Helping Me Help Myself
One Skeptic, Ten Self-Help Gurus, and a Year on the Brink of the Comfort Zone
Ratings2
Average rating3.5
15
One Skeptic, Ten Self-Help Gurus, and a Year on the Brink of the Comfort Zone
Ratings2
Average rating3.5
Grappling with her lifelong phobia of anything slick, cheesy, or remotely claiming to provide self-empowerment, Beth Lisick wakes up on New Year's Day 2006 with an unprecedented feeling. She is finally able to admit to herself that she's grown tired of embracing the same old set of nagging problems year after year. She has no savings account. Her house feels unorganized and chaotic. She and her husband never hang out together. The last time she exercised regularly was as a member of her high school track team almost twenty years ago.Instead of turning to advice from the abundant pool of local life coaches, therapists, and healers readily available on her home turf of northern California, Beth confronts her fears head-on. She consults the multimillion-dollar-earning pros and national experts, not only reading their bestselling books but also attending their seminars and classes. In Chicago, she gets proactive with The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. In Atlanta, she tries to get a handle on exactly why "women are from Venus," and in a highly comedic bout on the high seas of the Caribbean, she gamely sweats to the oldies on a weeklong Cruise to Lose with Richard Simmons. Throughout this yearlong experiment, Beth tries extremely hard to maintain her wry sense of humor and easygoing nature, even as she starts to fall prey to some of the experts' ideas, ideas she thought she'd spent her whole life rejecting. Beth doesn't think of herself as the typical self-help victim. But is she?
Reviews with the most likes.
Enough laugh-out-loud moments to make it work (see chapters on money and on the Richard Simmons cruise), but pretty much peters out before it's over...
I read this over spring break, but I seem to have forgotten to add it to my list of books read this year.
Didn't I already read this book? No, it wasn't this one, but the idea behind it was exactly the same. The book is Practically Perfect in Every Way and in it the author attempts to try to improve herself by reading self-help books. Beth Lisick does the same thing, but she also decides to try attending a workshop by the author of the self-help book. She feels, by the end of her year, that she has improved, unlike our Practically Perfect author. Both authors, sadly, spent an awful lot of money attempting to be better people, buying books, attending workshops, traveling to meet self-help gurus. Tax write-offs, I guess.
