The Self-Help Industry Has A Problem With Being Too Simple
The obsession for quick and easy fixes undermines the possible good that could come from the industry.
“Every article that you see under my name was created by an AI. Of course, I still have to spend a good 2 to 3 hours editing and our editor has to make some more adjustments. But at the end of the day, the fact AI can write the whole article makes it much easier to work as a writer.”
“Best of all, we are still ranking so well.”
These were the general words that my coworker said in our typical call. We talk business, writing, and other ideas and so naturally AI has a way of creeping into the conversation.
I’ve already shared my general thoughts on AI and agree with the practical use of it. But it also reminds me of the self-help industry at its core. You see a particular theme time and again in the industry whenever it comes to advice, programs, systems, and courses.
A lot of the gurus and hustle bros have a problem of oversimplifying solutions.
But what’s worse is these easy-to-adopt and sell ideas muddy the water for genuine help and improvement to thrive.
Quick And Easy Solutions Persist Because They’re Addictive
Whether someone in the industry wants to grift you or genuinely help you, both of them are tapping into the same source: our emotions.
Our emotions are powerful and for those wanting to make a quick buck, they often use our emotions to exploit that fact. It’s why a lot of the advice that they offer doesn’t work even though it feels helpful.
Ending up in a Tony Robbins seminar can get you fired up and excited to tackle the world, but afterwards, you wallow in procrastination. I experienced this to a lesser extent when I attended a conference when I was part of a network marketing company.
It didn’t have screaming fans, but the speakers certainly had that Robbins hype vibe that he brings. It made me interested in what was being said but in terms of committing and taking action, I lacked any motivation to do anything.
For sure one of the common issues that many life coaches face when motivating people is procrastination. They spend a lot of time dwelling on this. They think that if there is enough hype and dazzle that it’s enough to inspire individuals.
But it tends to make things worse.
What they provide is external motivation and that only works for so long. You can try to inspire people to look inward and develop internal motivation, but that requires action on an individual part.
With the latter, we run into a paradox where we want to be motivated to deal with our problems, but we prefer to be given easy solutions which there aren’t many. On top of being given a hype man, getting them to scream “Look into yourself!” isn’t going to make us find the ultimate motivational fuel we need.
We run into an ego problem. And the issue with focusing on hype is we neglect a lot of the internal thinking, who the person is, and their specific situation.
For sure, I get that self-help advice has to be broad and generalized. However, the particular model that many self-help gurus build around is a lot of that “dream big” motivational hype. It’s their bread and butter.
I can’t speak for every life coach or mentor out there but through my experiences with a coach and my research on Robert Kiyosaki, this seems to be the case. They’d rather leverage people’s emotions and enrich themselves than provide tangible benefits.
For Kiyosaki, he had a 5-figure course on real estate which presumably amounted to a lot of slides and advice that you’d get from his books.
For the coach I experienced, he didn’t teach me anything about productivity. Instead, we chatted for an hour once in a while and he got me to write children’s books for him while also roping me into a “referral marketing” company. I didn’t get paid as the idea was that my work was contributing to his coaching services
The service they deliver is hype rather than genuine guidance and growth. Like I said in my article on Kiyosaki, a 5-figure course ought to be an investment into the real estate market in which the student receives kickbacks from the start. That isn’t the case.
For the coach who led me down a rabbit hole, it would’ve been better for us to have a much longer chat about how we wanted things to go. That wasn’t the case either and it was steered more by the coach who saw an opportunity to profit rather than help me out.
But in either cases, both myself and any unsuspecting victim of Kiyosaki, we get starry-eyed and let our emotions get the better of us. People genuinely believe they’re going to get some great help by taking Kiyosaki’s course. I genuinely thought at the start that the coach was going to help me out. When he offered me a gig I thought this was a good opportunity to give back since I was using his coaching services for free.
There Is a Perceived Higher Value To Not Help Than To Help
Deep down, many life coaches or self-helpers are scared of helping others, genuinely. If I stuck around the coach for longer than I did, I probably would still be writing children’s books for him while getting no compensation.
I’d likely be roped into other projects of his while the coaching services he’d provide to me were not getting me anywhere. All the while, I’d be buying “cheap” cleaning and health care products through his “referral marketing” company.
On top of the addictive nature of providing quick and easy fixes — if at all — we’ve created an atmosphere where in order to thrive in the industry you need to provide as much hype as possible. What this often amounts to is saying what the person wants to hear while furthering your own agenda and ideals in some way while providing little to no help.
The coach I was working with mentioned at one point how he didn’t want me to say “I know” and that he chalks that up to a compatibility issue if it’s repeated. It felt disconnected, especially since I told him I was writing about self-improvement for many years at this point. So things like meditating, focusing, and generic productivity stuff were all familiar to me.
I needed accountability and a roadmap. All I got was that I should go back to church and cut ties with someone if I wasn’t getting anything from them after investing in them.
That latter advice was at least helpful.
All of this comes back to this fear because when you help someone solve their issues, that means they no longer need you for that particular reason. But this is counterintuitive to the bigger picture. Any coach worth their salt ought to be thinking this way on occasion, especially since it’s a piece of advice that’s dropped often.
When it comes to problems, not only do people have many problems, but they also realistically take several months to solve. This is on top of the fact that there are literally billions of people from around the world.
There is no short supply of issues every day people deal with.
Not only will you have a client stick around for a long period of time dealing with one specific issue, but there is also a good chance other issues will arise. And if those problems are something you can’t address specifically, then someone else is likely to take their place.
I know a personal trainer who has trained clients for years. Even when they have their ideal figure, a personal trainer is still useful beyond that because they provide accountability and guidance. Not to mention our bodies go through all kinds of changes and a personal trainer can help guide us through those changes in regards to exercise and eating.
Life coaches and self-help gurus can work in a similar manner.
Instead of milking one person in a perpetual loop until they run out of money, you’re moving from one person to the next. The number game shifts from “How many clients can I have” to “How many people can I brag about that I’ve helped.”
It really puts things into perspective when Tony Robbins has legions of people desperately seeking help and his wisdom whenever he goes on speaking gigs. It also speaks to his coaching services which cost thousands.
In the end, fear and simple fixes make us think more about client count rather than the number of people we’ve helped.
Everyone in the self-help industry can do better but the question is more that people are stuck on whether they should or not. Self-help gurus know the easy way is appealing because it’s easy. They talk about how you should hustle hard and the path is brutal while many consistently shun away from the hard road.
To help someone genuinely it’s about looking beyond the generic self-help advice the industry is known for. To try and mix in your own thoughts and ideas on effective solutions.
We’re still going to have the issue of advice not being effective, misinterpreted or not suitable for every person situation and that’s okay. The distinguishing factor between life coaches or self-help writers is they have their own unique perspectives and ideas for tackling solutions. As consumers, it’s vital that the industry has a much broader selection of people to choose from.
I even see this issue in books around certain topics. I’ve stopped reading self-help books years ago because there were similar themes and patterns I saw. Sure there was some deviancy but the writing styles and general advice could be boiled down to the same thing repeated again and again.
Indeed there are some simple routes that we can take to solve problems. The generic advice in general can be pretty sound advice. But often the gurus don’t acknowledge the difficulties behind those issues or they inflate the functionality.
It would be like my coworker recommending me to use AI and hype it up as the way of the future and that the articles it would produce would be fantastic and compelling. Instead, my coworker talked about how it took time to edit and there were things happening before the final copy and said specifically what AI resolved in this situation.
Self-help gurus can do this both on a large scale and on individual coaching. It all requires honesty and openness about their own problems and a willingness to do more research and actually embrace what self-improvement is all about for once.
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