And Rocks should Sweat

(This is a section from one of my works-in-progress, tentatively titled The Last Self-Help Book)

In the 1990s, television talk shows were just one venue where the jetsam and flotsam of low self-esteem could be seen bobbing up in the wake of the national trend of felt needs. Today, the trend has gone corporate. If you lack self-esteem, as I do, there are many individuals, organizations, and corporations out there willing to take your money.

Many are the major hotel chains that have become winners in this trend as they host three and four day conferences featuring self-help gurus who encourage legions of fans to reach their potential, unleash their inner leader, and, of course, buy more of their books and tapes.

The Conference: The Next Best Thing to Being Mr. Big is Being Near Him

It may sound as though I am simply being only negative about something that many, many people see as effective in helping them to become better than they are. Susan Cain reports on one example, the Tony Robbins UPW conferences, where excited people pay from $895 (the cheap seats where the attendees watch on giant screens) to $2,500 (where they can be near Tony and dance with him on stage) to learn to be true extroverts (37).

As Cain notes, Americans spend $11 billion a year on the self-help industry. She argues that by following the self-help money, we can get a sense of how it “reveals our conception of the ideal self” (35). In the case of Tony Robbins and his followers, that idea self is extroverted, large, alive, in shape, and beautiful and willing to help others in large ways.

The message that some may be getting in the trend toward extroversion is that you are falling short if you are an introvert.

True Believers

As Cain makes clear in her discussion of the UPW (Unleashing the Power Within) Conferences, it takes true believers to make the big break to being successful on Tony’s terms. The first day of the conference, a rigorous day of dancing to old top forty hits, listening to Tony talk about his life, and generally basking in his warmth, energy, and success, ends with people being encouraged to walk over hot coals in their bare feet to prove their convictions. This is nothing if it is not true belief. The conferees have been convinced and brought into the idea. At the conference, they’ve been pushed and shoved over the steps that might stop them if they were to go it alone. Many large churches today try to emulate what this conference looks and feels like, with people singing familiar songs and dancing together, reciting certain mantras together, and then hearing inspiring personal stories.

But what about introverts? What if the real world out there beyond our five step and four principle reality is very different, and we were created to fit into something that none of our gurus have had the ability to imagine? What if living a life of quiet is not living in shadows or being unsuccessful? What if living alone is to allow oneself to unleash the power within.

Attendees of this conference will never get the chance to ask those questions. Those who try to follow the steps and the principles will not look aside to something else. We will see ourselves as failures, because we are not Tony Robbins. We have been hypnotized by a mirage that someone else has made very real to us.

Work Cited

*Cain, Susan. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking. New York: Crown, 2012. 

*I am grateful to graduate student Ana Rosales, a fellow introvert, for leading me to this wonderful book.