Why I’ve turned my back on self-help…

…even though it might have saved my life.

I can almost certainly credit self-help for allowing me to navigate my way out of a pit of depression so dark I daren’t think about where it could have led. 

By self-help I mean those books and resources that help you re-wire your thoughts and beliefs away from self-destructive and negative thoughts towards a much more positive outlook. So, why, if they were so vital to my own recovery, do I now bristle at the mere mention of the category?

First of all, for context…

I am 47 now but in my mid-30s, I hit ‘the wall’. That wall being the realisation that everything I thought I knew to be true, the lens through which I viewed the world and the choices I had made up to that point were wrong. I knew this to be true because I was desperately unhappy. Furthermore, I realised I had been unhappy for a really long time, it was just that a series of events had exposed what I had been covering up/avoiding for years. 

Up to this point, I had never read a self-help book or tuned into a podcast on the subject because it just didn’t chime. It was woo-woo nonsense and wasn’t for me. I was aware of the category and of my friends who could parrot affirmations someone else had written but I’d thought I was ‘fine’ so didn’t need this kind of thing. 

Then after a breakdown, I went into therapy and so started the slow road to rebuilding myself. That road, however, only starts once you can honestly look at your choices and see how they’ve impacted your life. It’s only once you’re on this road that you can see what you previously couldn’t. It is an extremely uncomfortable, confronting and at times humiliating experience but much like Neo’s ‘red pill’ moment in The Matrix, once you see it, you can’t un-see it.

In my case, I had obviously been anxious since childhood. Always primed to fight or flight. Always edgy, jittery, nervous of something or someone swooping in and telling me off. Tied in with all of that was a feeling of never being good enough. 

Years after I left my job as the Beauty Editor of OK! Magazine, a friend who worked in public relations told me that I clearly had no idea of the ‘power’ I had had during my ten years there. How every beauty PR had wanted to see their products on my pages and would have jumped through hoops to do it. I remember being dumbfounded because my memory, through the lens of anxiety, was of constantly feeling overwhelmed by all the emails and phone calls, of feeling bad I only had room for a certain number of products, of knowing that some brands would never make it onto the page but I’d never be able to tell a brand that, of not having enough time to review every product or attend every launch event or read every press release… The list goes on.

I wished I could be like Ginger from Casino, the perfectly put together woman who glides through any social or professional occasion and whose smile and eye contact is social lubrication enough to make everyone want to be in her presence. In truth, I am less a social butterfly and more the person found in a corner or away from the noise so I can hold a one-on-one conversation. I might have wanted to be the ‘popular girl’ in the room, but through that job I learned that’s not who I am at all.

All this is to say, that I spent years trying to be someone I wasn’t and it was decades of emotional and mental gears grinding against each other and if it hadn’t been for a breakdown, and my subsequent submerging into self-help, I don’t know what would have happened.

Unlike today where your journey into self-help can begin via a 30 second social media clip, I flirted with self-help by making trips to Waterstone’s and lingering furtively by the few shelves containing books by Deepak Chopra, Erkhart Tolle and the like. 

I bought a few, hoping their title would be a path to the enlightenment I’d need. That was my first self-help mistake. I thought all it would take was a book and that once the last page was read I’d be ‘fixed’. I thought all I needed to do was pay such close attention to the script so as to be able to repeat it, swapping out the names and details for my own, and that would be my recovery. All neatly tied up in a bow. I thought the more self-help books I read, the better I’d become.

With therapy though, I came to understand where I had really been going wrong. Why things I’d previously thought were true were lies and, crucially, I began to be able to reframe the events in my life to be learning experiences and begin to see the world through a new, much more positive lens. No self-help book gave me those tools, but in tandem with those realisations - which, if you’ve ever had therapy, you’ll know hit you in waves so you can feel as though you are taking two steps forward and five steps back at all times - I was able to tune into those texts and voices that could help.

The first book that ‘changed my life’ was You Are A Badass by Jen Sincero. It was the first I’d read that felt somewhere close to the experience I was having. It wasn’t penned by some enlightened guru trying to guide you off a path of your own undoing, it was written by a woman who’d found herself living in a garage in her 40s and explained how she had changed her mindset to become, well, rich and successful. 

Then came The Four Tendencies by Gretchen Rubin, Mastery by George Leonard, Ultimate Confidence by Marisa Peer, Year of Yes by Shonda Rimes and Reasons to Stay Alive by Matt Haig.

I also listened, religiously, to The Tim Ferriss Show (it’s no accident my podcast is called The Emma Guns Show!). Every episode he deconstructs world-class performers of all different types from different fields to tease out the habits and routines that can be applied to anyone’s life. It opened up my mind to a whole host of people, perspectives and attitudes that I simply hadn’t encountered before.

For a few years, I was a little piglet suckling at the teet of self-help and I couldn’t get enough. So much so that I started my own podcast in order to be able to have my own conversations with the people I’d heard and been inspired by on other people’s podcasts. 

I enjoyed coming at ‘you can improve yourself’ from a less obvious angle. As much as I might have deep-dived into depression and anxiety with experts including Julia Samuel, Dr Tracy Dennis-Tiwary and Johann Hari, I also tackled more specific issues such as narcissism and the power dynamic of the empath/narcissist with Dr Ramani Durvasula, or unpicked how to advocate for yourself with the former FBI Negotiator Chris Voss, or learned how to mentally and emotionally equip yourself for whatever life throws at you with former secret service agent Evy Poumpouras. I came at mental and physical resilience via conversations with the ‘Ice Man’ Wim Hof and ‘personal trainer to the stars’ Jillian Michaels. I had conversations with people like James McAvoy, the convicted armed robber turned professional athlete, and the former RAF pilot Mandy Hickson. 

