In Life Strategies (1999), self-help guru Dr. Phillip McGraw writes that willpower is a myth – “an unreliable emotional fuel, experienced at fever pitch”.
Willpower may temporarily energise our efforts, he says – helping us to take a leap that initially changes our behaviour. But it will also hinder our progress once the emotional responses to our early endeavours have dissipated. For those wanting to change their behaviour, this makes willpower a dangerous energizer: a fuel that will evaporate, bringing us to a halt at the first difficulty – like a coasting car out-of-petrol and facing the slightest of inclines.
Of course, we are in the land of the New Year’s resolution: those moments when we decide upon change but, all too often and all too quickly, end up reinforcing our failings. The momentum of the new behaviour rarely lasts beyond a week, leaving us gritting our teeth and relying on willpower – all the while secretly knowing it is only a matter of when we fail. The if seemingly dealt with at the first pang of weakness.
So how can we improve our chances of success, whether in big pursuits (a new man/job/career) or small (quit smoking/biting nails/being a couch potato)? McGraw suggests that we replace willpower with a well-developed and well-executed strategy – especially one that manages to remove our emotions as key drivers. But what is a strategy? I spend some time struggling with the concept in What’s Stopping You? (TBP 2011) simply because people with high fear of failure (my target readership in the book) can be easily put off by such ambiguities. And while motivational concepts such as “goals” and “action points” are easily understood, the concept of a strategy can be confusing.
McGraw describes a strategy as the “operational definition” of a plan, which to me sounds like a plan with some detail included. Fine, but a plan for what? Clearly, it’s a plan to meet our goals, but aren’t those our action points – our day-to-day activities that lead us towards our objectives? Well only if they do, in fact, lead us towards our objectives. So perhaps our best definition of a strategy is that it’s a plan that ensures our action points move us in the direction of our ultimate objectives.
I’ll give one (silly) example to illustrate. Say we're arrivistes: social climbers having moved to a new location. If our goal is to ingratiate ourselves with the local squirearchy then one action point could be to hold a smart dinner party in which they are invited. Yet this is one event, which is likely to be well-received but unlikely to secure our invite to her Ladyship’s intimate circle. What’s needed is a strategy. A plan that joins a series of action points to create a co-ordinated and effective advance focused on success. So membership of the tennis and golf clubs is a must, as is some local charity work that may offer an excuse for a direct approach (being careful not to ask for money). The WI, an interest in the Parish Council, championing a local issue, horse riding – all may lead us towards our goal if pursued in a co-ordinated and strategic fashion.
Of course, my example is frivolous and old fashioned. It’s just stating that resolution will fail without a strategy. That action points are not enough without a goal. And that a strategy relies on a series of action points all focused on a calculated and positive objective.
In fact, positivity – the idea of moving towards something rather than away – is crucial for a successful strategy. Saying I want to change my job is negative and, ultimately, meaningless without positive direction (and brings me back to the previous post on running away). Probably, you will achieve your goal, but as it’s a negative pursuit you may find yourself repeating the exercise next year. Far better to move towards something – having calculated our positive and long-term goals and strategized our action points for achieving them.
This even works for habits – the most common target for New Year’s resolutions. Such small and negative pursuits are unlikely to succeed unless they’re one action point in a strategy towards a wider objective. Quitting smoking, for instance, is a narrow and negative objective and therefore one entirely dependent on willpower (leaving aside Allen Carr’s reframing of smoking as an addiction). Moving towards the healthier person you visualise in, say, six months – perhaps losing 10 pounds in weight and that horrible rasping noise in your breath when you climb stairs – makes the end of your smoking habit just one action point is a positive pursuit with a measurable and thought-through long-term objective.
Less and better food, more exercise, new clothes, less alcohol, a remodelled back garden, a walk rather than drive to the station – all are action points along the way: bundled into a strategy for achieving your objective. Of course, willpower isn’t banished as a requirement. We will always need to navigate the occasionally-triggered desire for our old behaviours. But willpower is no longer the central pillar in our pursuit. Instead, our central pillar is a strategy for achieving our positive and long-term goals.
Happy New Year!
Showing posts with label Allen Carr. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Allen Carr. Show all posts
Sunday, December 26, 2010
Thursday, December 16, 2010
HELP! I’m supporting self-help at a summit of cerebral cynics
Yiks – I have my first gig as a self-help writer! It’s at the School of Life in Central London. I’m a speaker at the Self-Help Summit on January 15th – part of the afternoon session entitled “Help Yourself: How Does Self-Help Help?”
