CONCLUSION – THE POINT OF RECOVERY
This book began with a healthy dose of scepticism towards the self-help industry. And, having stripped it bare of its useful tips and advice, it should conclude the same way. The modern self-help industry is just that: an industry. It has inputs (insecure people like us) and outputs (books and DVDs and lecture tours and surgeries and TV shows and even the odd gizmo). And it has a process: focusing the mind of the input on his or her own happiness and/or fulfilment and/or potential.
As Stephen Covey points out, it has also changed with the times: moving from a 19th-century focus on character building, in which virtues such as hard work and efficiency were promoted, to a thoroughly modern obsession with quick-fix techniques that “cure” our insecurities (in “under an hour”) and bring us instant success, constant happiness and dream fulfilment.
In an age where we want it all now, an industry has sprung up to tell us we can instantly have it all – well, there’s a surprise!
So is my job to tell you that this is impossible? Not really, as even the most avid devourer of the genre is aware of the over-promising of the “dream fulfilment” gurus (although they may still be vulnerable to the promise of a “cure” for their insecurities when, as most psychologists point out, we are hardwired to our inner beliefs). My job has been to try and marry the two – to accept the science, and the monkey as a constant if annoying companion, but to enlist the gurus and gizmos where they are useful for our progress. To try and offer a route for progress despite our inner beliefs – not to offer a rewiring where rewiring is impossible.
In fact, I contend that many of the gurus would quietly accept the charge of over-promising, defending it on those classic grounds that, if we aim high, we’ll land higher than if we aim midway, even if we land lower than the stated objective. This is fine for goal-setting, although obviously contradicts many claims regarding constant happiness (constant frustration, more like). But it is absolutely not fine when tackling psychological conditions such as fear of failure. As stated, self-denial – however deeply held and effectively masked – is no cure. It is a delayed reckoning.
Yet this is a long way from a depressing conclusion. It is a treatise for acceptance, one that states that I am who I am, and now let’s tackle the future. Although even here we have to be careful. Obsessing about anything – the past, the future, us, them – is unhealthy and can steer us down a dark path to nowhere.
Certainly, this is the contention of psychologist Paul Pearsall in his attack on the self-help industry called The Last Self-Help Book You’ll Ever Need (2005). Self-absorption, says Pearsall, can magnify your problems until they feel unmanageable. Pearsall’s contention is that there is “not just one good life” so you should stop looking for it and look for “a good life” instead. His view is that discontentment cannot be cured by consumption, even of ideas. As an alternative, he suggests you pursue his “seven attributes” of a healthy personality:
You cannot have a positive attitude all the time, states Pearsall, who openly questions the idea of clinging to high self-regard no matter what the setback – therefore reducing your ability to be self-critical. Guilt and shame are not always the villains, self-esteem not the only “sacred cow.” Doubt, depression, guilt, even shame can spur people to change for the better, he says, while hope and positivity can wrap people so tightly in their future goals that they miss the present moment.
Instead of self-improvement you should choose a different goal, says Pearsall: enjoying your life. You should therefore savour the present – even the bad bits – instead of seeking happiness in the future.
“There isn’t anything wrong with being depressed,” says Pearsall. “Life and its transitions can be sad. Crying … is not being ‘dysfunctional’. It’s being human.”
English professor Eric G. Wilson takes this a stage further in his book Against Happiness (2008) in which he defends melancholy as a condition. Few people accept a melancholic mood as a potentially beneficial state of mind and the entire self-help industry seems to be geared towards its banishment. Yet Wilson contends that sadness “sparks grand thought, sublime inspiration and vital creativity,” prompting people to “turn away from superficiality and to look deeper into the meaning of things.”
“Melancholia is the profane ground out of which springs the sacred,” is his rather florid take on it (he is an English professor after all), adding that such lows keep the “mind questing, questioning and alive.”
