Let’s admit it. We have all had the thought that self-help is stupid. Often we find that understanding to be complimentary to “Why do I have to do all this damn healing?” At least that was my experience. I have felt both incredibly overwhelmed and underwhelmed by this entire self-help thing. I have even questioned myself and my ability to truly step into healing, considering my childhood trauma was so impactful in the way I used to show up for myself. Having an ACE Score of ten really fucked me up.
I remember the first time I read a self-help book, Eckhard Tolle - A New Earth. It was a gift from a friend’s girlfriend. This was the summer of 05,’ and I was in a pretty dark place. I was nineteen, working full-time at Wendy’s as a manager. Instead of spending the summer drinking, hooking up, and staying up late, I was telling teenagers and people old enough to be my father not to oversalt the fries. Not to mention I worked awful hours and had no social life. Needless to say, that book was divine timing because I needed some kind of meaning in my life.
Fast forward to today, and I have consumed self-help ad nauseam. Hell, I even wrote a self-help book myself, and do you know what? Self-help is stupid, but only when you don’t create a framework around it. About eight years ago, I found myself having an existential battle - does self-help work, or am I wasting my time and money? All signs point to this shit working, but there are so many snake oil salesmen that it’s hard to shift through the garbage to find the gold. I can say for sure that there is a lot of gold as you browse the catalog, but sadly that isn’t always the case.
I found myself seeking something that I was not getting in those damn books, courses, seminars, and classes. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it; something in me wanted to stop entirely, and yet I kept going deeper; more pages, more videos, more conferences, more, more. Why? I needed to know that there was something more than in life than abuse and being in that place where I felt like I was always going to be a victim.
In all those ten-thousand, meh, call it twenty-thousand hours of learning, there was one thing that changed my perspective on self-help, and it came right at the moment that I was about to throw in the towel, say fuck it, and go about my day. I had a paradigm shift in what I considered self-help to be. I was looking at it through the wrong lens. I was expecting a final solution. I was hoping that I would read Tony Robbins, Brene Brown, Tim Ferris, Eckhart Tolle, Ray Dalio, Carol Dweck, Tara Brach, or any one of the bazillion Seth Goddin books and have some kind of life-altering experience when in fact, as you probably can guess, it didn’t happen. What did happen is that I changed the way I was thinking about self-help as a whole. I stopped seeking a definitive moment of change and embraced the truth that self-help is ongoing. This carousel doesn’t stop.
I felt a sense of relief that I now understood that this healing journey doesn’t just end, and I shifted how I think about self-help. I ask myself this question - can I learn one thing from one person who I assume is an expert in their craft or field and apply that to my life, even if it takes three hundred pages to get there? Yes. Then I ask - if I have reached a plateau at this stage, how to I reassess the direction that my life is going? Finally, if I remove the parameter that this journey magically ends on the day, can I continue to move forward without judgment but with curiosity?
There will always be a part of me that thinks self-help is stupid because, to be honest, I hate that I have to fix the problems that I didn’t cause. I didn’t sign up for child abuse nor the ramifications that carried with the abuse, but it happened. What can I do other than creating change in my life for me? The answer, as I have found, is that I can show up, or I can blame the world. The latter is much easier, that’s for sure, and I did that for a long time. But I can’t help but think if I put myself in the position of always learning and being the learner, I can create the change that I need, which may one day directly impact the world.
At the end of the day, we as individuals define meaning in our lives, and I expect that I have another twenty-five thousand hours of learning ahead.
Until next time my friend…
Be Unbroken,
-Michael
P.S. You can take my brand new 1-hour course: The Key to Healing for FREE. Click Here:www.linktr.ee/michaelunbroken
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