What might well be true? The connotation of my question that implies that your field is worthless?
Yes. I’m a rather outspoken critic of the field, and not just for marketing reasons.
The problem isn’t the industry, it’s that developing “kicking” skills requires practice, and for practice to work you have to have feedback, even if that feedback is you yourself checking your performance against some model. Most self-help material doesn’t even teach explicitly making these checks, let alone giving substantive criteria for telling whether you’ve done something correctly or not. People are left to blindly stumble on the right method, if they happen to hear a metaphor that works for them or read in someone’s story about doing it wrong, how they’re doing it wrong.
The entire field—at least in books—is like teaching people to ride bicycles without giving them any bicycles to practice on. Common practice in workshops isn’t a hell of a lot better, but your odds are a lot better of stumbling on a workshop where you can get coached or walked through something. Even there, testability, repeatability, and trainability are not the focus.
So yes, the entire self-help field might as well be a lottery right now, if you have no information on where to start. Many of my students, like me, own literally hundreds of self-help books, from which they got little or no help until they “got it” from something I wrote or said or did with them.
As for me, I just got lucky enough to get an insight from computer programming that opened my eyes to what was going on, that gave me my first “rosetta stone” for the field.
Yes. I’m a rather outspoken critic of the field, and not just for marketing reasons.
The problem isn’t the industry, it’s that developing “kicking” skills requires practice, and for practice to work you have to have feedback, even if that feedback is you yourself checking your performance against some model. Most self-help material doesn’t even teach explicitly making these checks, let alone giving substantive criteria for telling whether you’ve done something correctly or not. People are left to blindly stumble on the right method, if they happen to hear a metaphor that works for them or read in someone’s story about doing it wrong, how they’re doing it wrong.
The entire field—at least in books—is like teaching people to ride bicycles without giving them any bicycles to practice on. Common practice in workshops isn’t a hell of a lot better, but your odds are a lot better of stumbling on a workshop where you can get coached or walked through something. Even there, testability, repeatability, and trainability are not the focus.
So yes, the entire self-help field might as well be a lottery right now, if you have no information on where to start. Many of my students, like me, own literally hundreds of self-help books, from which they got little or no help until they “got it” from something I wrote or said or did with them.
As for me, I just got lucky enough to get an insight from computer programming that opened my eyes to what was going on, that gave me my first “rosetta stone” for the field.