I’m not finished with it yet, but I am currently greatly enjoying Beth Lisick’s Helping Me Help Myself. Helping Me Help Myself is a humorous look at the self-help industry. The official title of this book is Helping Me Help Myself: One Skeptic, Ten Self-Help Gurus, and a Year on the Brink of the Comfort Zone. If you have any doubt about the popularity of this book, you should know that even though it was published seven months ago, the hold list at my library (a large metropolitan library) is still hundreds of people long.
In this book, Beth Lisick decides that she wants to improve her life. She assigns one calendar month to each area of her life that she wants to work on and then seeks out a self-help guru to help her figure out an improvement approach. Among others, she turns to John Gray (of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus fame), Jack Canfield (the mind behind the Chicken Soup for the Soul books) and Stephen Covey (The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People). While she doesn’t meet with them individually, she takes part in their seminars, reads their books and looks for ways to implement their philosophies in her life.
So far, the book is very entertaining. I like how honest Lisick is about her life and that nothing gets glossed over. I really like that she enjoys her part time job as a Giant Banana. Most people wouldn’t consider dressing up as a giant banana and passing out fruit on the streets of San Francisco to be fun, but Lisick seems to revel in it. She loves her son, is trying to improve communication with her spouse and get control of her finances, all while doing her best to keep her sense of humor.
