This Is A Self Help Website
You may have heard, I’m a writer now. I go into more detail in this podcast episode, but long story short, that’s the job title I’ve now given myself, and the role I’m working to. But as much as this was something I wanted, something I was excited about, there was a problem - a problem of value. I couldn’t join up in my head how my role as a writer would be valuable enough to anyone else for them to buy the things I wrote.
It wasn’t that I thought what I wrote wasn’t valuable, I just couldn’t make it make sense - and if I couldn’t make it make sense to me, I had no chance of making it make sense to others. I thought it was a problem with the concept of being a writer with a business, but I can see now that actually I needed a simple way to communicate value when all I could feel was that it was mostly for my benefit. But then it clicked.
It happened in one of my long and winding “getting it all out to get to the point” text conversations with my work wife Jen, one in which I was, once again, trying to figure what I was going to do and how it was all going to make sense. I was saying “well the self-help stuff stays on the website and is in the courses, and then the literary stuff I’ll put on Substack eventually and into books”. And then I was like, wait - self-help.
I’d never defined anything I did as self-help before. I have always felt that I was the one who needed to do the helping, that the “point” (of getting paid? Of having a business? I’m not sure of what exactly) was that I was the one doing the work for people, that I had to be inextricably involved. That’s why it felt weird and selfish and nonsensical to be a writer because that’s not boots-on-the-ground helping.
But of course it’s self-help, because of course it’s been self-help all along. What is a course if not self-help? Taking the tools and suggestions from another person to help yourself make a change. Even in the one on one client work I’ve done in recent years, the most valuable part has been for people to hear themselves say what they want out loud, and then hear how they already know how to get it. Sometimes there’s not a big structural problem, sometimes we just need to catch up and identify as what we’ve been all along.
This re-definition has helped. Before I was full of tension with how undefined and shaky everything felt; now everything is looser by virtue of being tightened. There is a definition that makes sense, one that creates boundaries around what I do and where - and that makes me feel freer to create with purpose and focus. Since that text conversation I’ve tightened up my Offerings page, I’ve created a whole new programme, created a freebie but most of all I feel, for the first time in a long time, that I understand what I’m doing.
I have no doubt that this will not be forever. Maybe it will be a few years, maybe it will be just a season, a stepping stone to another thing. But for now, this is a self-help website - just as it’s always been.
