Story in Frenchhere.
More and more people are turning to self improvement. Whether they are young graduates in search of meaning, thirty-something disillusioned with the world of work, or in their fifties and in crisis, self improvement community is boiling over.
But behind this idyllic picture hides a much darker world, which does not always keep its promises to “grow” its adepts.
In this story we will see:
- Why is self improvement so appealing?
- The 2 fundamental issues with self improvement
- How to make the self improvement approach useful?
1. Why is self improvement so attractive?
Self improvement systems often begin with a first stage of introspection, where participants are invited to take a fresh look at themselves.
- What are my hidden desires or passions?
- For whom/what am I feeling gratitude today?
- What is the failure that has moved me forward the most?
Hundreds of books, coaching sessions, conferences are purchased every year to answer these questions. The objective is to push the reader/listener to take a critical look at her thoughts and actions.
Why this critical look? If you don’t put a finger on an aspect of your life/personality that is not right, there is nothing to correct, and therefore no call for action for self improvement.
Once this issue has been identified, the next step is to deep dive, to dissect it, to understand it, and finally to correct it with thanks to other books and conferences. Then the improvement cycle starts again, “introspection, analysis, correction” with new books, new conferences, new seminars… Each of self-improvement content adopts a new angle of analysis and perpetuates the cycles over and over.
The great strength of self improvement is that we all objectively have defects, imperfections that are worth correcting. Anyone who try this game of self-diagnosis will therefore identify a point in her life or personality that needs to be improved and thus put her fingers in self improvement gears.
This approach is not intrinsically bad, we all need to know ourselves better in order to improve ourselves and become more efficient. This statement is becoming even truer in a world that is moving faster and faster. On the other hand, it can also lead to many excesses.
2. The 2 fundamental issues with self improvement
One of the first limit of self improvement lies in the following paradox:
- The promise of self improvement is to make us better men and women, at peace with ourselves
- The engine of self improvement resides on 2 pillars: the observation that today I have defects, and the optimism that tomorrow I can correct them.
A self-improvement adept who becomes at peace with herself, and who no longer feels sorry for her condition is therefore no longer a potential reader/consumer of self improvement content. Thus, any system of self improvement will have to play in parallel on two levels:
- helping the reader/consumer to correct her identified shortcomings
- while continuing to push introspection on new elements to keep her in a perpetual state of lack.
It is therefore easy to understand why self improvement can become addictive, even though one of its stated objectives is to free us from our tensions and (other) addictions.
We all know this colleague who attend to conferences on self improvement, or that friend who only talks about her readings on how to know herself better but without any visible changes in their daily lives.
The second limitation of self improvement is its lack of connection with real life.
By its nature, self improvement is self-centered, and therefore an egocentric approach. By investing time and energy on how to become better, the “I” becomes the center of attention. Without a constant effort to apply the new acquired knowledge, there is a significant risk that the self improvement approach remains a theoretical quest, without impact on adept’s real life or on her surrounding.
Learning in detail about non-violent communication has no value in itself. Learner needs to apply this knowledge to grow her relationships or get him out of difficult conversations to make these knowledge useful.
3. How can we make self improvement process useful?
It is important to define a safeguard to ensure that the time, energy and money spent on self improvement contents are not spent in vain. As a consumer of self improvement contents for several years, I developed a “rule” in recent months to avoid falling into this trap.
Over the last 7 days, I look at the ratio between:
- My time spent reading / listening / following self improvement contents
- My time spent acting concretely / building shareable contents related to this new knowledge
My threshold is 2: if I spend more than twice as much time learning about how to become better versus implementing it, it means that my self improvement process becomes theoretical and I am disconnect from reality.
As soon as my ratio increases too much, very concretely I force myself to formalize what I read, to explicitly apply it into my life, or even to write a dedicated article on the subject (like this one).
Everyone should define their own self improvement threshold, knowing that the lower, the more demanding.
A few remarks:
- This ratio is independent from the subject of self improvement you are exploring, which makes it easy to use
- You can adopt it even if you have just started your self improvement quest. You just need to adopt a critical view about how you spend your time
In conclusion, self improvement is a must-do to better know oneself and move forward in life. But we must never lose sight that self improvement is not the end goal, but rather a mean to achieve our goals in real life more quickly.
And thus, always answering the question:
What does self improvement help me accomplish?