This is exciting stuff. External confirmation (as everyone with high fear of failure needs) that this isn’t all nonsense. That I have a point worth listening to – or, at the very least, worth appraisal from a cerebral and engaged audience. Yet I am immediately posed with a problem (beyond, that is, the obvious terror such a gig presents to someone with fear of failure). The School of Life prides itself on its enquiring agnosticism, as well as its wit and intelligence. Certainly, I hope What’s Stopping You? (TBP 2011) has lashings of all three, but I’d be sharing a platform with speakers that do enquiring agnosticism, wit and intelligence for a living. What can I possibly add?
In fact – with respect to the progamme at least – my potential positioning becomes clear after a quick scan of the speaker biographies. Among the speakers are psychologists, philosophers and writers. This is no more than one would expect from the philosophical and inquisitive School of Life crowd – all no doubt scarily tutored in the ways of dialectic debate. One expects searching questions regarding the true intent of self-help and lots of cynicism regarding its outcomes.
Although this is sympathetic to the positioning of the book, which is critical of the self-help industry for over-promising and offering near-instant cures for innate mental conditions, it provides me with little scope. I hardly add much to the debate if I stand up and say: I agree with the last speaker (at least the bits I understood) almost as wholeheartedly as I’ll no doubt agree with the next. It’s clear I'll have to take a different position: I'll have to defend self-help.
This shouldn’t be so hard. After all, I have written a self-help book, even if I seem to be in denial of the fact – largely because of the genre’s somewhat cheesy reputation.
Here are my notes so far:
Self-help sells...
In an age when everyone demands everything, instantly, a genre of books has emerged to tell us we can, indeed, have it all now. Shock, horror! They may be raising our expectations, sure, but they are also a response to the raised expectations of affluence. Isn’t this Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs in action? Having become materially secure, we seek self-esteem: cue self-help. At least that’s the majority position – to have reached the next level. Some in the audience may have progressed further and now seek morality (the top level, according to Maslow). Self-help is harder to defend from this height (though not impossible) because it can sometimes appear to be (and sometimes is) a false promise made to the afflicted desperate for a cure.
This is self help at its worst. Yet, even here, self-help can be defended as capitalism doing its job – creating and fulfilling demands for our general human improvement. For instance, as a kid I watched my dad do lots of jobs around the house. Meanwhile, I put an advert on gumtree.com and some Polish guy or Aussie sorts it out while I take the kids to Dad’s Club. In my view this is progress – both the Polish guy and the kids are better off and I’m using my time more enjoyably. And just as my Polish handymen improve – as long as the supply side is held up – so the bad side of self-help should over time be eclipsed by the good. At least that’s the theory.
...but the hyper-titles are off-putting to some.
The first title for my book was How Not to Fail. Yet my number one target publisher – John Wiley & Sons – suggested that this rather tepid promise was off-putting and wouldn’t sell, so I changed it to the more dynamic What’s Stopping You? In the end I agreed with their view, not because I wanted my advertised outcome to be more than the avoidance of failure – although I did – but because this is a crowded market place and you need to compete. And the title of the book is key.
Another example of hyper-titling comes from one of my heroes: Allen Carr. He wrote The Easy Way to Stop Smoking, a book I loved because it explicitly states there are no instant cures. Carr focused on self-awareness of the triggers trapping nicotine addicts and how they can navigate them. Yet look at the title – you’d think there was a frontal lobotomy kit included. Even Anthony Robbins – cheesy self-help king-of-the-gurus with hyper-titles such as Unlimited Power and Awaken the Giant Within – quickly settles down to offer strong methodologies for practical employment. Indeed, with most of the genre, the over-promising is usually mellowed within: it’s the over-hyping title and cheesy grin from the author that really gets rational eyes rolling.
Self-help helps...
Sourcing answers to problems has to be good for society. All advances require experiment and analysis and, if the self-help industry helps popularize this endeavour, so much the better. For instance, my father was good with a drill and screwdriver but was a pretty hopeless dad. He didn’t think he was hopeless – he’d just swallowed the accepted thinking of his age that small boys had to be toughened up through emotional rejection and mental barbarism (or they'd end up "soft").
Fine, except that we now realise this is utter codswallop. A recipe for low self-esteem and high fear of failure, although such an upbringing probably helped when it came to dealing with restive natives. Yet it took self-help writers such as Steve Biddulph to finally destroy the myth of “tough love” with respect to the treatment of young boys. Sure Biddulph is a psychologist but, make no mistake, Raising Boys is a self-help book aimed at popular consumption. And it took a popular book to change the way people thought about parenting boys. Without him dads would still be in the Dark Ages.
