Top Self Help Books
Sunday, July 31st, 2011top Self Help Books
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Indigo Ocean Dreams: 4 Children’s Stories Designed to Decrease Stress, Anger and Anxiety while Increasing Self-Esteem and Self-Awareness $7.95 Indigo Ocean Dreams is a 60 minute audio/CD designed to entertain your child in an ocean setting while introducing them to four research-based, stress management techniques. Each story integrates either progressive muscular relaxation, visualizations, breathing, and affirmations (positive statements). Children follow their sea friends along as they use progressive muscular relaxation and breathing… |
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New York City Ballet: The Complete Workout, Vol. 1 and 2 $19.98 Studio: Uni Dist Corp (music) Release Date: 11/07/2006… |
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Fleet Foxes $8.68 No Description Available.Genre: Popular MusicMedia Format: Compact DiskRating: Release Date: 3-JUN-2008… |
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Abs of Steel: Intense Abdominal Workout [VHS] $9.98 … |
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Tae-Bo Workout – Advanced and Tae-Bo Live! Sneak Preview [VHS] $4.99 When Billy Blanks called this workout Advanced, he wasn’t fooling around. This 57-minute workout will have your heart racing, your pulse pounding, and your sweat glands working overtime. The familiar moves from Tae-Bo Instructional and Basic are here, but Blanks has put a little razzmatazz on them, adding slightly more complicated combinations that should be fairly easy to master if you’ve complet… |
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Self Help Books – Do They Help?
I recall seeing a study somewhere that suggested self help books don’t really help. I believe it looked at financial self help books. If I remember correctly, three or ten years after reading various “get rich quick” and other money-related books, the readers were generally making more money, but so was everyone else (on average) that didn’t read the books. The conclusion was that the books didn’t help.
Now that is jumping to conclusions! Consider the assumption implicit in it. Researchers assumed those who didn’t read books did nothing special. This seems unlikely, to say the least. From what we see of people, we might wonder if most really want to work on general self development, but we also can see that almost everyone regularly tries to better their financial situation.
In other words, people in the control group were doing things other than reading self help books, and those efforts got them further ahead also. Think about this for a moment. How does this show that the books didn’t help? It’s like “proving” that a car can’t get you across the city because walking and biking and taking a bus can also get you there. They are just different ways to the same goal!
In other words, the books may have helped (on average), just like the other things people tried. Perhaps people choose the things that work best for them. Based on this hypothesis, a better test might be to have one group choose their self help methods while another is forced to use methods chosen by the researchers. If the first group shows more improvement, it suggests that many methods work, and that each person intuitively knows which will be more helpful.
It might show the opposite too. It is difficult to design such research. It is also difficult to have a proper “control,” and to start with the best hypothesis. One lesson from this is to be skeptical of research where things are hard to define and measure.
Self Help Books Clearly Can Help
There are those of us who don’t need research to prove that a good book can help. We clearly recall a book that changed the course of our lives, or that obviously helped us in our relationships, or even boosted our income. Yes, of course self help books can help us.
Now, there is the question of why they don’t always help. You may have a friend who has told you all about a great new Self Help Book or theory, yet doesn’t seem to be much affected by it in the end. You may have read some books yourself that got you excited, but didn’t seem to “stick” in our mind or change your subsequent behavior or life.
One reason for this apparent ineffectiveness may be that you need to read each book more than once, and that self help books in general help most if they are read regularly. (It is also possible that the effects of such books can be powerful, yet too subtle to notice right away.)
This reminds me of some research on eating I read about once. Researchers had people eat a meal. They then concluded that eating didn’t increase the odds of survival, since everyone died of starvation two months later. Okay, I made that up, but do you see the point? Just like you have to eat regularly to get the maximum survival benefit, perhaps you need to get those self help books out again and feed your mind from time to time to get the most out of them.
About the Author
Copyright Steve Gillman. For more on Self Improvement, and to get the Brainpower Newsletter and other free gifts, visit: http://www.IncreaseBrainPower.com
where can i find a list of the top 10 bestselling books of 2009 and 2008 ?
It has to be books in the category of “happiness,authenticity, and joy” and “self-help”.
You can either do an internet search yourself or go to a library and ask a librarian to help you. Finding the bestselling books of a particular year is relatively easy, but finding ones that relate to your specific subjects will take more time. You will probably need to pick out likely titles and read summaries to determine if they fit your categories.
If you decide to go the internet route, try googling “best selling books 2008″ or “New York Times best selling list” to start with.