Self Help Hell
Escape from self-help hell
Supposedly enlightened writers are queueing up to tell us how to live our lives and earning a fortune in the process. Reader beware ...Stephanie Merritt The Observer, Sunday August 31 2008 Article history
Ever since humankind learnt to read and write, we have nursed a hunger for books that tell us how to live. The original advice and self-improvement books, the sacred texts of the major religions, may not have claimed to offer instant happiness, nor to make us richer, thinner and younger-looking, but they did at least furnish us with a set of rules for a good life.
The desire for instruction manuals for living remains strong.
Self-help and advice is one of the biggest genres in publishing, netting over £50m per annum in the UK for the past four years.
Books such as Paul McKenna's series, I Can Make You Thin/Rich/Confident/Smug, regularly break out of the specialist sections of bookshops and reign supreme over the mainstream bestseller charts. McKenna has sold 2m copies in the UK alone.
Yet the genre suffers from the same conundrum as diet books: if any self-help book worked, no further titles would be needed and the industry would grind to a halt.
The best example is the late Allen Carr, who followed his bestselling The Easy Way to Stop Smoking with The Only Way to Stop Smoking Permanently, inadvertently implying that he had sold you short with the earlier book.
The exception may be the recently published Up for Renewal by Cathy Alter (Atria Books), a memoir of how she transformed her life by spending a year obeying the self-help pages of women's magazines. Alter's book opens up the alarming prospect of a whole new meta-genre: books giving advice on how to follow the advice of advice books.
Self-help books generally draw their precepts from three main sources: religion and spirituality (often borrowing heavily from a version of pop-Zen); psychology; and, increasingly, business.
A recent favourite of mine in the latter category is Rachel Greenwald's imperious-sounding Find A Husband After 35 Using What I Learned At Harvard Business School. The title was modified to After 30 for the UK edition, presumably because British women age less presentably - or get desperate sooner.
There is also a sub-genre based on sheer out-there loopiness, as personified by Barbel Mohr's Cosmic Ordering Service (Mobius). Famously endorsed by Noel Edmonds in 2005, the book claims you can get whatever you want by 'ordering' it from the cosmos, which you visualise as a sort of giant Argos (you can place your orders at thecosmicorderingsite.com). The idea that you can attract health, wealth and happiness to you merely by wishing for them is taken to the ultimate extreme by Rhonda Byrne's bestseller The Secret (Simon & Schuster), which draws together centuries of esoteric thinking and distils them into such nuggets as: 'Love yourself in every moment that you can' and: 'Know that there is no such thing as incurable.' The Secret is, in a sense, the Ur-self-help book; it promises instant wealth, love and weight loss and claims these goals can be achieved by visualising them, bypassing the more tried and tested methods of hard work, effort and exercise. It has sold 7.5m copies worldwide.
The Secret's success reflects the global nature of the genre; if you find a formula that works, it can be rolled out practically anywhere. But there is also evidence that self-help conforms to national taste. A scan of the UK pop psychology and self-help bestseller list for mid-August revealed a marked preference for no-nonsense advice books, such as Janet Street-Porter's Life's Too F***king Short (at number 4), a splendid anthology of suggestions for self-assertion that is the nearest most of us will get to being slapped around the face by Janet in person.
Autumn and the new year are the high points in the self-help publishing calendar, as we take stock and attempt to get ourselves back in shape after the holiday indulgences. In search of a life-changing mantra, I set out to work my way through the newest crop of advice books. I began with high hopes for Ursula James's You Can Think Yourself Thin (Century £9.99), although the title was a turn-off. Twenty years ago, when I was a teenager, diet books all used the word 'slim'; 'thin' and 'skinny' had connotations of illness. Now they all have titles such as I Can Make You Thin, You Can Be Thin and Skinny Bitch
Like McKenna, James bases her method on hypnosis and the book comes with a CD in which she leads you into three sessions of therapy. It's surprisingly effective; in the first session, I fell asleep and dreamt I was Will Smith in Independence Day and woke up feeling remarkably refreshed.
Since my conscious mind can't remember the hypnosis, I don't even know if she was asking me to visualise myself as Will Smith (he is pretty buff) or if this was coincidence. The hypnosis is intriguing and the book offers a broader scope than most diet books; it concentrates on the connection between overeating and negative emotions. James explains that it takes 21 days to form a habit and the third hypnosis session is designed to be repeated over three weeks, so I will have to wait for the results.
In the meantime, I turned to A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle (Penguin £12.99), author of the international bestseller The Power of Now. A New Earth was Oprah's Book Club choice earlier this year and it makes The Secret look like hard science. Tolle tells us how to shift from 'egoic' to 'new' consciousness; to do this you need to accept his notion of Enlightenment (don't think Rousseau and Voltaire), an ill-defined casserole of transcendent religions. Tolle, like many a self-help author, anticipates cynicism and pre-empts it; if the book does nothing for you, he explains, it's because you're not 'spiritually mature' enough to understand it.
