Not Another Self Help Book

It’s time to get over your self! Written by a clinical psychologist and student of Eastern philosophy, this handy little guide offers a radical solution to anyone struggling with self-doubt, self-esteem, and self-defeating thoughts: “no-self help.” By breaking free of your own self-limiting beliefs, you’ll discover your infinite potential. There is an insidious, global identity theft occurring that has robbed people of their very recognition of their true selves. The culprit—indeed the mastermind of this crisis—has committed the inside job of creating and promoting the idea that we are all a separate self, which is the chief source of our daily distress and dissatisfaction. No more than a narrative of personhood pieced together from disparate neural activations, the self we believe ourselves to be in our own minds—although quite capable of being affirming, inspiring, and constructive—often spews forth a distressing flow of worry and second-guessing, blaming and shaming, regret and guilt. This book offers an antidote to this epidemic of stolen identity, isolation, and self-deprecation: no-self (a concept known in Buddhist philosophy as anatta or anatman). The No-Self Help Book turns the idea of self-improvement on its head, arguing that the key to well-being lies not in the relentless pursuit of bettering one’s self but in the recognition of the self as a false identity born in the mind. Rather than identifying with a small, relative sense of self, this book encourages you to embrace a liberating alternative—an expansive awareness that is flexible and open to experiencing life as an ongoing and ever-changing process, without attachment to personal outcomes or storylines. To help you make this leap from self to no-self, the book provides forty bite-sized chapters full of clever and inspiring insights based in positive psychology and non-duality—a philosophy that asserts there is no real separation between any of us. So, if you’re tired of “self-help” and you’re ready to explore who you are beyond the self, let The No-Self Help Book be your guide.

Do you ever feel like self-help gurus are...lying to you?You want a better life. You know it's possible, but the promises you see most self-help books make just seem too good to be true, right?"Work 4 hours a week and make millions?""Quit your job in six months!""Follow these ten steps to become rich, famous, and everlastingly happy!"Is there a better alternative? Is there a way to learn how to live a better life without all the extra hype, fake-promises, and B.S.? Real Help: An Honest Guide to Self-Improvement details the in-depth self-improvement knowledge and wisdom from Ayodeji Awosika -- a self-taught 3-time author, TEDx speaker, and top writer on medium.com with over 50,000 followers who helps millions of readers per year with wisdom and insights to change their life.This book won't guarantee any of the following: You'll make millions of dollars You'll build a life-changing business that helps you quit your job overnight You'll find perfect, peace, happiness, and contentment It will, however, teach you everything you need to know to help you: Discover your life purpose (without needing an "exact match") Develop the mental toughness you need to thrive in an unfair world Start your first passion project or side business (without needing to be an expert) Dramatically increase your odds of living a successful life (even though this can't be guaranteed) Build life-changing habits and execute them on auto-pilot (even if you've tried and failed before) This is a book that tells you what you need to know, not what you want to hear. This is a book that tells you how the world actually works, not how you think it should work.Aren't you tired of being told you can "succeed no matter what!"? It's almost insulting. You live in the real world. If you want to succeed in the real world, you have to understand how to be optimistic and realistic at the same time. With Real Help, you'll get a no-holds-barred field guide to improving your life with the circumstances you've been given. It will help you build a tailor-made path to a successful life based on your definition of the word.

Fiction. Asian & Asian American Studies. Semi-Finalist, Thurber Prize for American Humor. Marty Wu, compulsive reader of advice manuals, would love to come across as a poised young advertising professional. Instead she trips over her own feet and blurts out inappropriate comments. The bulk of her brain matter, she decides, consists of gerbils "spinning madly in alternating directions." Marty hopes to someday open a boutique costume shop, but it's hard to keep focused on her dream. First comes a spectacular career meltdown that sends her ricocheting between the stress of New York and the warmth of supportive relatives in Taiwan. Then she faces one domestic drama after another, with a formidable mother who's impossible to please, an annoyingly successful and well- adjusted brother, and surprising family secrets that pop up just when she doesn't want to deal with them. Mining the comedic potential of the 1.5-generation American experience, NOT A SELF-HELP BOOK is an insightful and witty portrait of a young woman scrambling to balance familial expectations and her own creative dreams. "A breezy and charming tale ... Anyone who's grown up immersed in a profoundly rich old-world culture and feels its constant pull will commiserate--and be entertained."--Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, author of A Tiger in the Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family "Marty is a wonderful character who learns to stand up for herself and discovers what she really wants in life."--Booklist "An expert combination of humor and deep feeling... Digs deep into the particular challenges of defining and asserting an artistic identity in the world."--PANK Magazine "Ceaselessly surprising and entertaining... Lai's debut is an unexpectedly radical book on our deeply complicated relations with parents."--Hyphen Magazine: Asian America Unabridged

