How to Read Self-Help Books to Set Personal Goals Effectively

By?Ruzanna Hernandez, Ed.D.

Questions

Do you read self-help or self-improvement books?

Do you find them helpful?

Do you think it would help you get some strategies on how some of what those books teach can be used right away in your life?

Are you looking for ways to improve your life and set more goals for improvement?

If you answer YES to these questions, this article will give you some helpful insights!

Introduction

Self-help books, self-improvement, and self-development books are essentially written to help readers change something or enhance something about themselves. These changes can be for their:

· Personal life

· Career

· Mental?

· Personality traits

· Abilities

· Skillsets

· Relationships

· Health

· Overcoming obstacles

· Finding happiness

· And more!

Most writers of self-help books are experts in the field and have educational or experiential pathways that have led them to success. They share that knowledge with their readers in hopes of inspiring them to achieve goals in life. According to?standoutbooks.com, writers' intent is to provide readers with the tools they need to improve an aspect of their lives.?

The fact that self-help is a growing industry, especially in the United States, tells us that people acknowledge that they could use some help, advice, and motivation in their lives. People are willing to choose to change something specific in their lives to become happier, healthier, live more purposefully, and more.?

Data and Statistics

Self-help and self-development books are a?$2.5 billion industry in the United States?alone. According to?Psychologytoday.com, at least a third of the population has purchased a self-help book at least once in their lifetime. Amazon.com, alone, has over?417,000 self-help books?available for purchase in the wide category of self-help or self-improvement. Unit sales of these books have grown by?11% since 2003.?

What drives sales is consumers’ recent desire to achieve more mindfulness and minimalism in the past decade.?Kristen McLean, a book industry analyst, says people are looking for more meaning, peace, and calm in today’s chaotic world. Sales of motivational and motivational books have also increased, as well as books on?creativity and journaling.

Millennials compose the generation that is most interested in self-help and self-improvement. In fact, the average consumer of self-help products is a?woman between the ages of 40 and 50.??Even though the majority of the books are written by men, the majority of consumers are women.?According to Forbes, 94% of millennials reported making personal improvement commitments in 2015, more so than baby boomers or those in generation X.

Self-help audiobook revenues were reported at?$769 million in 2018?and are increasing to this day. The top ten best self-improvement apps in the US reportedly generated over?$15 million in 2018?alone.?

The Problem

According to?Matthew Jones, a life coach & personal growth expert, people seek self-help and self-improvement because their lives are out of balance. Our culture now is one of consumerism, entitlement, and instant gratification. People are mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually exhausted.?

Self-help books are an excellent source of knowledge and wisdom. They could provide the tools necessary for the readers to feel empowered to make the necessary changes in their lives that they seek. However, self-help books do not work?because they cannot work in a vacuum. They will work if you want them to work. Simply reading a self-help book will not affect change in your life. You must actively apply what the books are recommending in your own life. The lessons are helpful, but where most people fail is applying those lessons in their own lives.?

Even though people read self-help books to improve, they often do not put the lessons learned into practice because they do not have the specific means and methods to do so. For example, a self-help book might tell a reader that it is wrong to procrastinate and that procrastinating must be stopped immediately to make progress. How would a person suddenly stop procrastinating? What steps need to be taken? Many self-help books do not give these specifics because the authors know each person’s circumstances are different. What they recommend to one person may not apply to another person.?Therefore, they leave the action steps up to the readers. The really good self-help books do, in fact, make action step recommendations, and those are the ones that are more popular and recommended by readers!

The Solution

To make improvements and life changes, we have to incorporate specific changes in our daily systems. According to?Merriam-Webster.com, a system is a regular interaction of a group of items that unify to make a whole. For example, you are a system. The things around us that make us who comprise the parts of our systems. Those parts include our families, friends, our body, knowledge, environment, culture, skills, education, experiences, and more. They all come together as items that unify to make us whole. They are our systems.?

There is a field of study on the systems that surround each and every human being in psychology. This is otherwise known as the ecological systems theory, first developed by?Urie Bronfenbrenner, a Russian-born American psychologist. His theory is often used in child development to explain how a child’s mind and body develop due to their surroundings. Our environment affects who we are. Our thoughts, talents, upbringings, views, beliefs, and who are at our core make up our overall system. By making small changes to the system, we can make improvements to our lives. The fact that we reach for self-help, self-improvement, and self-development books tells us that we want to make changes – we want some or all of the system to work better.?

7-Step Process to Helping Self-Help Books Effectively Using an Organized and Systematic Approach

To get self-help books to work effectively for us, there are some steps we can take when reading them. Here is a systematic approach with tips and strategies to reading self-help and self-improvement books to make the changes in our lives that we seek.

1.??Read each chapter.?Highlight or underline the parts and pieces that resonate with you the most.

2.??When you get to the end of the chapter, go back, and read the highlighted or underlined sections only.

PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE REMAINING STEPS, ALONG WITH DOWNLOADABLE DOCUMENTS, LINKS, AND IMAGES.