Who the F*ck Are You To Write Self-Help?

Have you got all the answers?

Self-help is a dirty word. Or perhaps two dirty words conjoined by a hyphen. Often, it’s spoken about in mocking terms. Self-help even mocks itself. I read self-help books all the time that tell me they’re not self-help. No one wants to be associated with that phrase. It feels snake-oily. Only last week I saw a life coach who was 26. Twenty fucking six. Any old – or in this case, young — fucker can become a life coach. It’s an unregulated industry swimming with chancers.

The plucky people who write self-help position themselves as an authority, they’ve got it right, you’ve got it wrong, now watch them explain why they’re better than you.

I too write self-help and I agonise endlessly about claiming to have answers. The older I get and the further I wade into these waters, the more I understand there is only one truth and that’s what’s true for you.

It’s called intuition. Gut feel. It knows you better than you know yourself and it sure knows you better than I do, or Tony Robbins does.

But try to write self-help without answers. It’s Impossible. The more I sit on the fence about a topic the more insipid and woolly my writing becomes.

Consequently, writing self-help can feel like you’re endlessly bullshitting. Still, at least I’m not a twenty fucking six year old life coach. That’s bullshitting taken to new audacious heights.

So why write self-help at all?

After therapy in 2014, I used self-help to rebuild who I was. I’d cleared out the trauma and made peace with my past but what now? So I turned to new role models; motivational speakers, army soldiers, entrepreneurs, sports stars and spiritual teachers, all hoovered up from the internet and the pages of books. Self-help saved me. It rebuilt me. There is a night and day difference between who I was and who I am today.

This is why I write, to crystallise my thoughts and share them with others so they too can be emancipated by epiphanies and lightened by enlightenments.

So, is it wrong to set yourself up as an authority if you want to help? No, not as long as you’re being authentic and open about your mistakes and lessons learned. After all, what else do we have?

I haven’t got all the answers. But I have some that have worked well enough. I’ve got answers for the 20-year-old me and the 30-year-old me before I went to therapy. I’ve got answers for the self-harming 16-year-old. That was me too.

So perhaps it’s your duty to share your story and wisdom with others. Perhaps we have to write self-help because it’s the right thing to do.

Are we going to be sharing the same wisdom as Buddha or the bible? Are we going to know as much about the human condition as Tony Robbins or Zig Ziegler? Are we going to help everyone who reads our work?

No, no and no. But, if you write about the truth and you come from truth, if you express your authentic experience, then you’re on the right path, because you will change somebody’s life.

My life has been changed by Medium articles, little quotes here and there, and small epiphanies peppered within these four digital walls.

So write what you want to write. Make sure it’s true, get out of your own way, don’t worry about judgement and keep writing about the same thing. Every time you write about the same thing you dig a little deeper, you do some more inner work, you get a little bit more gold for your efforts.

Every extraordinarily successful person actively thinks about how they think. That’s how powerful self-help can be. They use self-help to unlock their potential. And writing about self-help unlocks your potential as much as any other form of self-help.

So write self-help. Don’t feel like a fraud. No one authentic can be a fraud. That’s the beauty of it.

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