Are You Really Searching for Self Help?

The self-help world is big. Very big. Bigger than most people think. And it's quite old, as well. You can go back into the mid 20th century to find a thriving, established "self help" marketplace. In fact, you can go further back than that if you want. Marcus Aurelius' "meditations" are as self-help as anything you'll ever find.

So...if self-help has been around for so long, and so many people throughout the years have accessed it in some form or another (a book, a workshop, a whatever), then we have to ask a really important, but rather strange question: why are so many people not being self-helped?

Really. Shouldn't the world be a qualitatively better place? Why, if there is so much self-help stuff out there, do we -- as a species and as individuals -- run into the same problems over and over and over?

My guess?

It's not self-help that is to "blame" for this. Well, okay, some self-help stuff is really terrible, and exists simply to get your money. But a lot of self-help stuff is great -- including Aurelius' meditations.

The real problem as I see it is that self-help is not there to validate or justify your current behavior; and this is a problem for MANY people. Basically, they want to find a self-help path that "confirms" what they want to have confirmed: that other people are toxic, that all they have to do is "let go of negativity" and pretty much continue doing everything that they've been doing.

Self-help -- REAL self-help -- doesn't conform to what you want it to be. It doesn't simply provide you with a framework to like what you currently like, dislike what you currently dislike, and therefore -- paradoxically -- never change.

In fact, many people on the self-help path soon realize that -- inevitably -- they will have to change their framework, their attitude, and their approach. And this is when a lot of people put away the self-help book or turn off the DVD, because it becomes...well, it becomes inconvenient. All of a sudden, that self-help advice is getting a bit too pushy; it's getting in the way of how you want to live your life.

Self-help is not easy. It may seem easy -- because writers use stories and graphics and it all seems like "common sense," -- but it's simply not easy. It's, arguably, the hardest thing you'll ever do. Facing your OWN behaviour patterns -- seeing the utter error of how you interpret reality and project back onto it -- is not easy. For the ego, it's humiliating.

If you're on the self-help path, remember: it's not a game. It's a commitment. Are you ready to make it?