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Eckhart Tolle
The German-born, Cambridge-educated Tolle is living proof that you shouldn’t dismiss an author just because Paris Hilton took his book The Power of Now with her to read in jail. Tolle claims to have undergone a “spiritual crisis” one night in his Belsize Park bedsit, aged 29, that destroyed his previous identity as a near-suicidal perfectionist worrier – but you can roll your eyes at that and still find much value in his core message, based largely on Zen Buddhism, which is that most of us spend our lives mentally fixated on the past or future, when only the present is “real”.
Richard Carlson
The bestselling series of self-help books that began with Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff… and It’s All Small Stuff is frequently dismissed by critics as belonging to the “chicken soup for the soul” genre of cheesy sentimentality. But Carlson, who died in 2006, was arguably making a rather subversive point: sometimes, what we need is not new tricks and techniques for changing ourselves but simply a dose of perspective. It’s not really all small stuff, as Carlson himself acknowledged, but overdramatisation is usually a major component of worry and anxiety. Maybe you don’t need to fix yourself, after all.
Seneca the Stoic
If you think your life is hard, pity Seneca, the Roman philosopher forced to commit ritual suicide by bleeding himself to death. Before that, though, he formulated many of the basic ideas of Stoicism, which bears little resemblance to the stiff-upper-lippery with which the word has come to be associated. One piece of advice: “Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while, ‘Is this the condition that I feared?'” A splendid antidote to positive thinking: focus not on the best possible outcome but on the worst-case scenario and it loses much of its sting.
Barbara Sher
Barbara Sher, an American career coach, is responsible for the enormously comforting concept of the “scanner” personality, which is the idea that some of us are simply better suited to being nimble generalists, switching from interest to interest, rather than specialists. If you find self-help’s fixation with discovering your “passion” or your “life purpose” to be oppressive and bullying, consider that you might be a scanner and that you really can make a living, and a fulfilling life, as what our specialism-obsessed society dismisses as a “jack of all trades”.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Jon Kabat-Zinn has pioneered the use of mindfulness meditation techniques in secular, non-new agey settings, such as his renowned stress reduction clinic at the University of Massachusetts medical school. “Mindfulness-based stress reduction” involves paying heightened attention to the present moment. In one introductory exercise, Kabat-Zinn asks participants to study the appearance, texture and taste of a single raisin in what might seem like excruciating detail. It’s anything but excruciating, though: being jolted so firmly into the present has a profoundly relaxing effect.
Tony Robbins
The chisel-jawed author of (among numerous others) Awaken the Giant Within, famous for having participants in his expensive seminars walk barefoot across hot coals, is a dispenser of some remarkably preposterous advice. But it’s entertaining and even fruitful to read his books and then do the exact opposite. For example, Robbins, a proponent of strenuousness in all things, is fond of advising readers to take “Massive Action” in pursuit of their goals; it follows, therefore, that the preferable approach is almost certainly to take numerous tiny actions – the kind that will sneak unnoticed past the part of your mind that’s itching to procrastinate or rebel.
Sonja Lyubomirsky
Lyubomirsky, a psychology researcher at the University of California and author of The How of Happiness, would almost certainly be genuinely appalled to be described as a “self-help guru” — which is one excellent sign of a good self-help guru. She has led much of the recent research that has started to give some copper-bottomed scientific credibility to certain self-help techniques while casting doubt on others. If you need some peer-reviewed studies to convince you to show appreciation to your partner, keep a gratitude journal, or invest in friendships, you’ll find it in Lyubomirsky’s work.
David Burns
David Burns’s 30-year-old bestseller Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy has the rare honour that its effects on depressed people have been studied by academic psychologists – leading to the finding that in some cases it may be as effective as prescribing drugs or undergoing psychotherapy. Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapyintroduced to a lay audience the basic tenets of cognitive behavioural therapy. It is an approach that has its justified detractors but that in Burns’s hands consists in gently identifying and altering the barely noticed “automatic thoughts” that trigger much negative emotion.
Susan Jeffers
Jeffers’s classic book Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway may be packaged to look like yet another work of self-defeating “positive thinking” but, as her title makes clear, her message is actually entirely different. We waste far too much time, she argues, trying to perfect our mental state – to make ourselves feel happy or motivated or optimistic. Better to accept the enormously limited control we have over our emotions and find ways to live alongside them, while getting on with the things we want to do. More positive emotions, in any case, usually follow once you start taking action.
David Allen
The unlikely messiah of “productivity geeks” everywhere, Allen is the originator of the philosophy of personal organisation known – like his most famous book – as Getting Things Done. It’s a relatively elaborate system that will appeal most to those whose idea of a pleasant Sundayafternoon involves colour-coding their to-do lists with felt-tip pens. But the basic principles are simple and widely applicable, above all the question that Allen insists we should keep asking: “What’s the next action?”
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