If Self Help is not painful, then it is not helping at all
Posted on April 15, 2008
Filed Under Culture
From the department of we-want-you-to-be-careful-of-what-you-read
Our era seems to be a time of dire needs, woes, cares and ambitions. Browse the self-help corner of any bookshops, you will find advice on dating, controlling your rage, becoming the next Bill Gates and be as rich as Donald Trump.
As a typical child of a typical middle-income family, I am too plagued with self-doubts and at the same time, of course, an ambition to change the world. I peruse numerous tomes of self-help books in my past, and recently it dawns on me that, in most cases, there are two type of self help books.
The first type is what I call change your mind techniques oriented self help - visualise your success! Stand tall and firm! Assert your power! Build a pipeline and have passive income. They are usually printed in bright colours on bold laminated papers, use big fonts when Arial 12 points will do, and feature famous stories repeated ad ad nauseum - the elephant who was trapped in the cage, the two classes of average kids and one class is told that they are Grade A students and so on and so forth. The premise is - change your mind, change your outlook and you are a winner!
One book which belongs to this genre is Feel the Fear, and Do it Anyway. The premise is to repeat to yourself again and again (of course, this is an unfair summary, but anymore said I may infringe copyright laws) “No matter what happened, I can cope with it.” While this works fine when you are deciding whether to bake your own Thanksgiving turkey or get one from the local NTU Fairprice, this advice fell flat if you are a manager or a leader responsible for the jobs, lives or maybe pension funds of thousands of people. Those who have been liberated from their own self doubts, fears just by changing their thinking and ‘visualising’ success for themselves can only lead themselves.
Those books usually propose motivation posters all over the place, listening to the tapes of successful people and keep repeating to myself “I’m good; I’m good; I’m good” and doing some visualisation. Well, if I crawl into a kennel and bark like a dog, it doesn’t turn me into an adorable Golden Retriever.
Worse still, such books, I deem, are harmful to introverts, which makes up 20% of the world’s population. Most of those books are written by…extroverts. (Sounds logical. Give me three years to do the research and I’ll present it at the next World’s Self Help Convention) . If you suspect yourself to be of an introvert disposition (a personality test helps), most of those advice sound baseless, or if you are forced through it, may even hurt or harm. Introverts are in touch with themselves; they know their flaws and strengths. They need personal space and long recharge time. Telling them to “fake it as if you are a successful man and plunge right straight into the meeting” is very likely to have very bad side effects. For introverts, I propose the book “The Introvert Advantage: How to Thrive in an Extrovert World”, by Dr. Marti Olsen Laney. Extroverts, if you have introvert friends who you care about (like your SO), you better read that too.
The other thing about self help books is that there are so many types of personality out there - competitive, logical, those who are grounded onto the earth and skeptics etc. Mind renovation techniques have different effects for them all. Some will find what the books say natural; other will balk. No wonder the self help book industry is such a thriving industry.
Now, for the other type of self help books - they don’t just suggest writing down 10 goals like those Harvard students do (havent we all know the importance of SMART goals?) or print bright comforting slogans (YOU ARE UNIQUE AND YOU ARE THE BEST) on brightly laminated pages. They demand you to learn discipline. For the heart is the wellspring of all thoughts. Your thoughts, while partly subject to chemicals, upbringing and genes, are also controllable. Those books demand you to subject yourself to a discipline of reflection, soul-searching, re-evaluating your life - asking you to become who you are supposed to be, not Donald Trump. Nope, I am not talking about the Bible, by the way - and it’s not New Age mumbo-jumbo.
What those books say is this “Changing yourself is hard. You have to go down to the root of it all - your values , habits and your beliefs. Repeating slogans only change the appearance. There are some universal principles in life that we all ought to know, to be disciplined and conditioned to follow and it is going to be difficult.”
You may not become Donald Trump this way, but at least you can find the real you, which may means a lot more to you and your friends and family.
Some examples? Try Today Matters, by John Maxwell. Then you’ll see that changing yourself is hard, life-long and a discipline. And if you need to change badly, find a therapist.
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