Certainly, my dad never read a self-help book in his life – would scoff at the very notion. Yet this did little for his parenting skills, which was not his fault: bless him. But in our more enlightened age – where self-awareness if more encouraged than self-discipline and where just about every endeavour talks about "best practice" – this is unacceptable.
Meanwhile, I defy anyone to read Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and not become more efficient, or Richard Carlson’s Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff and remain as angry and irritated by tiny annoyances, or Mark McCormack’s What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School and not become more effective in their career pursuits. Each contains great truths to help mere mortals navigate the modern jungle. Yet all belong on the bookshop's equivalent of a cheese counter.
...and knowledge is always a benefit.
Why is ignorance to be cherished, with respect to anything – even self-help? It amazes me the number of times I hear people declare their ignorance with pride, usually when such knowledge is unfashionable. For instance, although a southerner, I like the North of England. I went to Manchester University and have a passion for football, so perhaps that helps. Yet I’m constantly amazed by the number of southerners that say: “Oh I’ve never been up north,” usually with a dismissive wave of the hand as if this somehow makes them a better person. It doesn’t – it makes them small-minded and ignorant of their own country.
Dismissing anything – especially something aimed at expanding our understanding of ourselves – is for those with very short horizons. American educator Derek Bok said: “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance” and that is just as true for self awareness, of which self-help is the frontline.
Self-help has a perception problem, especially in the UK...
If you ask someone if they believe in self-development, most right thinking people will of course say “yes”. Self-improvement is also likely to be answered in the affirmative as is self-awareness, self-confidence, self-respect and even self-control. Yet all are alternative names or potential outcomes of self-help. Only the term “self help” generates cynicism – largely because it brings to mind angst-ridden under-confidents lurking in the wrong part of the bookstore and being sucked in by the hyper titles and surgically-whitened grins on the cover. It all seems so embarrassing – like asking for something horrendous at the pharmacist. Yet it also appears synthetic: a bit trashy, sleazy – dare I say it, even a bit too American for us stiff-upper lipped Brits. We’re happy being crap thanks – especially when it comes to our emotions.
...which makes even the self-help writers a little defensive.
In fact my book is no more than a self-help book that begins by dissing the genre. It then nicks its best ideas. Isn’t this how everyone muscles their way in? Certainly, I remember from my political theory and philosophy classes at university each guy demolishing the thesis of the previous thinker before adding his or her view on top. Given this, just maybe I shouldn’t be so embarrassed at the notion of being a self-help writer and, indeed, should use the School of Life talk to “come out” as a wannabe self-help guru. Either that or be “outted” by the other speakers, it seems.
This is exciting stuff. External confirmation (as everyone with high fear of failure needs) that this isn’t all nonsense. That I have a point worth listening to – or, at the very least, worth appraisal from a cerebral and engaged audience. Yet I am immediately posed with a problem (beyond, that is, the obvious terror such a gig presents to someone with fear of failure). The School of Life prides itself on its enquiring agnosticism, as well as its wit and intelligence. Certainly, I hope What’s Stopping You? (TBP 2011) has lashings of all three, but I’d be sharing a platform with speakers that do enquiring agnosticism, wit and intelligence for a living. What can I possibly add?
In fact – with respect to the progamme at least – my potential positioning becomes clear after a quick scan of the speaker biographies. Among the speakers are psychologists, philosophers and writers. This is no more than one would expect from the philosophical and inquisitive School of Life crowd – all no doubt scarily tutored in the ways of dialectic debate. One expects searching questions regarding the true intent of self-help and lots of cynicism regarding its outcomes.
Although this is sympathetic to the positioning of the book, which is critical of the self-help industry for over-promising and offering near-instant cures for innate mental conditions, it provides me with little scope. I hardly add much to the debate if I stand up and say: I agree with the last speaker (at least the bits I understood) almost as wholeheartedly as I’ll no doubt agree with the next. It’s clear I'll have to take a different position: I'll have to defend self-help.
This shouldn’t be so hard. After all, I have written a self-help book, even if I seem to be in denial of the fact – largely because of the genre’s somewhat cheesy reputation.
Here are my notes so far:
Self-help sells...
