How to Help Yourself With Self-Help

Book excerpt: Are Self-Help Books Good for Anything? Have you ever bought a self-help book, read it cover to cover, only to find that nothing changed for you? How many hours have you wasted this way, expecting to improve your life by simply being inspired by something you read? The hard truth is that it’s easy to read self-help, but difficult to implement it in real life. First you need to figure out what exactly to read, and then you need to know what exactly to do with the advice you find inside. The world of self-help has a lot of traps, and throughout my years as a voracious reader, I’ve fallen into probably all of them. Now, as both a reader and an author of self-help books, I’d like to share with you some advice on how to use self-help books in a way that will actually help you achieve real-world results. Here are some of the topics I cover in my short guide How to Help Yourself With Self-Help: - The 5 most common pitfalls of self-help and how to avoid them (you’ve probably fallen victim to most of them). - Tips on how to identify what specific area of your life you should target first in order to benefit the most from reading self-help. - What confirmation bias is, why it’s dangerous, and how to escape it to stay flexible and enjoy consistent personal growth. - How to interpret the advice you get from a book and tailor it to your life circumstances (cookie-cutter approaches don’t work). - Why it’s sometimes better to skip self-help books and what to read instead to help you achieve your goals and become a better person. Don’t let another self-help title become just another book on your shelf. Learn how to read in a more strategic way and, more importantly, act on the advice you get. This short guide can be your first step toward the new you.