Those that strive for unending happiness, says Wilson, are essentially seeking control. And it is often the lack of control – the feeling of powerlessness – that most concerns the insecure. Yet Wilson quotes philosopher Alan Watts who states that “there is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity.”
Constant happiness is therefore an artificial state, says Wilson, and its pursuit a religion with its own high priests (the motivational gurus) who fuel a hopeless drive to tame a future that is – of course – untameable.
Stephen Covey agrees: “To think we are in control is an illusion,” he says in First Things First (written in 1994 with Roger and Rebecca Merrill). “It puts us in a position of trying to manage consequences.”
Covey’s view is that any paradigm based on control – of time, people or consequences – is bound to fail, so it is pointless to base our happiness on such a quest.
So what should the recovering High-FF seek – especially once we have mastered (or at least understood) our emotions and set in place long-term objectives and a plan for achieving them? Again, Covey has the answer.
“Choosing to serve becomes the most enlightened habit of all,” he writes in The 8th Habit (2004).
Don’t worry, I’m not about to get all touchy-feely in the final analysis. Covey’s very practical advice states that once we stop looking inward and, instead, start looking outward we are on the path to what he calls “enlightenment” but what I would rather call “sustainable recovery.” It might just be the case that the most debilitating High-FF trait of all is self-obsession. And that the most effective counter is the exact opposite – a concern for the other person. Covey’s eighth habit, therefore, focuses on “finding your voice and helping others find theirs.” Voice, in this context, is your “unique personal significance” – the key element of yourself that you can offer others (without becoming the preaching motivational convert, I hasten to add).
I have noticed this at Moorgate. The element of the job that gives me most satisfaction, that has me inwardly punching the air with self-confirmation, is in harnessing the latent writing power of our new employees. When writing my first book I discovered in Strand Books (the famous second-hand bookstore in New York) a book that was unknown in the UK called On Writing Well by William Zinsser (first published in 1976). His practical guide for writing non-fiction – along with his clarity and sincerity and sheer passion for the subject – not only transformed my own writing but stirred in me a desire to pass on his teachings, and some of my own. I became evangelical about good writing on even the driest of subjects (and, boy, do we deal with some dry subjects at Moorgate!).
Certainly, I measure the success of Moorgate as much by our ability to turn out strong copywriters as by our ability to attract new clients or add more zeroes to the bottom line. For instance, one unhappy worker left with the parting shot that his only regret was not having learnt to write so well at Oxford while struggling with his English dissertation. Another satisfied customer, in other words.
So why should you empower others to find their voice? Well, Covey suggests you consider the alternatives. You could try to lead through control, although that is rarely satisfactory and a recipe for conflict, as many High-FFs have discovered. Or you could abdicate responsibility when dealing with people, which may well have been your strategy thus far with obviously unsatisfactory results for your progress. The third – and only sustainable – option, according to Covey, is to help others achieve their goals, making that a primary concern in your endeavours.
You should help others calculate their own long-term objectives and then set about aiding their achievement, opines Covey. If you do this genuinely – meaning that you are not simply recruiting them for your own goal pursuits or trying to neutralize their attack on you – you can create “win–win” empowerment: the idea that your own progress is bound together with the progress of those you encounter, whether this is at work, at home or even in your social life.
This is a fantastically enlightening concept for those with a high fear of failure, in my opinion. Through binding our goals with those of others we have immediately reduced a damaging self-absorption, which puts us in the right frame of mind to radically improve our people skills. We have also unlocked the positive traits that, as we have seen, High-FFs possess in abundance. Our innate creativity and sensitivity, and our strong potential for leadership, can be positively and fearlessly employed because the result is not about us, it’s about them. And by depersonalizing our pursuits the monkey is sidelined, or at least more easily dismissed, because he has no domain over other people.
So far from turning us into overly worthy sandal-wearing do-gooders, helping others achieve their goals may prove to be the High-FF’s most powerful and liberating tool for recovery.