Follow the Formula or Perish
Charlotte Booth • 17 February 2021
How to get the most of self-help and business books
However, I am many coaches’ and teachers' worst nightmare as I question and adapt and remodel all the advice I get – cherry picking what I think works for my business and more importantly for my personality.
Follow the Formula
The majority of self-help books seem to follow the idea that if you stick to their formula to the letter you will succeed but if you deviate from the method in any way, you are doomed to failure and therefore don’t care about your self-development enough or believe in your business enough.
I don’t buy into this at all.
We are all unique
Many of these programmes, whilst telling you to embrace your uniqueness are in fact trying to mould you into replicas of them. "This worked for me so it will work for you too. "
Humans are wonderfully diverse, with interesting histories and experiences which have led to a unique collection of contradictions.
Therefore, it is very very difficult to insist following a formula exactly will work the same for anyone. We are all starting at different points on the journey and therefore it has to be adapted to work with individuals.
We are not broken
Another common feature of many development programmes seems to be looking for the problems (in you and your business) and 'fixing them' rather than helping the reader to identify their strengths and amplify them.
One of the worst books for this, in my opinion, was The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod. He actually states that before you can grow you must start by admitting you are mediocre! Then through his programme you can become a 'Level 10' person. These people are pretty much defined by their success in business, money and lifestyle.
I can’t work out how admitting you're mediocre is good for you. No one is mediocre, we all have strengths and we all have things we could improve on. I am not mediocre because I have no idea how to change the oil in my car or because I don't speak Japanese in the same way someone else is not mediocre because they work for minimum wage, don't find writing easy and could get lost walking in a straight line (that’s me too actually).
Wanting to learn new skills or improve skills does not mean you are starting from a place of failure or mediocrity. We all need to identify our strengths and then use those to help improve the things we are less successful at.
Self-development has little room for contentment
I have also noticed that although many self-help books are advocating leading a contented life, there is little room in their formulae for actually reaching this.
For example, advocates of the Law of Attraction leave little room for people to be content and not actually want £1million or a new car. It seems to me that if you don’t actually want anything other than maintained contentment their whole ethos collapses. This seems to be followed by statements like if you don’t want anything you must be scared of change and that means you need to work on fixing that .
But this directly contradicts the Law of Attraction love of affirmations like "You are enough" - you can't both be enough as you are and constantly strive for something other.
As Caroline Pattendon says, "You are enough, you always have been. It's time to start a revolution and say no to change for the sake of it, no to pressure to look a certain way and no to competing for job positions because it feels like it's something you ought to do." (Breathe Magazine, Issue 331, July 2020).
Change and growth are wonderful things, but no one should be made to feel a failure if they don't reach someone else's idea of success or contentment.
A tricky conundrum
Despite these quite baffling contradictions I quite like self-help books and business books as they can be a source of great ideas. But it can be hard to ignore all the negative messaging designed to make you feel bad and then fail because the steps to follow are not feasible for your lifestyle.
The cynic in me sees that these formulae are designed to end in failure (or at best semi-success) so you can buy the second book, enrol on the course, or one to one training. As Stephanie Lam states, "Welcome to a board game called You Could Do Better! It's designed so that however many sixes you roll, you'll always be last. In fact, it's a game you'll never win." (Breathe Magazine, Issue 331, July 2020).
I approach these books with an an open mind and I approach these books as an expert.
An expert in me, my ethos, my abilities and more importantly my boundaries.
I am happy to try new things and want to do this – but they have to be right for me.
I have rarely followed a formula 100% which if I believed the negative messaging is why I am not a captain of industry and ruling my own part of a capitalist empire.
Just because a formula worked for the author doesn’t mean it will work the same for every person who reads the book (or attends the workshop) because we are all coming from different places and are all going to different places.
I try to take something away from every book I read or course I attend, but only follow the steps which fits with me and my ethos and sparks interest.
This doesn’t mean I don’t care about myself or my business. In fact, it means the opposite.
I care so much about my business and my own development that I’m not prepared to compromise my principles because a business book author, coach or online guru states it’s the only way to success.
The only way for me is my way. This means my clients know they will always get the authentic me, even when I am trying out new things which are out of my comfort zone. They will still be quintessentially Charlotte.
There is nothing more amusing than checking out mediaeval artistic renditions of lions and other heraldic creatures. These beasts, grimacing and gurning are a strange juxtaposition of human, animal and demon and as far from the cute image of Alex from the Madagascar franchise or in fact a real lion as you could possibly get. There are three main reasons mediaeval lions are so ‘bad’ and un-representational; The artists were following a very tight brief. Some of the artists may never have seen a lion, and were following the descriptions they were given. These lions were representing heraldic principals of bravery, nobility and authority; all very human characteristics. When viewed through this lens it becomes more understandable why they look the way they do, but they are still ‘not right’ and not a great tool for learning about lions. Generative AI is very similar to an uninformed but talented mediaeval artist. There is a element of intelligence but at the end of the day it is following a brief, with no actual ‘knowledge’ of the thing it is producing. As an example, if you prompt your generative AI (ChatGPT and the like) to produce a blog for your new product or service, aimed at your ideal customer avatar you will in all likelihood get a mediaeval lion out the other end. Sort of recognisable, and sort of not. This is because AI doesn’t know what a customer is (ideal or otherwise), has no idea what your product or service is and does, and has no true understanding of how this service or product will serve your ideal customer and their needs. Of course, AI is pulling all the information available from the internet to help with its answer but there is no understanding there. There is no determining fact from falsehoods or even which websites are trustworthy and which are not. So, it skims the internet and puts together content which suits the brief as it understands it. This is then when the actual work should start as this content shouldn’t be used in the raw. It should be edited and tweaked by a human who DOES understand the brief, has been a customer (ideal or otherwise) and can imagine what your ideal customer will feel when using your product or services. We are in a world now, where we have generative AI promoting products and services to humans, when it has no concept of what a human is and how it thinks, meaning the marketing department are in fact more important than ever for ensuring content and copy is aimed at humans and human emotions. You could argue that the world would be a more entertaining place if there were more mediaeval lions in it, but it wouldn’t be a great environment for learning, or for basing purchasing decisions on. If you want to maintain the human element in your content, then I would love to help . Explain the brief, your CTA and your ideal client and I will know what I need to ask to get a clear idea before writing. Then you can rest assured your content was written by a human for a human and we can leave the mediaeval lions to the museums.
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