Self-help

That's all incorrect.

If I was titling this article, I might have titled it something like The Dark Side of Self-Help Industry, not The Dark Side of Mindfulness.

But when mindfulness is co-opted into self-help, it's gonna fix you.

Well, that is not what it was designed for, so it's a square peg in a round hole situation.

Hello, my loves, and welcome back to Love Bites by Dr. Tara podcast, where we talk about all things sex, love, relationship, dating, marriage.

And today with us is Delaney Fisher, and she's the host of Self Help-less podcast, in which I was on, so definitely check it out.

I'll leave the link in the episode description.

And she's gonna tell us the story of when, uh, she was a hookup buddy with her now husband.

Welcome to Out to Lunch.

The self-help industry is a multi-billion dollar global market encompassing books, digital courses, personal coaching, seminars, and wellness apps aimed at personal optimization.

An author we've never heard of, Samuel Smiles, introduced the concept in 1859 with his publication, Self-Help, which emphasized thrift, discipline, and individual perseverance.

Today, we can turn to Oprah Winfrey's self-help bestsellers, life coach Tony Robbins, and familiar apps like Headspace, Noom, and Calm to help us meditate, diet, or sleep.

My two lunch guests today, Catherine Wilkes and Margaret Wilkinson, are building their own self-help empires right here in Baton Rouge.

Thank you for having me.

Catherine, publishers typically try to build an author's reputation very carefully.

They'll pick a date to publish a book, do pre-publication publicity, get celebrity blurbs, and possibly reviews.

Like, you read a magazine article that's impactful and you're like, "Oh, I like that and I'm gonna, like, carry myself differently."

What exactly makes a good self-help book? Does self-help actually work? How do you differentiate guru from grifter? [laughs] I'm joined by three people who have thought a lot about this.

Beth Bloom is a professor of contemporary literature at Harvard and author of The Self-Help Compulsion: Searching for Advice in Modern Literature.

Toni Jones runs an international self-help book club called Shelf Help, and she is the author of the mini self-help book, You! The Beginner's Guide.

And Jeremy Stephenson is a clinical psychologist and author of 12 Levers: The Complete Psychological Toolkit for Improving Your Life.

Yeah.

In, in my study, I argue that the first self-help book proper is actually quite a few decades before Carnegie.

In 1859, you have the publication of a book called Self-Help, the first to use self-help in its title, by a Scottish author named Samuel Smiles.