The last self-help guide you’ll ever need

I’m starting this blog by presenting a few simple rules for changing your life. I’ll write more about these as I go on, but here is the basic list. Most of the time, if you follow these rules, things will change for you.

The last list of self-help tips you’ll ever need

1. Have a goal. Keep the goal simple. Whether it’s losing weight, finishing a book, or opening a business, have something you want to change. There are no “best” goals, except whatever is best for you. Some people prefer to start with the most life-changing or important goals (fix your health, get financially stable, get a relationship.) Others want to remove the main drag on their functioning (get over their fear of going places, be less depressed, etc.) As long as you have enthusiasm for the goal you pick, that’s a good starting place.
2. Get active in making changes. This may be the MOST important rule. Many people make positive changes in their lives all the time. Others seem not to. The main difference between them? Generally, it’s how actively engaged a person is. Are you doing something, or just thinking about doing something (or even worse, thinking just about how swell it would be if only…?)  Take steps. Often, taking just small steps toward your goal is enough.  Most of the big successes in life come from taking steps to make things happen.
3. Persist. Once you have a goal and are working to make a change, assume you will not get there overnight. Small steps, over time, including going back to the drawing board sometimes, are the key to success.  Persisting means working long-term, enduring the times when things don’t instantly go your way, and having the ability, if need be, to start over again at the beginning when things fall apart.  As Winston Churchill said, “When you’re going through hell, keep going.”
4. Think in terms of the long term.  A lot of the clients I see are at the worst points in their lives; their losses and problems often seem overwhelming. The ones who eventually rebuild shattered lives after a major illness, a bankruptcy or business loss, a job loss, a drug or alcohol problem, or a prison term (or, in folks I see, sometimes all of the above), are the ones who tell themselves that if they keep doing the right things, keep making changes, over time things will get better. Not guaranteed, not every time… but the people who usually manage to rebuild their lives, are the ones who were willing to live with the hard times for as long as it would take for things to get better.
5. Keep track of your progress…and balance short term results against the realities that change may be hard. Want to lose weight, learn a language, earn a Ph.D., save up a fortune? For every goal there is a way to track your progress.  Make a to-do list and check off the “done” items, draw a graph, start a logbook of the project, or to do something to show yourself how you’re doing, how far you have gone and how far you have to go. Halfway across the country, it helps to check your odometer or your GPS and realize you’ve gone 1500 miles already. You may be exhausted, ready to quit, and still have 1800 miles to go, but at least you know where you are.
6. Modify the plan when you need to. If your guidance system tells you you’re off the highway you should be on, that you are gaining instead of losing weight, that your debt is rising instead of falling, you really, really need to know that. Keep honest track. Don’t keep jumping from plan to plan, from diet to diet, from job to job… generally, people who get a pretty good plan in place and stick to it come out better than people who keep reinventing their life plans all the time. But sometimes, the plan (whether it’s the diet, the Prozac, the job, the marriage) really isn’t going to work. Something is being missed; a mistake is occurring.   Knowing when to fold ‘em, or whether to tweak the strategy, is not easy. But take comfort in the fact that evem for the most effective, super successful of us in any field, from business to sports to writing to whatever, the ones who do best are real familiar with this struggle, stick to their plans most of the time, but make changes when they must.
7. Take time to notice when you are successful. Whether you are “done” with the project and met all your goals, or only halfway there, notice that you ARE halfway there! Notice not just what’s wrong, but learn to appreciate what you’ve done right. Notice your small successes along the way. Develop your ability to savor the plowed field and your sore back at the end of the day and sip some cool water and say, “wow! I did all that. We’re not done, we haven’t even planted anything yet, but we’re done with this much. And it’s good.”

Doing these things: setting goals, persisting, thinking long term, tracking progress, repairing the course, noticing that you’ve made something better so far… these things define the steps to success in pretty much every human endeavor.

This is not rocket science. But it’s how you can become a rocket scientist. Among other things.

Most of the self-help advice you will need in life is in this list. Analyze almost any self-help book you’ve ever read, and this is the list you’ll find it organized around. This is the skeleton under the muscle and skin and hair and pretty outfits and perfume of every self-help book there is, from “how to make a fortune” to “how to cure your shyness” to “how to build a business.”   Because these steps are how chronic illnesses are overcome, how books get written, how fortunes get made, how children are raised, how marriages grow and thrive, how fears are conquered. How worlds are changed.

This is the process of life itself.

A philosophy of “self-help”

This is really about the critical importance of wording.  Suggesting that a do-it-yourself approach to “self help” is most likely to be effective if the image in your mind is not of somehow getting “cured” of an “illness” or “problem,” but more akin to the way they talk in sports psychology or coaching: seeing yourself as striving for “higher performance.”

That and the idea that most self-help approaches basically work alike, regardless of the particular “illness” you are treating.  While the particulars of treating depression may be different than those in treating agoraphobia, the core template or skeleton of the treatment amounts — for the most part — to the very same thing.

