A better way to help yourself
Where most self-help fails
I was looking at the bestseller sections recently and it’s baffling to me why most of that is self-help. This is despite knowing that most self-help advice is actually bullshit. Why do so many people keep consuming it though.
I might have a hunch.
Most self-help advice is designed for two things:
Make you feel good about yourself
Give you hope that you can solve your ‘problems’
However, this is just the solution. To what?
Most of us feel inadequate on a daily basis. We feel we are not enough.
This may often be linked to goals (e.g. I want to be at x position but I’m not there yet) but I think often that is also an illusion. I think feeling inadequate (or to flip it, desiring feeling important) is a core part of human existence.
That inadequacy also comes often from not staying in the present. The moment you think there is something better than your current moment, you see that there is a gap between where you are and where you can be, and that gap leads to inadequacy. To solve for that inadequacy, you assign a goal and work to accomplish it.
How do you actually solve for that feeling of inadequacy?
If I were to break it down from first principles,
you either remove inadequacy
you change your frame
Removing inadequacy
One cause of inadequacy as discussed above is not being present. In that case, the feeling would go away if we are more present. Indeed, a lot of self-help books also preach ‘Stay Present’, ‘Enjoy the Now’ etc. But I think those phrases rarely help.
There can be an entire post on this, but suffice to say that a few practical things are
Do what you love / gives you energy / keeps you in flow state (that is what works majorly for highly ambitious people)
Bring your focus to your body (e.g. conscious breathing, motion etc)
Changing your frame
Watch this video from 1:04:49 to 1:05:11 (and more if you’re curious)
(Summary below if you want to skip it)
To paraphrase,
You are born enough. Then you surround yourself with the layer of not being enough. And then you keep feeding off that layer. It is the layer that creates that feeling of inadequacy. Not actually being not enough.
I think this is much harder to pull off, but might actually be a surgery than a bandaid. Truly believing that one is enough requires a lot of conscious energy and faith.
This again comes back to two things I’d mentioned in this article on changing your reality:
Frame —> change from scarcity to abundant frame about oneself
Agency —> figure out ways to not feel inadequate
Most self-help advice is actually to help you change your frame. But I don’t think that’s enough. E.g. If you’re poor / bankrupt etc, you might want to not just index on frame, but also agency.
But agency is also a deeply personal thing. What gets you to move and get things done may be very different from some other person. And that’s what self-help can’t get right. You have to have awareness about yourself and figure out ways that work for you (through a lot of trial and error).
So if I were to sum up a better way to help yourself:
Figure out what works for you to be in flow. And remember that you’re enough.
