Self-help books suck
 

Has any self-help book ever helped you? I’m very curious, because I think the majority of them are full of fluff and bullshit.

I find them to be very impractical and vague. They focus way too much on attitude and not enough on skill and technique. The few that is practical, the information is common sense! Stuff that I already know.

Common themes that self-help books focus on that I think is a crock:
*You will succeed if you just try hard enough
*Every thing will fall in its place if you just be yourself
*Hard work and being a good person will get you far in life (it can help, but it is not the magic bullet)
*Get a promotion/Find you husband/Build a mansion in 30 seconds or less!!!
*Too much emphasis on motivation, attitude, and self-esteem/confidence
*People are generally good and have your best interest
*The power of positive thinking (no pun intended)

Now, not every single self-help book falls into the above categories. One book that has helped me in leadership, strategy, and competition was The Art of War.

I’ve learned that in order to help yourself you have to learn from real life experience and observations of other successful/happy people.

I love it!! I'm a volunteer facilitator at a divorce recovery seminar, and they always have about 40-50 self help books for sale there. The newbies snap them up like candy, but the facilitators all tease about "buying another self help book that you'll never really read all the way through."

As part of an experiment, a few of us tried certain books or authors. I can't remember all of the results, but the books by Barbara DeAngelis seemed to be the ones that were the least degrading, and most on target.

Ok, just to throw this out there, I went through some really rough personal times when I was younger (basically, 13-16 really sucked pretty hardcore for me, depression/body issues/social stuff). My mom got me that "Don't sweat the small stuff, and it's all small stuff" book. I never cracked the cover. When you're having rough times, you feel like no book can really understand you. I refuse and I mean REFUSE to go to a shrink...any person you have to pay to listen to and act like they care about you...nope, won't do it. But I found a lot of strength in music. Just good, loud, hard, thrashy music. That and a really life changing camping trip with some kick ass chicks my own age really turned life around for me, turning me in to the well rounded and "outspoken" woman I am today (mwuwahaha)

The only "self-help" book I've ever really read is Stephan Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It has really impacted my way of thinking and the way in which I tend to act on the world.

However, I know that the only reason why it's been so helpful for me was that I took a leadership class where the book was the main text, and the habits were presented over the course of the semester one by one. I then became a TA for the class and had a semester of training (basically taking the class again for no credit) and then a semester of being a TA...so I went over the book three times with help from people who could explain it to me (or that I had to explain it to).

I think that self help books can work, but they require a lot of work and a lot of time and effort to make worthwhile. And any real change is going to have to be through continued self reflection which is extremely difficult for a lot of people...If you don't go in with the right attitude, youre destined to fail from the beginning.

Wow, who told you that?

A "shrink" is someone who's educated and trained to be able to identify patterns. Patterns of behavior, thinking, etc. Which is why they can help *so much* with certain kinds of depression, eating disorders, etc. Often (say, with depression) you get so off-track with how you're thinking and reacting to the world around you that you "forget" you didn't used to be miserable all the time. A therapist/counselor/whatever can help you identify ways to change that.

Of course if you have a chemical imbalance in the brain, this will only be so effective.






sidenote: I saw an interview with Tony Robbins once and he said something that I thought was really great: exercise. He maintained that it changes your whole outlook, makes you more aggressive (in a good way!) and can have a huge effect on how you run your life, basically.

I've read a lot of self help books because I have a general interest/hobby in social psych and personalities. They are generally helpful.

I also go to therapy once a week and it really does help...I believe EVERYONE could use therapy...Think of how much better off some of the people YOU know would be if they just had someone to talk to and to tell them what the hell they were doing to screw up their life!

We are all just seeking keys to a better ride on this trip called life. How you get through it is your choice!

PS: Exercise is a great depression lifter! Helps me a LOT! I can't see ever NOT exercising again in life...Feels great!

amen. Jumping up and down on the bed listening to "Lithium" or "My Michelle" at full blast is a way better tonic than any self help book.

That sounds like an exceptionally closed-minded thing to say, and I wonder how you formed such an inaccurate impression of psychiatrists. I agree with everything HotDamnImAPhiMu said, and I'll add that the point of a psychiatrist isn't to "act like they care" but to diagnose and treat you, just like any other doctor. Would you not seek treatment for cancer because your oncologist is paid to "act like they care" about your treatment?

keep in mind that there are counselors and counselors . . . a lot of people could benefit froma good success coach.

I didn't think sexual experimentation had so many benefits . .. ;)

It's just the distrustful part of me. I could never trust them, especially at the cost. Just how I am. As far as physical stuff goes...that's something that can be traced and solved and physically manifested to me. But someone saying to me that my depression is because my dad didn't love me enough or some crap just wouldn't fly with me. I'm not saying that physchiatric treament doesn't have merits, of course it does, but just not for me.

And as far as the kick ass chicks I met on my Outward Bound trip...they just showed me that being ridiculous and happy was easy if you just took things one step at a time and took the time to look around and realize that there's a whole world out there for me, and there's life after high school. It changed my perspective on life (dangling from a rope about 500 ft above a canyon floor does that to you...after the initial panic you look around and go..."This is REALLY COOL!") . And I really look at that as a metaphor for my life so far...while things might really suck and really be terrible, there's so much out there that you can look at and go "This is REALLY COOL!" even though it sucked and took hard work to deal with.

Psychiatrists/psychologists/counselors/therapists only say that in the movies.

In real life they do a lot more *listening* than talking. They're an unpartial person to talk to who doesn't have an interest in your life or what you do, which is great -- you can be like, "I'm thinking of divorcing my husband" and then have a discussion about what lead to that and why you're thinking it's a possibility and what to do now. Instead of spending the next 10 minutes explaining to your best friend HOW you could possibly feel that way about her brother or to your mom, who would rather you fell off that face of the earth than got divorced or your husband who would hold it against you if you tried to work things out.

I think you need more information about what exactly counselors do before you decide they're not for you. To translate it into more physical terms, it sounds like you have strep but you're convinced if you go to the doctor they'll give you a masectomy. That's just not the way they do business.

I'm not so into self help books either. Unless they are going to tell me things I don't know, I maintain I generally know what I need to do: stop procrastinating and get my ass in gear.

I've never really been one to get into self-help books. My major dealt a lot with leadership, leadership training, etc., so I'm pretty well aquainted with the concepts.

I think they're really helpful for some people. There are actives and alums of my chapter that just gobble those things up. In fact, in our alum chapter, one gentleman who is in a leadership position told the rest of us that we were going to study this certain book about teamwork "Like the Bible". I promptly blew his assignment off ;)

-- for some people, they're great. For others, they're pointless.