Depressed by Tolle's inanities, I moved on - briefly - to Joel Osteen's Become a Better You (Simon & Schuster £12.99). Osteen, with his frighteningly immobile smile, is the pastor of America's biggest church, in Houston, which clearly gives him some authority in the self-improvement game in the US (the book advance alone netted him $13m). It proposes seven 'simple yet effective' steps to finding one's life purpose and becoming happier, calmer and more sane. But since a God-based set of instructions holds little to inspire an entrenched atheist, I decided to forfeit the prospect of 'becoming a better me' in favour of 'being the person I really want to be', the subtitle of Jamil Qureshi's The Mind Coach (Vermilion £10.99)
Here, at last, was a book that offered some practical suggestions for getting yourself together, based on the tenets of cognitive behavioural therapy. Though the illustrative case histories are long-winded, the chapters are broken down into short, snappy sections that suggest practical exercises ('Learning From Life', 'Working the Confidence Muscle', 'Embracing Your Fear'). Qureshi's method is to help you change your behaviour in tiny increments, in the belief that changing bad habits will in turn break negative thoughts.
Cognitive therapy has become the dominant form of treatment for depression and anxiety disorders because it works by encouraging people to look in detail at how they respond to situations and how those reactions can be changed. It makes sense that the self-help books that work most effectively are those that use the same techniques, offering readers real examples to follow and measurable steps to take - books such as The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R Covey (first published in 1989), or the excellent Manage Your Mind: The Mental Fitness Guide by Gillian Butler and Tony Hope, reissued in a new edition last year and, for me, one of the best examples of the genre. Yet the hunger for quick fixes and magic bullets remains, especially if it's dressed up in quasi-spiritual language, giving any self-appointed guru the opportunity to make millions from the credulous. Alchemists and snake-oil salesmen have been peddling potions to bring health, wealth and beauty for centuries. These days, they come in book form with accompanying CDs and we go on hoping, irrationally, that there may be something in it this time.
Fortunately, you can now take the opportunity to write a bestseller about how such self-help books changed your life, and if it makes enough money, follow it up with an advice book about how to get rich by writing a memoir about advice books and so on until you die. The audience will always be out there.
Words of advice: Classic self-help books
The Road Less Travelled by M Scott Peck (1978)
A paean to the power of discipline in overcoming life's essential hardship.
Women Who Love Too Much by Robin Norwood (1986)
'If being in love means being in pain, this book was written for you'.
Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway by Susan Jeffers (1988) 'You can drop an awful lot of excess baggage if you learn to play with life instead of fight it.'
Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus by John Gray (1992)
A guide to the yawning gulf between the sexes.
itage figures prominently -- it's visible in the architecture, arts, ambience and, of course, the people.. la.
Posted by Jack Dawes at 2:26 AM
0 comments:
Post a Comment
Newer PostOlder PostHome
Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)
Contributors
Jack E. Dawes
Jack Dawes
Blog Archive
► 2010 (20)
► 2009 (29)
▼ 2008 (400)
► December (1)
► November (54)
► October (81)
▼ September (264)
Temptation and Libation
Sacred Cows
Where are they now?
Pet or Poultry?
Feeling Blue?
Beasts of Burden
Something about China
Favorite Places
Fantasy and fiction.
Tempoal Lobe Epilepsey
Is Peace possible given Man's innate aggression?
Reflection
Balancing Act.
Joe Louis
Beauty is a many splendored thing.
Speak up for your rights.
We all need a friend.
Paranoia. Crime on the rise. Citizenry arm thems...
Genetic Engineering.
Global Warming
Sinister
The Russians are coming.
Can you name the Queen?
Raven scavenging on shark.
Dick Cheney is not the first guy to have the ear o...
The Russians are coming.
Religious Tolerance
Occasional miscalculations are bound to take place...
ANCIENT
CUTE
Dempsey's Bar
Mortgaged to the hilt?
Objects of War.
Tall Guy.
Pink Freud and his mother.
A boy and his dog.
Why does this rabbit look nervous?
Happier Times
False God.
Political Satirist
Albino Squirrel .
Red faced congressman slinking home after a few co...
Hang on tight... to what?
Will there be riots? And police on horseback?
We Are All Terribly Worried.
Confused on Main Street and Wall Street.
This guy became famous lampooning Politicians duri...
Viagra changes the face of Magic.
Tidal Wave of Calamity
what do democrats belie? is the name of this pictu...
Pitfals in the Way of your Goals
This guy has an interesting style
How did we get here?
Panic to be contained?
Simple Arithmetic
When does this all end and how does it end?
