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What’s your favourite self-help book?
Wondering what’s your favorite self-help book, with the most practical, down-to-earth advice that maybe changed your life.
I’ll go first: I really liked Mindfullness in Plain English, removed all the myths around meditation and broke it down to very digestible concepts allowing me to practice the same on a daily basis.
Looking forward to hear yours!
I can't recommend my favourites to any one because the way they changed my life is still a work in progress. So hear me out, I'm definitely not advocating. Just for discussion. And as for down-to-earth, I'm not always down here.
I'll start with the first and go forward. Atlas Shrugged hit me at an early age and if it did one thing, it freed me from being a slave to confusion and unclear thinking. Unfortunately, it also made me arrogant.
Realizing that as wonderful Science and logic were, they barely skim the surface of what a human mind is capable of, I investigated the Tao Te Ching and enjoyed first its poetry and then its completely unorthodox-for-westerners approach to living.
Seeking more, I discovered the madman Carlos Castaneda's very poetic and wildly unconventional books, my favourite being Tales of Power. This book, more than any other, taught me how to see reality as something constructed by the mind from percepts and teaching/repetition/learning/feedback(success).
Very deep stuff. Now I was relatively free to choose or create the 'gloss' appropriate for my situation and tendencies. After 20 years of rugged individualism and relative isolation, I put on the 'gloss' that was standard for my place and time, which was Christianity. The Bible, particularly the Psalms, proved to help me deal with the society around me in a workable way. Incidentally, this approach also works well with reconciling science with the intuitive, non-linear part of the mind and our perception of reality. It's the best method I've found, always keeping in mind that the choice of methods is mine and very personal.
This has been a long journey and there have been many more books involved in my path. There are probably more in the future.
For those who might find the Tao Te Ching a little daunting: I can heartily recommend The Tao of Winnie the Pooh it's a great introduction to Taoism and incredibly approachable, as the title might suggest.
The Tao Te Ching made a lot more sense to me when I read a bunch of other eastern philosophy books. I started out with Art of War, which I enjoyed but didn't really understand. Then the Tao Te Ching, which I found very difficult to take meaning from even though I loved the "prose". I read the I Ching which was really just a user manual for telling the future =p. Then I read the Bhagavad Gita which blew my mind and made all of those other books make way more sense.
I always recommend the Gita and the Tao as a unit now.
Thanks for the tip!
The Life Changing Magic of Tidying up by Marie Kondo.
It's about decluttering and though I found the book mostly amusing, it helped me a lot letting go of things in my life. I was trying to go zero waste for a while, and this book helped me organize how I wanted to do that.
They're not really self-help books, but I got really into behavioral economics and really loved two books specifically:
Worth noting that TF&S has been a small victim of the replication crisis in psych. Basically a couple of the things that are stated as being utterly certain in the book turn out to not replicate. Still worth reading but read this first.
For those with a history of trauma or abuse:
Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving
The Body Keeps the Score
Those two books have provided more clarity and help than anything else I've tried.
One of the most important books to me is Beyond Addiction: How Science and Kindness Help People Change. So many people are told there's nothing they can do but watch their loved one suffer and hope they hit rock bottom. BA is a fantastic and compassionate book and I hope it helps put that tragic myth to rest for good. (A lot of the same concepts are outlined for free here, and I mod a subreddit that discusses them as well.)
I also love The Dance of Connection by Harriet Lerner about finding an authentic voice in conflict. She seems to have said a lot of the stuff you'll find in Beyond Addiction some 10 years before it came out. So many therapy-type self-help books are rigid and absolutist, but this one I found to be loving and balanced-- giving tips for kinder communication but with the caveat that what's really important is not to lose flexibility; more aggressive styles aren't universally ineffective or unloving. I really like her concept of "taking a conversation to the next level" when someone doesn't hear something important you're saying. It's one of those ideas I felt kinda dumb for not having figured out on my own: instead of getting caught up in a cycle of mindless bickering, you can find another way to say, "Hey, no, really, this needs to get resolved."
"Mastery" by Robert Greene. Has some glaring issues, but gets you pumped to commit to anything. Breaks up that talent BS.
Feeling Good by David Burns saved me from my depression and anxiety, gave me my life back and changed my life. It is cognitive behavioral therapy in a book and I cannot recommend it enough. I think everyone should read it.
I haven't read a self-help book, although I find the book On Becoming a Person helpful for my (troubled) self. It's a compilation of talks, essays, and articles by the psychologist Carl Rogers. A bit dated, and somewhat repetitive, but it helped me learn new ways of social interaction and how to view myself in it.