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I just read a blog post by Aytekin Tank about why self-help doesn’t work. There are some truths in that post. Yet, I wanted to publish a response to express my objections. Let’s discuss some of his arguments.

What works for everyone is different. Therefore, self-help content won’t work for you.

I partially agree with the first sentence. I completely disagree with the second sentence.

People are different. Their backgrounds are different. Their challenges are different. Therefore, you can’t come up with a solution that would apply to everyone in each situation.

Yet, people have similarities. There are strategies that work for the majority of people, if not most people. If that wasn’t the case, we had to throw all social sciences, including psychology out of the window.

I heard a prominent natural scientist saying that social sciences aren’t real science, and Aytekin’s post is going in the same direction. Needless to say, I disagree.

Here’s an example. Some people have the so-called photographic memory. Others are better off using the spaced repetition method to learn something for the long term. What’s the percentage of people with photographic memory? I bet sufficiently small so that they can be ignored.

Hiring a coach who listens to you and works with you to develop solutions together with you is much more beneficial than reading self-help content alone. Yet, if you can’t afford hiring a coach, consuming self-help content and actually applying the advice might be the next best thing.

Self-help doesn’t make any difference in your life.

After publishing 300+ self-help posts, I started to see some trends. Most people consume self-help content to distract themselves.

When you’re in stress, and you want to distract yourself for a while, you have two options. You distract yourself with something completely irrelevant like dancing cat videos, or you consume self-help content.

Conscientious people feel bad for distracting themselves with something completely irrelevant, but it’s an acceptable compromise for them to distract themselves with self-help material because they think that they’re doing something good for themselves.

Some people just rely on setting goals and consuming self-help content to feel good about themselves and their lives. Unfortunately, it ends there for them. They use their goals as a drug to medicate themselves.

If someone uses self-help content merely as a distraction and doesn’t follow up on what they consume, of course, that content won’t make the slightest difference in their life. Self-help isn’t a magic pill.

If you are that person, you’re better off knitting socks as Aytekin suggests or watching big cats showing affection to each other.

Aytekin mentions a scientific study that examined people who consumed self-help content and found out that it doesn’t make any difference in their lives.

I suggest another scientific study. Let’s study people who consumed self-help content and did the following.

1. They summarized the lessons they learned from the content.
2. They reviewed their summaries periodically, weekly, monthly, quarterly and so on.
3. They did the exercises suggested in the content.
4. They applied the ideas in their lives.

I’m really curious about how the results of such a study will be.

I get where Aytekin is coming from, but I don’t think it’s the self-help industry’s fault that their consumers don’t follow up on their advice.

Well, maybe self-help books should come with warning labels like cigarette packages.

“It won’t work unless you do the work.”

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I’ve been blogging on a daily basis since December 2017. There are more than 300+ posts in my blog. Some of these posts received no views at all, others thousands of views. Yet, I have a burning question about my posts.

Did my posts make a positive impact in the life of a person? If yes, what was it? More important how can I make a greater positive impact in the lives of my readers?

To answer that last question, I need your input. How can I contribute more to your life? What kind of problems bother you? What kind of solutions do you want me to offer in my blog posts?

I tried to answer those questions via Quora. I answered quite some questions over there, but I didn’t receive much feedback.

I feel like people are posting a question on Quora not to find an answer, but just to vent off their frustrations. Once, they have done that, they move on and don’t check the answers they receive.

There’s another problem with Quora. People just post a single sentence questions without any context. Finding answers to self-help questions is usually a Q&A process.

Coaching isn’t about preaching to the coachee your point of view or your solutions. Coaching is about understanding the problem of the coachee thoroughly. It’s about understanding where they are coming from.

Only then, you can work out a solution in collaboration with the coachee. That isn’t possible when you try to answer a single sentence question on Quora.

To learn more about the challenges of my followers, I used to offer free coaching sessions or conversations with me via Skype to my email newsletter subscribers, but no one took that offer yet.

Now, I want to make a similar offer. I’ll offer a free coaching session via Skype to the first ten people who subscribe to my email newsletter below and then reply to the email they received. This offer is limited to the first ten people who take advantage of it. The deadline is October 19, 2018.

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I remember buying my first iPhone, installing a to-do list app on it, and filling it with literally thousands of things to do.

Of course, I never had the time to do all of those things no matter how hard I worked and ended up uninstalling that app and deleting all the to-do items with it.

Maybe, this is my personal subjective perception, but I feel like we live in a society where we don’t acknowledge each other’s successes but only criticize and complain.

I can see why. If a boss had to acknowledge the accomplishments of an employee, the employee wouldn’t work as hard and ask for a raise.

If a teacher acknowledged a student, that student would slack off. If a parent acknowledged their child, that child would get spoiled.

As a result, we create a culture where the successes aren’t acknowledged, but the slightest failure is punished harshly.

The reality is the complete opposite. People work harder when their achievements are acknowledged. If you want to get your employees, students, and children to work hard, recognize their achievements. That’s the basic rule of leadership.

We don’t treat ourselves any different than we treat others. We don’t acknowledge our accomplishments, but we are too quick to find fault with ourselves. That erodes our self-esteem.

There’s a simple rule of communication, relationships, and leadership. It’s called the 5-to-1 rule. To maintain balance in our relationships, we need to give five times more positive feedback for each negative feedback we deliver.

Make no mistake, I don’t mean to play Pollyanna and never tell people what they did wrong. That’s unfair to you, to them, and to everybody. If you don’t give them constructive criticism, you’re robbing them of valuable growth opportunities.

However, every instance of constructive criticism needs to be balanced with five cases of positive feedback. Otherwise, your constructive criticism undermines the self-esteem of that person, and their performance degrades over time.

The 5-to-1 rule not only applies to your relationships with others but also to your relationship with yourself. If you don’t give yourself those five instances of positive feedback, no one else will give them to you. That’s the sad reality of our culture.

Especially, people who are ambitious and interested in personal development find a lot of faults with them. Yet, they don’t pay any attention to their achievements at all. For that reason, I recommend you an exercise.

Get yourself a notebook. Write down every task you have completed and everything you’ve done right throughout the day. Every time, you write an entry in this accomplishments log, take a moment to let that emotion of accomplishment sink in.

Close your eyes, take a deep breath, feel the victory, no matter how small, and take a warm bath in those pleasant feelings of satisfaction and fulfillment. Do this every time you enter an item in your log as well as at the end of the day, week, month, quarter, and year. Do this every day for a decade and see what kind of a life you’ll have!

Don’t worry, you won’t be spoiled. On the contrary, you’ll be motivated to get even more of those feelings and attack the next task on your to-do list.

We think that if we keep a long to-do list and find a lot of faults with ourselves, we’ll grow a lot and we’ll get a lot done. That might sound rational on the surface, but in practice, that approach is a recipe for burnout.

You can come up with a point of improvement or two, but remember to come up with five accomplishments for each POI. The more you acknowledge your own accomplishments, the more accomplishments you’ll create in your life. Your success then will be a self-fulfilling prophecy.