Date Posted: May 14th, 2010
So my new favorite blog is Havi Brooks’ Fluent Self. (My favorite because she explores ways to break through mental blocks about mindful business and marketing, things I’m dealing with right now.) She does a weekly check-in as a form of therapy and a way to let readers get to know her better, and I’ve decided to go ahead and try it too. Basically in the Check-in I go through what I’m working on, how I’m doing on it, and any insights I’ve gotten (or may have gotten). Here’s what I’ve been working on/dealing with this week:
Wedding
Oh man, this has been eating my time and energy. (In case I haven’t mentioned it, the wedding’s on June 6th. Less than a month away!) Some of the energy/time eating’s been due to worry. Some of it’s been having to face uncomfortable (but good!) things like writing up vows. Some of it’s been guilt at not having personally made much progress on the gowns in a while. (My friends have been incredibly helpful, though.) Here’s what I’ve learned:
- I have great friends. Seriously. They’ve been so helpful and supportive… in an unconditional way. I don’t know how to thank them enough. I don’t know the right way to say thank you.
- I don’t have this money thing down. This has to do with the “I don’t know how to thank my friends”. Part of me thinks I should give a cash gift to thank certain friends that have been over-the-top helpful. Another part of me thinks any gift I could afford to give would be less than what their work is worth. It has to do with the “No one Pays for Thanksgiving Dinner” problem. I want to stay firmly in “social norms”, but I don’t know how to do that. I’m sure they’d be alright if I didn’t strictly give anything, but I still want to. I just don’t know.
- I’m better at being a manager than a producer and I feel uncomfortable about it. When I look back on the past few weeks I haven’t made that much. I’ve made my hat, and I’ve attempted to make the hats for my bridesmaids, and even on those hats I’ve gotten other people to do significant parts of them. Things have been getting done, but I feel weird that I’ve mostly been in the position of “tell others what to do” or “tell someone they’re on the right track” more than I’ve actually been producing.
- *Whispers* I kinda like being a manager. Ok, I said it. It feels good to be in power. And scary. And guilt-inducing. “Only bad people like power.” etc. etc. But things are getting done… I’m just not doing them. No one resents me at the moment (except perhaps some family… but that’s neither my problem nor related to this issue) so I must be doing something right.
- It’s a good idea to not expect your friends to do anything. One thing is ask people to help but not expect them to come through. If they do, I’m thrilled. If they don’t, that’s OK too. This way I totally avoid resentment. Not everyone’s in the same position to give, and that’s alright.
- It’s hard to apply this to my family. All of us have expectations. And resentment. It’s not pretty.
Good thing: I think this wedding is going to happen. 
Yay!
Guilt
I’ve been afflicted with guilt since… at least elementary school. I remember walking to the bus-stop, worrying and feeling guilty about not having worked on homework that was due in a few days. My hope was that I’d do the right thing in order to avoid the self-punishment. It’s almost never worked, but I feel like there has to be some sort of consequence for me when I don’t keep my promises. I’m starting to see that this reasoning is flawed, but it’s a long-ingrained habit.
Here’s a list of things I’ve learned/realized about my guilt problem:
- I’ve been doing this for a long time. See above.
- I don’t know what a life without guilt looks like. Do I go around breaking promises all the time? With no punishment, why should I be good?
- Hey! That sounds familiar! It’s the “Without the Church people would lose their sense of morality” argument. That’s clearly false. “Good requires Guilt” is probably also false, maybe even for the same reason.
- Still don’t know how to deal with me not keeping my promises. The best of I’ve come up with so far is to:
- Figure out why I broke it.
- If it’s because it’s something I don’t actually want to be doing, I forgive myself and move on.
- If it’s for some other reason I first apologize.
- Then I do whatever I can to fix it.
So, in keeping with that. I’m sorry I didn’t update last Saturday’s post like I said I would. I’m not sure when I’ll get to it. Right now this blog is, sadly, not quite my top top priority. Aside from the obvious tops of Relationships and Work, Wedding comes first right now. Then Blog. Then everything else. I still want to edit that post because I want to improve my writing, but editing takes time and energy I have a hard time providing right now.
Not sure how much I like this method for guilt-dealing mechanism.
So that’s my check-in for this week. Methinks this will be a good way for me to get in my “one post a week” minimum (and let you get to know me a bit better).