I was writing a note about this blog in my other blog in Tumblr (which is sort of a place I use for quick posts on random topics, tweeting but longer), and said this:

My second realization was about the nature of self-help approaches: that basically, whatever the problem you are addressing, there is really just one main schema or approach or way to do them.  If you break it down, it’s about studying and defining your problem behaviors. The first thing is learning to view your problems as caused by your “behavior” (mental as well as physical), instead of seeing them as caused by, say, the idea that your spouse is a jerk or that the universe hates you.  Next is learning to take small, simple steps to chip away at that way of thinking and feeling and doing, until you gradually have a greater sense of control and well being.

My third realization was related to something I was recently discussing with my own physician: that most medical care, I think, starts off from a wrong premise.  Instead of seeing health and wellness as flowing from a very active, vigorous mindset and lifestyle (like Teddy Roosevelt’s “strenuous life,” say), our culture reinforces a model, drummed into us at every medical visit, that yeah, while you’re supposed to be “living healthier,” basically you get buried in pills until you die. The assumption is that medicine is a sort of slow hospice death, with gradual deterioration as pills are applied.  Versus the model I have come to see as much more helpful: a self-directed striving toward “higher performance”, as they put it in the coaching or sports psychology fields.

So I wanted to do a blog that integrates self-help and high-performance notions, that you can apply to phobias or depression or improving your social intelligence or career productivity or running time.  To show that the basic tools are the same, that psychological self-care is really a set of common techniques much like a “swiss army knife of the mind.”  Not always, sure, but that’s the general idea.  And it’s the general idea of the blog.

Of course one’s mileage will vary depending on the problem, their skill at problem-solving, and so on.  And sometimes you really do need the meds, the shrinks, the “whole catastrophe,” as Zorba said.  But basically, I think we can cover a lot of self-help topics in a simple, 80-20 approach (more on that later, in the blog), with just one blog.  Sort of, the “last self-help blog you’ll ever need.”

Getting oriented

Once upon a time, psychologists were supposed to keep their mouths shut.  It was an era of mysteries, confusion, a time of just emerging from the dark, murky world of ghosts and mysterious maladies, and for a time the only torch lighting the day out of the dark cavern was the work of Sigmund Freud.  Which was actually a huge improvement over the options which came before him, when depressed persons had the options of suffering or becoming novelists or drinking themselves to death.

But over time, Freud’s idea that people often need basically a good listener who doesn’t jump in with all sorts of unwanted advice, became distorted.  Shrinks started to believe that doing things like actually giving someone advice was a bad thing.  This went to absurd links — perhaps peaking when prominent psychologists move to revoke the membership from the American Psychological Association of one of the pioneering psychologists of the self-help field, Dr. Joyce Brothers, just because she answered people’s questions and tried to help in a more active way than mumbling “uh huh” every twenty minutes.

Eventually, common sense prevailed.  Building not just on the discoveries (which strictly speaking, weren’t all bad) of the European masters like Freud, we began to apply the findings of a more modern science to our understanding of the human mind, human relationships, and even to how our minds and bodies affect each other.

It’s been nearly a century and a half since the first psychology laboratories were established (by Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzig, and William James at Harvard), and in that time whole libraries have grown up to contain our findings.  In the spirit of a true “Renaissance” (a rebirth or rediscovery of knowledge), we can now benefit from the best thinkers of ancient Greece and Rome, the philosophers and novelists and spiritual pioneers of the past 3000+ years, but most especially, from the discoveries and innovations of modern behavioral, cognitive behavioral, and neuropsychological researchers and practitioners.

Whether it’s how to keep your brain functioning through the lifespan, to protect and ehnahce your physical functioning or athletic performance, how to understand and connect effectively with others, how to reduce a depression or a phobia, or how to manage your career, there is a huge amount of information out there to help you.

In my work, I meet daily with people teetering on the edge of permanent disability (my clinical practice is mostly doing psychological evaluations and consulting with agencies and with businesses and organizations.)  Often, people have been relying on rather passive, antique methods of coping, such as hoping the latest medication from their primary physician will somehow “kick in,” or maybe just relying on alcohol or drugs to ease the pain of living.  But seldom do people have even the vaguest familiarity with highly effective psychological/behavioral ways to reduce chronic pain, to cope with a depressed mood, to cope with a severe phobia that keeps them housebound, or to be more effective in their career, business, marriage, or parenting skills.

I’ve wanted to set up a blog about phobias, which I’m supposed to do to let folks know about my phobia book. (I have one on the topic of social intelligence.)  But I’ve been writing some stuff on depression and other topics, and have ideas for a variety of other books and writing projects with similar themes of “you can take control of your own psychological functioning, at least some of the time.” (I’m actually a kind of “how to manage your life” nerd.)  So instead of doing scattered blogs, I’m doing a single one now, merging some other material here.

Because to a large extent, you can approach a depression, weight loss, interpersonal skills at work, anxiety control, flirting, or “getting things done” in very much the same way.  If you become an expert in managing one part of your behavior and life, you can use most of the same tools for the other areas as well.

That’s what I want to share with you in this blog.