Samuel Beckett as a guru for business executives? James Joyce as a guide to living a good life? The notion of notoriously experimental authors sharing a shelf with self-help books might seem far-fetched, yet a hidden history of rivalry, influence, and imitation links these two worlds. In The Self-Help Compulsion, Beth Blum reveals the profound entanglement of modern literature and commercial advice from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Blum explores popular reading practices in which people turn to literature in search of practical advice alongside modern writers’ rebukes of such instrumental purposes. As literary authors positioned themselves in opposition to people like Samuel Smiles and Dale Carnegie, readers turned to self-help for the promises of mobility, agency, and practical use that serious literature was reluctant to supply. Blum unearths a series of unlikely cases of the love-hate relationship between serious fiction and commercial advice, from Gustave Flaubert’s mockery of early DIY culture to Dear Abby’s cutting diagnoses of Nathanael West and from Virginia Woolf’s ambivalent polemics against self-improvement to the ways that contemporary global authors such as Mohsin Hamid and Tash Aw explicitly draw on the self-help genre. She also traces the self-help industry’s tendency to popularize, quote, and adapt literary wisdom and considers what it might have to teach today’s university. Offering a new history of self-help’s origins, appeal, and cultural and literary import around the world, this book reveals that self-help’s most valuable secrets are not about getting rich or winning friends but about how and why people read.

Reclaim your relationship with pain This may look like a book on the surface, but it's more of an experiential journey filled with relatable stories, original music, coloring book pages, irreverent humor, lessons for healing, and most of all, hope. With this book as your guide, you are invited to show up as the brave, badass woman you already are and challenge your past, current, and future experiences with brokenness. Through the lens of Lindsey, you will experience a paradigm shift as you learn how to grapple with all that life throws at you. If you're a pain magnet buried in overwhelm and exhaustion, suffocated by shame, stress, and guilt, this book is for you. Not Another Self-Help Book is for imperfect women who desperately want to reimagine their relationship with pain in all its forms. Flipping the script on the unhelpful notion that everything happens for a reason,Lindsey's words will revolutionize the way you see heartbreak, trauma, conflict, rejection, and humiliation. Gaining awareness that pain is the greatest teacher, you will learn how life isn't happening to you, it's happening for you. It's about damn time to ramp up your search for relief, start making sense of what you've seen, and dig out of the hole you can't seem to get out of, no matter what you try. Lindsey Kane Leaverton has authored over 100 original songs, traveled the world sharing unforgettable stories, and out of sheer desperation during Covid found a way to completely reframe the way she interacts with life's shit. Reading this book will feel a lot like having cocktails with an old friend who makes you belly laugh. You may have tried everything under the sun, read all the self-help books on the planet, and given into the notion that maybe life will always be this hard. Don't give up before the miracle. This is not just another self-help book. You'll see . . .

If you're fat and fail every diet, if you're thin but can't get thin enough, if you lose your job, if your child dies, if you are diagnosed with cancer, if you always end up with exactly the wrong kind of person, if you always end up alone, if you can't get over the past, if your parents are insane and ruining your life, if you really and truly wish you were dead, if you feel like it's your destiny to be a star, if you believe life has a grudge against you, if you don't want to have sex with your spouse and don't know why, if you feel so ashamed, if you're lost in life. If you have ever wondered, How am I aupposed to survive this? This is How.

A hilarious and heartwarming rampage through the world of self-care Marianne Power was a self-help junkie. For years she lined her bookshelves with dog-eared copies of definitive guide after definitive guide on how to live your best life. Yet one day she woke up to find that the life she dreamed of and the life she was living were not miles but continents apart. So she set out to make a change. Or, actually, to make every change. Marianne decided to finally find out if her elusive perfect life—the one without debt, anxiety, hangovers or Netflix marathons, the one where she healthily bounced around town with perfect teeth to meet the cashmere-sweater-wearing man of her dreams—lay in the pages of those books. So for a year she vowed to test a book a month, following its advice to the letter, taking the surest road she knew to a perfect Marianne. As her year-long plan turned into a demented roller coaster where everything she knew was turned upside down, she found herself confronted with a different question: Self-help can change your life, but is it for the better?