Tags:
Character-Development, Emotional Health, Family, Leadership.
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Date Posted: May 8th, 2010
Since in twitter I promised that I’d post an article this morning, here’s a draft of the one I was planning to post. I’ll be revising it a bit in the afternoon, so consider yourself warned. 
Dear Monique,
Whenever I hear people talk about self-help, usually at least one person says they “don’t do self-help” or they “don’t like navel-gazing”. I don’t get it. Is “navel gazing” bad? Why do so many people dislike self-help?
Confused-
-Self-conscious about Self-help
Dear Self-conscious,
To answer your first question, No, I don’t think navel gazing is ever bad as long as you keep the purpose of navel-gazing (or self-help or self-work) at the front of your mind when you’re doing it. The purpose being to get over the mental-block that’s holding you back from doing what you want to do.
When people complain about navel-gazers they’re either complaining about people who perpetually plan to change their lives but never actually do or the people that refuse to accept feedback from their friends or the people that seem to think that their lives will change just by reading a book. In other words, they’re complaining about people that have forgotten why they’re working on their problems. If they hadn’t forgotten, the planners would start taking steps to change their lives, the feedback-ignorers would at least listen to the thoughts of their friends, and the readers would know there’s more to change than reading.
Get in the habit of asking yourself “what have I done today to work on my mental-blocks?” If the only thing you’ve done is read another article or book… that’s not enough. If you’ve written out a plan, that’s not enough. (You need to do at least one thing on your plan.) If you’ve haven’t sought out the advice of your support group, you might want to do that. Etc. When you honestly answer this question, you’ll know you’re not in danger of being the kind of navel-gazer that annoys people.
That said, you can do all this and people will still freak out when you tell them you like self-help. But that’s their problem, not yours.
To answer your second question, “Why do people dislike self help?”, I think it has to do with two misconceptions: Self-help = Narcissism and Self-help products are useless and/or are made by con-artists.
I think the self-help = narcissism idea comes from that fact that self-help has “self” in the name (that’s gotta mean you’re selfish, right?) and that people who read the books, know the theory, but don’t have the courage and humility to practice the theory are really annoying. They feel so good about themselves and yet there isn’t all that much to feel good about. 
Of course, deep down, their LINK heart of hearts knows they’re lying to themselves, but that’s hard for us to see.
The thing is, if you are able to practice the theory then you become more compassionate, more self-less because now that you aren’t dealing with your old problems you have the capacity to care more for others.
The “Self-help books are useless and written by con-artists” misconception is a bit more complicated. There’s no grade level for self-help books. If you pick one up at random there’s a good chance you aren’t in the right place emotionally to make use of them. They’re either so basic you think the content is common sense (Someone’s making a profit from this?!) or their past you. (I could never implement this. I don’t understand how anyone could live like this.)
And even the ones that are at your level may not be the right “vibrational match” for you. For instance, Getting Things Done and First Things First have the same underlying goal, (to get you in a place where you can work on things that are important to you) but the solutions for getting there are very different. Getting things done provides a straightforward, flexible method for getting the garbage out of your head and on paper. First Things First focuses on figuring out what you want in life and letting go of the idea that balance means doing everything important to you every day. Both have good ideas, but one may make a lot more sense to you than the other. If you picked up the wrong one you could get the wrong idea about the genre. You might think that all (or most) self-help books are useless.
Also, there’s no degree program for self-help. The closest you can get is a psychology degree, and I’ve read books by psychologists haven’t been very good. (Predictably Irrational and anything by Wayne Dyer come to mind. ) And a few well-known self-help writers have gotten incredibly rich off of their advice. It makes you wonder what their motives really are.
In any case, I’ve found self-help books to be very useful. You probably have too. They don’t always work. After a while you find a lot of them say the same things. But more often than not I get some insight into my mental-blocks. And it’s not a huge monetary investment either. I get all my books from the library and only buy the ones I’m likely to want to read again. No worries about supporting con-artists.
So Self-Conscious, there’s no need to be self-conscious about your finding value in self-help stuff. You aren’t a bad person for working on yourself; in fact you’re without a doubt a good person for making the effort. If you’re ever unsure of the value of navel-gazing, recall a time when it has helped you get over some mental-block. That always helps me.
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