. You want to grow and pick on brilliant minds you can only access through books, videos and seminars, fine, but don’t leave it to sit there until you forget about it. The one and only ingredient to success is action.
In conclusion, self-help helps itself with your money, likes, and views. It is a billion dollar industry. If you think you need a fix, you need to look within yourself but if what you want is growth then make sure it is longterm and it connects you with your inner wisdom and genuine longings. Make sure it provides tools to help you move forward and not just emotions. And most importantly it keeps your focus on action.
The self-help trap to misery
Research & References of The self-help trap to misery|A&C Accounting And Tax Services
Source
0 Comments