A Confession By A Former Self-Help Guru

In this video I will share how for almost 10 years I used to be a self-help guru and also how I eventually realized that being one is one of the worst things you can do. Hey Critical Thinkers! As some of you may already know, for close to 10 years I used to run my own professional martial arts yoga and meditation studio. What many of you probably don't know is that there I was also leading various workshops such as on relationships, better sleep, achieving your goals and much more. Looking back at it all now, I easily realized how silly that was, but at the day it took me a long time to realize that. I was basically a part of the self-help culture and I honestly thought I was doing good. That's actually the fascinating part I find about self-help gurus. As much as myself, at a much younger age, I think that many self-help gurus start out with good intentions. My own desire as well was pretty much always to help people. But the issue was, as much as it is with pretty much all of the self-help gurus, was that I was taking the wrong angle. By the way, before we continue, to make things simpler, from now on I will be referring to self-help gurus as SGs. So what do I mean by the wrong angle? My story of how I tried to become an SG to begin with is actually a great example of that. Ever since I was a child, I always wanted to help others. Since I constantly felt lost and confused myself, I would often go to the bookstores, go to the psychology section and buy tons of self-help books, which was basically packed by them. The answers that I found there at the beginning seemed great. I soon started sharing the advice that I found there to others. Whenever people heard these advice, they also liked them. So to me, it seemed like there's no problem. I was actually feeling like I'm helping them. The problem was that the books didn't really help me. I kept feeling lost and confused most of the time. The advice that I gave to others, although it felt good at the beginning, none of the advice really helped them in the long run. The problem was though that I didn't have enough critical thinking to see that. And I feel that's one of the big issues with self-help culture. The advice that the SGs give, it sounds good at the beginning. It makes you feel good. And most people take that as a sign that it's good advice. Yet if you look at the long run, probably more than 90% of that advice doesn't work. Yet as human beings, we tend to focus on the short term than the long term. And the fact that most of the SG advice doesn't work goes unnoticed. There's a great argument that Steve Salerno makes in his book, Sham, How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless, where he points out that if the self-help books are really so useful and helpful, then how come there are so many? If they would really work, then probably the first few that were released would be enough. Even more so, if you look at most of the SG books, they have dozens of dozens of the same book, just in different variations. But if their first book would really work, then basically there would be no need to continue to publish different variations of it. Yet another problem that the self-help culture has, is that usually the SGs, they put the responsibility entirely on you. They convince you that their advice entirely works. Yet then they continue to say that if it's going to work, depends on you. Whether you will really keep up to it, whether you will continue to apply it, and if you will continue to apply it well. Then when it doesn't work, you start to feel guilty. You think, probably I didn't understand something. Probably I didn't apply it correctly. Coming back to my own story, over the years of trying to be an SG, I started to feel how the self-help culture was burning me out. I kept reading so many books, I kept trying so many things, but I still felt lost and confused. Meanwhile, the funny thing is that I also kept giving advice to others, which is probably the only thing which was really making me feel good. But then that's again ridiculous, because that advice didn't really have much value besides just making them feel good at the moment. My conclusion was, I just need to keep pushing harder. Which is actually kind of one of the things that the self-help culture also suggests. Never give up. Keep reaching for your dreams. They don't tell you that not all dreams are worth pursuing. They don't tell you that their advice may not always work. So you just keep pushing harder, expecting that one day you're going to make it, without making any serious suggestions. I basically didn't have enough critical thinking to realize that it wasn't me that was failing, but actually the advice that I was following was failing me. And yet again, the self-help books, they encourage this type of thinking by putting the blame on you. My desire to help others and the belief that being an SG will be the way, led me to move into a spiritual martial arts yoga meditation school full-time. I spent three years there, living, training and studying there every day. Again, I was feeling like I was doing the right thing. But the problem was, now that I look back, was that the owner of that school, the leader of that community organization, was actually lacking critical thinking almost as much as I did. But he was the authority figure. Everyone around me praised him. Everyone around me believed him. And that made me believe that he knows his thing. After studying there for three years, he eventually told me that I'm ready to open my own school. And so I did. I came back to my country packed with pseudoscience and a bunch of spiritual nonsense, believing that I know all the answers. I'm actually kind of even embarrassed to admit it right now, that I was occasionally leading relationship seminars, sleeping quality seminars, achieving your goals workshops. And you know what my source of knowledge was? It was a bunch of books that I read. It was a bunch of untested nonsense that I learned from my SG. And it was a bunch of small time experiments that I did in my own life, that I used as reference points. I would basically read a few books, try out a few things for a few days. And as soon as it seemed like it's kind of working, then I would pretty much rush to tell everyone else like, look, this is great advice. I didn't spend months upon months testing these methods. I didn't test and check if it actually works for others as much as it works for me. I didn't check the sources where I was gathering information from. How did they prove if it works or not? And most of the SG books didn't. They were actually doing the same thing. The more I reread those books and the more I analyzed my own SG, the more I saw that they were doing the exact same thing like I did. They tried out some method. It kind of worked for them. It sounded good. They came up with some new crazy idea, and they would go on and tell others about it. Now, because it sounded good, others would like it too. And for the SGs, usually that's enough to decide that it really works, that this is legit. They confuse the acknowledgement they get from other random people as a sign that their stuff works. They usually don't appreciate tests and pressure testing. For them, what feels good at the moment seems good enough. And I was exactly like that too. I was a lean, mean, lack of critical thinking machine. Now, some of these self-help culture fans could say again, oh, it was your fault. You didn't have enough critical thinking. It was your responsibility to understand that you're teaching the wrong things. But what is closer to truth is that I was just a victim of the self-help culture, as much as there are plenty of victims like myself too. When I was learning with my SG, he not only lacked critical thinking, he also encouraged a lack of critical thinking in me and other people that surrounded him. He would discourage questioning, especially when it related to him and his teaching methods. And whenever something didn't work, he also blamed me as if I didn't apply his methods correctly. The thing which actually started to wake me up when I noticed the exact same issues coming up in my community that I was witnessing in the community of my SG. Various internal conflicts, gossiping, unhealthy power dynamics, and other toxic phenomena that I constantly witnessed while I was a live-in student at his school started to appear the same way in my school. And it was really puzzling to me because it was a different country. It was a different culture. I had completely different people. But again, the problems were the same. Now, luckily enough, I had enough common sense and critical thinking at that moment. For me, I truly cared about the well-being of my students in my community. So I started asking myself, why do these same issues come up in my community as much as they did there? And I started to realize it all came down to the teaching methods. The more I looked at it, the more I realized that the toxic methods that my SG was applying to his community, I was basically copying him and applying the same methods in my community. And it led to the exact same problems. That also inspired me to continue to question even further. Slowly, I started to question my SG directly. And the more I did, the more I started to notice that so many things that he taught me, he wasn't really doing well himself. I also noticed how frequently his own teachings changed. One month he would be teaching us one thing, and the next month he would be teaching us a different thing. And with close observation, I started to realize that he was doing the same thing that I did. He was just trying out random things and whatever kind of worked for him, he would teach us right away. There was no science, there was no testing, there was no pressure testing, and there were no trustworthy sources that he would rely on. Luckily, with this process of questioning, I eventually started to shed my SG skin and step-by-step develop critical thinking, which helped me to stop promoting and practicing bullshit. If you want to know a more detailed story of how my SG ways led me to lose most of my first generation students, click on this video right here. Also subscribe to the Critical Thinker's channel, since I will continue to release more videos which will shed critical thinking on the subject of self-help culture. This is Rokas, and let's keep creating a culture of critical thinking together.