What I Have Learned After Studying and Writing Self-Help for 6 Years
Half the time it’s our thinking that blocks us from the solution.
Before studying self-help, my life looked like a train wreck. No seminar or book was going to save me. I was literally screwed.
My mind took a beating and couldn’t clearly decipher fact from fiction anymore. I still don’t know what made me turn to self-help. It’s all a blur.
After six years of studying self-help and writing about it, there are many common themes. People are quick to dismiss self-help as trashy or unhelpful, but that’s because they don’t understand it.
Self-help just means you make a decision to help yourself.
Fixing Yourself Is Hard Work
Once you’ve decided to help yourself, everything else stems from there. You will go down your own rabbit hole and start fixing yourself in your own way.
Fixing yourself looks like this:
- Dealing with feelings
- Overcoming fears
- Treating yourself with kindness
- Mastering one area of your life
- Adding discipline
- Analyzing your thoughts
This is where the “fixing” starts and it’s bloody hard work. The human mind is a mess, full of thousands of years of bad programming. You have to reprogram yourself and it’s messy and complex. But it can be done and people do it every single day. Mostly, it’s about stopping the lies you tell yourself.
The Topics and Advice Haven’t Changed
I recently read “How to Stop Worrying and Start Living.” It first came out in 1948 which seems like centuries ago in the era of self-help. I noticed that many of the book’s key themes are being repeated by the modern-day writers who write today’s version of self-help.
Reading the book “Think and Grow Rich” produced a similar insight. It was originally published in 1937 and many of the lessons feel like they came straight off the front page of Success.com
The truth is self-help mostly stays the same. It’s the context that changes.
Worrying about war is different from worrying about a mystery virus, even though the lessons are similar.
The Repetition Is the Skill
A friend said to me the other day, “I have this great idea about the future of nutrition based on the current uncertain times.” They explained their idea to me like it was profound.
Self-help teaches us that ideas are useless. It’s the repetition of one or more skills combined with an idea, that produces a result. If you can learn to get used to repetition, you can build anything your mind can think of.
Repetition is hard, though. You want results and you want to see something for your effort. The crappy part is that you won’t see anything significant stem from your effort unless you’ve been at it for a long time. I found that my repeated habit of writing two days a week didn’t produce any tangible results for many years.
Writing, for example, is nothing more than practicing repetition. You can be a terrible writer and make something of yourself if you master repetition. The same goes for any goal you might have.
Everything Is Self-Help
When people say they hate self-help, what they’re really saying is that they think they’re too good for self-help. The truth is that everything is self-help.
If you learn anything, then you’re helping yourself. If you have one habit, then you’ve fallen for self-help. If you’ve improved your health through exercise or food, then you’ve found the holy grail of self-help.
Pretending you’re too good for self-help is ridiculous.
The moment you can move away from trying to be part of the cool club that bags everything — including self-help — and move towards forgetting about genres and focusing on what you want out of life in the short time you have left, your life will completely change. You’ll realize that you have more control than you thought and that’s a profound idea.
You Won’t Worry About Critics for Long
Self-help shows us that we have to help ourselves. Therefore, the natural progression that happens is that you need to worry about yourself and what you’re doing, and not have critics throw you off track.
The self-help game is between you and your self.
People are going to think your self-help journey is crazy. When I mention the early days of walking down the street and chanting completely random shit because a tall self-help guru with big teeth told me to, critics tell me I’m nuts.
The start of any journey seems nuts. The chanting I practiced and the affirmations I repeated were probably total nonsense but they took me down a path that led me to the eventual thing I was looking for.
There’s no time for critics who block you from your potential. It’s you vs you.
Anyone Can Write Self-Help
Writing about self-help is not reserved for special people. Telling your story and talking about what worked for you is self-help and we all should be able to do that without being labeled a “guru.”
By writing about what helped you, you help others. That’s a useful pursuit.
There Is a Level Beyond Self-Help
I’ve learned over the last two years that self-help is a progression. You start out by helping yourself and then eventually you want to help others. This is a natural progression and you’ll arrive there at some point when you’re ready.
My hope is that you use self-help to lead you to helping others; only helping yourself gets boring after a while. The joy that self-help brings comes from finding a way to be useful to people who are enduring problems you’ve gone through yourself and solved.
What Self-Help Really Is
Self-help is learning to think about your problems.
Not being trapped in a circus tent for life with your problems.
Thinking about your problems helps you unlock your imagination. Your imagination can lead you to all sorts of places that are far beyond where you currently are right now. Once I learned to think clearly about problems, using the strategies learned from self-help, I was able to set up my own experiments and find the answers myself.
Half the time it’s our thinking that blocks us from the solution.
If you learn to think, you can help yourself and others.
To consume self-help is to think about your problems. To write about self-help is to see your problems. To read self-help is to learn about solutions. To share self-help is to remind yourself of the solutions. To help others with self-help is to get value from your problems.
Self-help is more than a genre. It’s a way to reach your potential through the tried and tested strategies of humans that came before you.