Though every conversation was wildly different, each person demonstrated that whatever your circumstances, whether you’re between the President of the United States and an assassin’s bullet, at 30,000 feet in a fighter jet when you get word over the radio that a plane has ‘flown into the Twin Towers’ or facing a double-life order at Her Majesty’s pleasure, you have the agency to change your life, to be and to do better. 

I have over a thousand episodes of the podcast and hundreds of conversations with people I genuinely think are experts and who are exemplary at being able to communicate their expertise in a way that’s accessible and helpful. I presented them to my listeners in the hope they chime with at least one person. In the back of my mind, I’d always think ‘I hope this conversation finds the person who needs to hear it’ when I hit ‘publish’. 

Of course, I also benefitted from these conversations. They helped me with my own issues and being the one asking the questions and having a meaningful discourse only heightened my own experience of their insights. 

Then two things happened at around the same time. 

Firstly, I had suckled enough. I’d fattened myself up on the wisdom of hundreds of guests and I could suckle no more. As much as it’s admirable to want to improve oneself, you can’t always be bogged down in the theory. At some point, you have to go out and put what you’ve learned into practice and that was the point I’d come to. 

It’s much like the modern driving test where you have to pass a theory exam before you are allowed behind the wheel to take your practical test. Getting a 100% of the theory test correct does not mean that you won’t be a liability behind the wheel. Being able to parrot Mel Robbins, Brene Brown and Simon Sinek, no matter how well you think you understand and have interpreted the source material, does not mean you’ve trodden the same path as them and learned the same lessons.

I am a journalist though so whatever my own personal experience, I could have happily carried on having these sorts of conversations for the benefit of an audience for a thousand more episodes, but as I said, two things started to happen at the same time.

In conjunction with my own appetite and enthusiasm for self-help and personal development waning, the space itself seemed to fill with a thousand wannabe gurus. What had been a small corner of self-help books in Waterstone’s turned into a whole department and I was flooded with requests for people to appear on the show so they could share how they turned their life around.

At first I thought ‘Great, more interviewees!’ but there was a change in the air. The inspiring story wasn’t so much inspiring as it was formulaic. It might sound a bit harsh, but I’d heard it all before and many of the stories felt inauthentic and contrived.

I’ve never had Oprah Winfrey on my podcast (if only) but Oprah is a great example of a unicorn story. She has single-handedly travelled a journey that no one else has travelled before or since. Given her humble beginnings, becoming the most successful woman in global media with a personal fortune of over $1billion was not her obvious destiny. Hers is a story that does not need fabrication. It also doesn’t need to be rammed down a listener, viewer or reader’s throat to tell you where the inspiring part is. It’s gobsmackingly and unbelievably motivating.

The same with Arnold Schwarzenegger who I also haven’t had on my podcast (can you even imagine?) but whose life is an example of anything is possible. Poor Austrian boy comes from nothing, moves to America, becomes the strongest man in the world while also studying business and buying up property in Santa Monica before marrying into the Kennedy family and then becoming the highest paid actor in Hollywood before two terms as Governor of California. Excuse me, say that again? You did what?

The point I’m making here is that the very idea of something being inspiring is that it sits alone, it stands out, it doesn’t make sense so you need to make sense of it, it shouldn’t have happened but it did so how did it happen?

Oprah and Arnie were to the self-help space what the original Jaws film was to cinema, if you will, and slowly, as people realised that packaging up a bit of inspiration could be extremely lucrative, everyone started to do it but in most cases you were lucky if you got Jaws 3D.

It just feels like too many people jumping on the bandwagon. One long, dark night of the soul does not make you a self-help guru and of all the people I’ve interviewed who I think are worthy of being able to say they inspire others, none of them do.

I tried desperately to tell Jen Sincero how much she’d impacted my life, but she didn’t accept the glory. Jillian Michaels will immediately say, ‘No, you did the work!’ if anyone tries to credit her with changing their life. Even Tony Robbins, the OG inspirational speaker has stated ‘I am not your guru!’.

I’m turned off by the people who say they want to help you change your life but need your email address and credit card information for the change to really ‘stick’. And seem more interested in followers, going viral and the bottom line than they are in the end-user’s experience.

I stopped doing one-to-one interviews on the podcast about six months ago for a variety of reasons but the sheer volume of life coaches, transformational and mindset coaches etc who wanted a platform became a massive turn off. I hit the roof one day when I received a request to platform a ‘serial impact entrepreneur, investor and conscious DJ’ who wanted to reach my audience. I’m sorry, WTF? 

I’d spent years painstakingly creating episodes that I thought could genuinely inspire, entertain and inform listeners and this is what people think I do? Sure, call me petulant, why don’t you? My first question would be ‘what the heck is a conscious DJ, Sir? And why on Earth wouldn’t you be conscious at work?’

I appreciate, as someone who has platformed many inspiring stories over the years, that I am a part of the problem. I’ve been complicit in the self-help space becoming a hugely lucrative pie that many people now want a slice of.

As I mentioned earlier, the key to any journey of self-discovery is knowing when that journey ends, or at least when it’s time to go it alone, knowing that it’s always there if you need it. The self-help space, as it stands today, seems to want to herd people, like cattle, into a pen where they just keep feeding off the same messaging all while paying handsomely to do so but making little to no progress at all.

I feel quite conflicted because without therapy and without the curiosity and hope that I could change my life, I’d have never fallen so deep into the realm of self-help and personal development and I can’t deny that it did help me hugely. How self-help exists today though, feels very different. It feels mass-produced, low quality and opportunistic, and I’m not sure, in its current form, it’s really helping anyone…