Why we should stop trying to improve ourselves.

I kicked off my early 20s by going to Tony Robbins’ Unleash the Power Within weekend seminar. It was like nothing I had ever experienced. I quickly started signing up for every self-improvement lecture and workshop I could attend.

Living in Manhattan during the late 90s, there was no shortage of options. Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer, Dan Millman, Stephen Covey, John Gray, Brian Tracy, Julia Cameron … if they had a best-selling book, I knew them, read them, and listened to them.

And so it went for almost a decade. It was only after reading over five hundred books, listening to hundreds of audio programs, and spending thousands on events and seminars that I began to question my sanity.

Was all the time and money I was investing in my “personal growth” really worth it?

A Brief History of the Human Potential Movement

To answer this question, let’s take a quick tour in the past.

Western psychology arose from two places: the laboratory and the hospital.

In the hospital, clinical psychology and psychiatry, with their focus on treating pathology, were dominated by psychoanalysis. In the laboratory, experimental psychology became dominated by behaviorism.

By the 1960s, it was clear that neither behaviorism nor psychoanalysis addressed the full range of human experience.

The pioneering efforts of Carl Jung, Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and others gave birth to humanistic psychology. Instead of addressing mental illness, humanistic therapies aimed at healing the split between the mind and body. The goal was to reveal a higher potential within each of us.

Michael Murphy and Dick Price founded the Esalen Institute in 1962 in Big Sur, California. Inspired by Maslow’s work on peak experiences and self-actualization, Esalen attracted the world’s leading psychologists, thinkers, and visionaries (including Maslow). The Human Potential Movement was born.

From the Human Potential Movement of the 70s and 80s came the New Age movement and the self-help movement of the 90s to today, estimated to be a $9.9 billion industry currently.

Why Is This History Relevant to Us?

Everything in the self-help movement came from the field of psychology.

Sigmund Freud was the father of psychoanalysis. In many ways, the entire self-help movement can trace its roots to his ideas.

Freud chose to name is field psychoanalysis, the study of psychotic or mentally ill people. You see, to Freud, his patients were “mentally ill” while he and his trained analysts, were not.

And this skewed and misaligned notion still runs through our culture on a subconscious level.

This entire self-improvement industry (including much of so-called “spiritual” communities) exists on the idea that there’s something inherently wrong with us that we must fix. (And there’s no shortage of ideas on how to fix us.)

How much of our efforts are guided by this subconscious sentiment? I came to find that behind my morning routines, daily reading, exercising, meditating, and so on was this nagging itch that I couldn’t successfully scratch.

There’s truly no end to this rollercoaster of “constant and never-ending improvement.”

The Hidden Forces Behind Self-Help

This self-improvement fixation, if it infects us, can last a lifetime. We can only get off this ride if we pause long enough to inspect what’s really happening.

If we pause long enough, however, we may begin to hear a voice. It’s usually a younger voice, perhaps a remnant of a former child within that says, “Am a good enough now? Am I okay now?”

Only when we hear this voice will Buddhist meditation teacher Pema Chodron make sense when she calls “self-help is an attack upon oneself.”

If was only after hearing this inner voice that I started to get a handle on what was happening. Even though I thought I was “bettering myself” through my efforts and will, inwardly my attitude was one of self-rejection, even self-hatred.

And what better way to mask this self-loathing than by pouring my energy into self-improvement.

So What’s the Alternative Approach?

Instead of trying to “be better,” I started to move toward myself. I merely started seeing and listening inwardly—seeing my flaws and fragmentation without trying to change any of it. That’s all.

For the part of us that wants to fix and improve everything about us, simply seeing and listening seems insufficient. But in truth, I’ve come to realize, only through inward seeing and listening that we can get our footing.

Then, we may discover that fixing and improving isn’t necessary. We just needed to see and hear without judgment or criticism—to bring to consciousness the inner angst that we’ve been dragging along in our shadow since childhood.

In truth, this practice is so simple that many of us may quickly discount it. But for those with the courage to pause long enough to see and hear what’s driving our behavior, it can be a truly liberating experience.

Comments