Advice Please
Bankrupt Economics - Washington Post
Tom Wolfe observes the NY Scene
Financial A.I.D.E.S.
Cimbing the ladder of success requires rest and re...
Let history be the judge
Seek to buid bridges not walls.
Seeking the support of friends
count your blessings
Celebrate the Moment!
Soft Landing
We need a guy with a crystal ball.
Hot Tub.
Pacific Northwest rainforest
Look to the Future and be Confident
Make Love not War
Let us Pray.
Give them circuses
Banks
Stockbrokers
Drug dealers
Canada is a safer place.
NelsonMandella spent 25 years in prison for his be...
Don't sweat the small stuff.
Smoke?
Don't Blink!
Of course, I'm in a bad mood.
Why do I drink?
Fighting over the public's money
Congress
The public waiting for Congress
warren buffett
Greed feasting on high yields. Waiting for the Sl...
Bond Traders
The Guy that got away.
the Press
Wall Street
Federal Reserve
Who should go to jail?
Banks are for sale.
Who do we blame?
Bob Marley songs start making sense.
Clowns are rude.
My dog has a look of concern.
People are getting weird.
The Russians are Coming.
you lost the money. Now what?
Are we getting the facts?
It all started out innocently enough...
we all get anxious at times like this.
When Pigs fly, everything will be o.k.
Be Happy
Hope for
The Pundits sound scared
Who knows how bad it will get and what else have t...
We are already in a Bear Market
Where is Bloghistan?
Is it about the crude, dude?
Iran wants to make a Bomb and they are already thr...
Temple Guards
Never Give Up
Ship of Fools
Boaring
When in doubt...
Its not the return on my money that worries me. I...
Hatching a Plan
Would she do a worse job than George?
Subprime loans have some real victims in a neighbo...
Young George
My solution.
I know it sounds like a lot of money but think of ...
Bailout or ...?
Choice
Wall Street - Main Street?
Remember Merrill Lynch?
Is this an advertisement for the car's suspension?...
Exuberant youth is a wonderfull thing.
Frogs are dying.
Read Labels and know your ingredients
Golf Anyone?
Red Indian
Frogs are fun and threatened
Ideologies
Technology
Values
Natural Selection or Intelligent design?
Bookworm
Outcomes of over speculation in something not well...
Simpler Times
U.N. Inspector
Piss on it.
Chavez?
I helped create the Bomb.
How do they see the Presidential Debate?
Is this Irony?
Controversey
Texas Govenor goes on to be Worst President in U.S...
Messing with Nature and the Stem Cell Revolution
Super Powers Jockeying For Position Never Ends.
The Poor are always there to be helped.
Culture Contaminates
More China News
Is he our friend?
China, the ascending World Power?
We live with many rules of conduct.
Pakistan has the Bomb
Golden Rule
Monkey See Monkey Do and the Madness of Crowds
Russia
Finding Balance
Define Success and make it your Big Picture
Why form good habits?
Is America the new Roman Empire?
To do List
soprano
Tom Wolfe
writing how to's
writers quoted
Weight
Time doe not manage itself
Charles Bukowski -thoughts on love
Thinking of you
Symptoms
Stress
Momentum
S.E.C.
Dumb Little Man
Hell?
Randy Pausch
Proposals
Negotiate
Motivate you
more quotes
more quotes
from NYT's memory
Plan
Leaders
Journal tips
Integrity
Think Ahead
home office
Good
Rid yourself of these habits
New habits
improve yourself
Focus
Take care of your body
Desiderata 2
Desiderata
Six Thinking Hats
Dan Dennett
Communicate
Committment
quotes
Take responsibility
De-clutter by any means possible!
Make Lemonade
Alcohol abuse and dependence
Self Management
Buddha's 4 Noble Truths
Hal Urban
to do lists
Kaizen
GRIT
Persistence
Repetition
Pitfalls to Achieving Goals
Getting Organized
Quit Drinking
Good Objectives
Motivation through Mission
addiction
Getting the right things done.
Idea
Thumbs Up!
Monty Python said it best. Remember?
Always look on the bright side of life.
Daily Actions
What direction to take in Life?
Good luck or good management.
Big Dreams are your Best Motivators
The Devil made me do it; better known as excuse m...
Life rewards action
Values
Make careful decisions, then pull the trigger.
Life rewards Action so do it now!
Life is managed, not cured.
Perfect the present to attract a better future.
Attitude
Mindfulness
Focus
FAILURE
Interdependence
7 Habits of Successful People
Look To This Day
Then and Now
Philosophy of Changing Habits
Keeping a Journal
Change can be a matter of a Simple Formula.
Change is a constant.
Think of your life as a path
Corvus Monedula in the genus of crows and ravens
Jackdaw
Arnold
Will Power Fades
Habit Change
Compass Needed
Life Changing Formulas are hard to find.
