Will Self Help Books Help Your Personal Development?

Personal Development and Self Help Books

When you think of personal development, you probably think immediately of self-help books. Self-help books is a billion dollar industry will millions of people buying books that apparently teach them how to live better and be better at whatever it is they want to improve. However, the question is, do self-help books really help your self? Should you spend your money on these books?

To start, self-help books are books written with the intention of instructing the reader on personal problems. They get the term of self-help because they are apparently teaching you to help yourself. These books focus on psychology like romantic relationships, human behaviour, controlling will power and more. Self-help books usually advertise themselves as being able to help you find satisfaction within your life.

These books will often tell you that they will help you when other therapies cannot. They often tell you they can do it faster and that entices many who want to fix things now, rather than working for the change. There are also many celebrities who offer self-help books, even though they have no training in self-help.

Most of these books are bogus and you should not waste your time with them. When you are looking to develop yourself personally and better yourself, you cannot do it quickly. We live in a society that wants everything now and instantaneously. We want things fixed immediately because we are a one-hour photo society. Things do not happen quickly, they take time, they will not be fixed immediately. When you want to change yourself, you must look inward of yourself and make the change. It takes time and it is a long personal journey. Self-help books are a lot like diets. When you find a fad diet that helps you lose weight because you are only drinking apple juice and eating cucumber sandwiches, you lose a lot of weight. Then when you lose the weight, you stop the diet and gain all the weight back. This happens because you did not take the time to truly change who you are. You just followed diet till you got what you wanted, then went back to your own ways. If you want to lose weight you have to alter your lifestyle, with exercise and eating right. Then when you lose weight, you keep it off. Self-help books offer you a quick fix and initially you may feel as though they are working, but they are not. They are just giving you what you want and then when you think you have what you want, you stop following the self-help book guidelines and you revert back to the way you were.

If you truly want to better yourself, you need to take the time to look inward and begin that long inward journey without having a self-help book or celebrity telling you have that is going to happen. Things do not come quickly, so don’t think they will. Take things slow and you will be happier in the end.

To streamline and minimize blog maintenance, I will be discontinuing maintaining the Simplepersonaldevelopment.com website (however, I will still hold the domain). I will gradually move all articles from this site to Ahmed Dawn Dot Com. This article originally published on the above website on Nov 27, 2010.