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The Side Effects of Self-Help

• Posted by Theresa on June 15th, 2006 filed in Book Review, Believe It or Not, Self-Help

Here is another look at self-help. Notice especially the portion in red. I can relate to his observation.

I do not want to diminish what I have learned from the “greats” because I have learned and applied many of their philosophies. And it has worked for me in many areas of my life. But none of “them” had ever gotten me all the way to my dream. And then last year I found Jack Canfield and The Success Principles.

Jack had his principles outlined in an easy to follow, step by step procedure. I vowed to read each step, do it, and not move onto the next step until I was done. (It is easy to plow right through a book to read all the good stuff and promise to come back and do the work…and then never quite get to it because you are onto something else.)

I did it…step by step…I blogged about it (Me ‘n’ Jack)…I even wrote Jack and told him how well it was working.

And then everything fell apart for me. I felt let down and angry at Jack. I did everything he said - why didn’t it work? I felt like such a loser. I was depressed. It took me a long time to get over it (I’m still not all the way over it, Jack).

So it was a relief to me to have Steve say to me to quit reading self-help books. I didn’t have the energy to start over with somebody else’s list.

Does that mean I will never read another self-help book? No, probably not. Just not for awhile. Just not related to my career.

Read this tidbit below and tell me what you think.

Ever since America began to wean itself off the sociological junk-food of victimization and the much-maligned Culture of Blame, the landscape has been steadily overspread by an antithetical conceit - loosely bracketed as “empowerment” - whose preachments can be summarized as follows: Don’t let anyone take away your dreams. Everything you need to succeed is right there inside you. Believe it, achieve it.

Lost in all the adulation is the downside of this tireless effort to uplift. The overselling of personal empowerment - the hyping of hope - may in fact be the great unsung irony of latter-day American culture, destined to disappoint as surely as the pity party it was supposed to replace. And in a far more insidious fashion.

I have been to sales seminars where the motivational speaker implied to 250 real-estate professionals from the same company that all of them could be the firm’s No. 1 salesperson next year. One of them will be. The other 249 will not.

Consider, then, the psychic costs of coming up short in a philosophical system that disclaims the role of luck, timing, or competition, and admits no obstacles that cannot be conquered by the sheer application of will. If winning is a straight-line function of “character,” then what does that say about those who lose?

From:Overdosing on Oprah
The side effects of empowerment.

By Steve Salerno Sham : How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless

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