Self-help can work

Earlier this week I read Johann Hari’s piece “Thatcherite chicken soup for the soul” which recounted the evils of Paul McKenna’s latest self-help offering: ‘I Can Make You Happy’.

Hari’s piece spent a great deal of focusing on a few choice phrases from the book. On top of that he suggested that McKenna is telling readers to abandon friends who are suffering from depression because they are detrimental to your own happiness. This assertion was out of context and rather ridiculous. As someone who has met McKenna and benefitted from his self-help techniques, it only seems right to present another view.

A few years ago I went along to one of McKenna’s seminars entitled ‘Change your life’. I was sceptical. However, during those three days I learned numerous exercises that helped me think more positively and become more aware about negative thinking.

McKenna’s work uses Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) which is about re-programming the way we think and emotionally react to situations. It’s basically about getting in touch with your internal dialogue and changing what that little voice inside your head tells you.

One of McKenna’s techniques is imagining an unpleasant situation that you may have had in the past. In your mind’s eye it may initially be a big and vivid image but what McKenna suggests is to gradually visualise it getting smaller and fading until there is nothing left. The final step is to repeat this process as many times as you need to.

For example, I found I would beat myself up if I made a mistake or said something wrong at work or in a social setting. I would keep re-visiting the situation in my head and feeling bad despite the fact that I could not change it. This exercise helped me move on from that and essentially let it go. It all goes back to the core of NLP and re-programming how we think.

At the end of that course I felt a lot better about myself and more equipped to deal with the obstacles life threw at me. Whether it’s changed my life completely I can’t say. My existence is certainly not a paragon of bliss and I don’t walk around with rose-tinted spectacles on. But I now realise when I am over-thinking and amplifying negative thoughts. This level of self-awareness is useful and it helps me to focus on the positive things in my life.

As to cutting friends out of my life who “bring me down”, I have friends who suffer from depression and I am always here for them. Like most of McKenna’s readers, I would never discard a friend because they were not the life and soul of a party and I would help them.

The majority of people who seek self-help are not sociopaths hell-bent on achieving happiness at any price. Instead they may feel lost and these books can offer them a form of support that they do not have. McKenna books and NLP have helped so many people and it seems wrong to be so dismissive of it. In the end it’s simple, commonsense advice and for some people it works and for others it doesn’t. I suppose in the end it is the view with which you approach it.