Helping Me Help Myself by Beth Lisick
Helping Me Help Myself: One Skeptic, Ten Self-Help Gurus, and a Year on the Brink of the Comfort Zone is more of a humor book than a spiritual journey. Unlike the author of Eat, Pray, Love, Beth Lisick never takes her mission too seriously or tries too hard. The chapters, each of which is nominally devoted to a self help topic, are mostly humorous accounts of what’s going on in her life.
She goes to some seminars and meets some of the self-help gurus. She laughs a bit at their fans. Sometimes she tries one or two things they recommend, half-heartedly. Sometimes the things actually work, despite her lack of commitment. At the end, nothing much seems to have changed except that she’s tired from working on herself all year long. Easier to laugh at other people, I guess.
Lisick is apparently a humor writer, and taken in that vein this is an entertaining book, but it leaves me longing for what it could have been. Steve Pavlina was more what I was looking for, though I don’t always agree with his emphasis. He is at least really trying.