“If I buy it, then I’ll be motivated to change.” This faulty logic leads to suburban basements filled with dust-collecting treadmills, weight sets, and ab gizmos, cupboards filled with unopened vitamins, backpacks with unopened Moleskine journals, and bookshelves (or Kindles) lined with half-read self-help and business books. A set of free weights certainly can help you to get strong, but buying one won’t give you any more motivation to do what is difficult.

The truth is, it’s much easier to buy something than actually change yourself. Hence why we get self-help as consumerism. Gurus of self-help products regularly contribute to this problem. At the Tony Robbins “Unleash the Power Within” seminar I attended, Robbins encouraged everyone present to give a several hundred dollar deposit for his “Mastery University” series of very expensive seminars, using such twisted financial logic like “if you think you can’t afford it, that’s just your limiting beliefs about money that will keep you poor forever” and encouraging people who didn’t have the money in their checking accounts to write a post-dated check and “find a way” to get the money into their account before the check cleared. (The truth is I know several folks who declared bankruptcy from using this method to attend Robbins’ seminars.) Talking out of the other side of his mouth, Robbins also frequently harps on people who read self-help books and go to seminars but don’t take enough “massive action.” Personal development authors encourage selling with emotional triggers to get impulse buys from customers, yet then turn around and blame the customer for not getting results. Talk about not taking responsibility! (more…)