Self Help is an Inside Job
I was putting the cart before the horse as my core self-construct was what needed realigning first and then the rest would follow. I needed a new view of what I was! The only result I had achieved from the self-help books I had read over the past 30 years was frustration. Now, I apparently had all the answers I needed from the various masters but still, based on my rules, I had no more success than before. I didn’t need techniques I needed a better understanding of model development and the personality construct.
Of course all the while I was adding insult to my clueless condition by wasting money on the multitude of products that promised to reveal the “secret”, all supported by the slick advertising of the billion dollar self-improvement industry. There is a saying that “Trying to Teach a pig to sing simply frustrates the teacher and annoys the pig”. Or in the case of the self-help industry enriches the teacher and leaves the student in an even deeper hole of despair at their apparent failure to thrive. The Pig was never going to sing and I was never going to change. As it happens I didn’t need too and nor do you!
Maybe you’ve been down the same well travelled road; of course, they say all you need to do is follow in their strategies. It’s easy; set goals, repeat affirmations, visualise that you already own the result you seek, maintain a journal, look at everything with a positive attitude, follow Oprah’s book list and then to really make you feel inferior, the grandest lie of them all, realise that your life is the way it is because of the choices you have made up to this point. This one is even a favourite of neoliberal governments. Yet still, nothing changes. Back to being the victim.
By now you truly buy into the idea that there must be something wrong with you if you have the same information and opportunity as all these successful people, people regularly paraded in the media for us all to emulate. Those who just did it. Nineteen years old and already with three houses. Another, 25 years old and already running a multi-million dollar corporation. Shooting stars maybe, who knows? Even the Prime Minister of my native land, New Zealand, was bought up in long-term, rented public housing. He managed to earn millions as an Investment banker prior to returning to take up politics before he was 50. He did it by sheer hard work and determination! So why haven’t you?
The neoliberal takeaway of all this orchestrated propaganda? If you’re in poverty and picking up a welfare check you only have your lazy attitude to blame and you deserve whats coming to you, while those that are living in high cotton, they worked hard and got the reward they deserve.
So the very issues that convinced you, you needed the training to be a better mousetrap actually reinforces your existing opinion of yourself. As you know if you are reading this, you are your own harshest critic so your anxiety becomes more entrenched and your suffering more focused.
Of course in a World of six billion plus people, there’s always going to be someone doing something amazing that makes your life look pathetic. Just like there’s a murder or a storm or a natural disaster somewhere in the World that gets reported instantly to even the most remote corners of the World. With an agenda, it’s very easy these days to subject society to all manner of bad news that when edited with that agenda in mind can cause us all to react in a predetermined, predictable manner. This is especially true now that multinational corporations and governments have access to vast quantities of personal data mined from social media.
So it seemed like everyone but me had it sorted. I know it went through my head when we had lost everything, how did others cope, when we had trouble tieing our shoes, let alone making it to the end of each week. It seemed that there were just so many obstacles and minefields waiting to blow up in our faces.
I’m sure this sense of anxiety is even more marked for millennials who are faced with change at the speed of light and well organised political factions constantly spreading their ideas using viral memes with the blanket bombardment of social media. More than ever we all need to be awakened to our duality and how we are captive to our ego illusion. A captivity that leaves us open to being victimised by those who want to use us for their power games. Once we know that we are creators and not receivers we can see through the manipulation of others. It’s easy to do, but also impossible because Pigs don’t know Pigs stink.