Self-help doesn’t work – until you’re ready to hear the message. To use another cliché: The teacher will come when the student is ready. The self-help field is often maligned as pop psychology, but it does the job for those of us who like the summarized, pre-digested version as a starting-point for further research. And, often enough, the short version is sufficient for our needs.
The field of self-help is as vast as people’s “issues”. If a particular issue isn’t an issue for you, well, you get to skip that section of the bookshelf. Just make sure that you don’t dismiss that issue just because you’re too uncomfortable asking yourself whether it might not be an issue for you after all. Not that I’m speaking from experience or anything.
The advice ranges from the near-mystical to the highly scientific. From marketing shills to philosophers. From trite to deep. And then there are a few genuinely life-changing books. They will be different books for different people. Sometimes the entire book profoundly changes our outlook. Sometimes it’s only a line, only one thought in an otherwise unremarkable book, that triggers a profound insight or drives a change. And sometimes it’s just that the author puts our personal experience of the world into words that instinctively ring true. That make us feel seen and understood. Even if we don’t learn anything new, this can be a powerful thing. A validation of our experience. The realization that we’re not alone.
There’s another benefit as well. Not only do we gain insight into how our own minds work, but we also get a glimpse of how other people tick. How they can see and react to the same events in ways that are diametrically opposed to our own. How people can take decisions that make no sense at all – to us. It can be extremely helpful in our relationships and interactions with others to see the world from their perspective.
For writers, this window into other people’s minds is invaluable. It lets us write characters who are very different from us and show their actions in a more authentic and believable way. It lets us take the characters deeper and make their actions and motivations more coherent and compelling.
Just for that, reading in the self-help category is useful. And if we glean a few insights to apply in our own lives, so much the better.