In an age when everyone demands everything, instantly, a genre of books has emerged to tell us we can, indeed, have it all now. Shock, horror! They may be raising our expectations, sure, but they are also a response to the raised expectations of affluence. Isn’t this Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs in action? Having become materially secure, we seek self-esteem: cue self-help. At least that’s the majority position – to have reached the next level. Some in the audience may have progressed further and now seek morality (the top level, according to Maslow). Self-help is harder to defend from this height (though not impossible) because it can sometimes appear to be (and sometimes is) a false promise made to the afflicted desperate for a cure.
This is self help at its worst. Yet, even here, self-help can be defended as capitalism doing its job – creating and fulfilling demands for our general human improvement. For instance, as a kid I watched my dad do lots of jobs around the house. Meanwhile, I put an advert on gumtree.com and some Polish guy or Aussie sorts it out while I take the kids to Dad’s Club. In my view this is progress – both the Polish guy and the kids are better off and I’m using my time more enjoyably. And just as my Polish handymen improve – as long as the supply side is held up – so the bad side of self-help should over time be eclipsed by the good. At least that’s the theory.
...but the hyper-titles are off-putting to some.
The first title for my book was How Not to Fail. Yet my number one target publisher – John Wiley & Sons – suggested that this rather tepid promise was off-putting and wouldn’t sell, so I changed it to the more dynamic What’s Stopping You? In the end I agreed with their view, not because I wanted my advertised outcome to be more than the avoidance of failure – although I did – but because this is a crowded market place and you need to compete. And the title of the book is key.
Another example of hyper-titling comes from one of my heroes: Allen Carr. He wrote The Easy Way to Stop Smoking, a book I loved because it explicitly states there are no instant cures. Carr focused on self-awareness of the triggers trapping nicotine addicts and how they can navigate them. Yet look at the title – you’d think there was a frontal lobotomy kit included. Even Anthony Robbins – cheesy self-help king-of-the-gurus with hyper-titles such as Unlimited Power and Awaken the Giant Within – quickly settles down to offer strong methodologies for practical employment. Indeed, with most of the genre, the over-promising is usually mellowed within: it’s the over-hyping title and cheesy grin from the author that really gets rational eyes rolling.
Self-help helps...
Sourcing answers to problems has to be good for society. All advances require experiment and analysis and, if the self-help industry helps popularize this endeavour, so much the better. For instance, my father was good with a drill and screwdriver but was a pretty hopeless dad. He didn’t think he was hopeless – he’d just swallowed the accepted thinking of his age that small boys had to be toughened up through emotional rejection and mental barbarism (or they'd end up "soft").
Fine, except that we now realise this is utter codswallop. A recipe for low self-esteem and high fear of failure, although such an upbringing probably helped when it came to dealing with restive natives. Yet it took self-help writers such as Steve Biddulph to finally destroy the myth of “tough love” with respect to the treatment of young boys. Sure Biddulph is a psychologist but, make no mistake, Raising Boys is a self-help book aimed at popular consumption. And it took a popular book to change the way people thought about parenting boys. Without him dads would still be in the Dark Ages.
Certainly, my dad never read a self-help book in his life – would scoff at the very notion. Yet this did little for his parenting skills, which was not his fault: bless him. But in our more enlightened age – where self-awareness if more encouraged than self-discipline and where just about every endeavour talks about "best practice" – this is unacceptable.
Meanwhile, I defy anyone to read Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and not become more efficient, or Richard Carlson’s Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff and remain as angry and irritated by tiny annoyances, or Mark McCormack’s What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School and not become more effective in their career pursuits. Each contains great truths to help mere mortals navigate the modern jungle. Yet all belong on the bookshop's equivalent of a cheese counter.
...and knowledge is always a benefit.
Why is ignorance to be cherished, with respect to anything – even self-help? It amazes me the number of times I hear people declare their ignorance with pride, usually when such knowledge is unfashionable. For instance, although a southerner, I like the North of England. I went to Manchester University and have a passion for football, so perhaps that helps. Yet I’m constantly amazed by the number of southerners that say: “Oh I’ve never been up north,” usually with a dismissive wave of the hand as if this somehow makes them a better person. It doesn’t – it makes them small-minded and ignorant of their own country.
Dismissing anything – especially something aimed at expanding our understanding of ourselves – is for those with very short horizons. American educator Derek Bok said: “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance” and that is just as true for self awareness, of which self-help is the frontline.
Self-help has a perception problem, especially in the UK...
If you ask someone if they believe in self-development, most right thinking people will of course say “yes”. Self-improvement is also likely to be answered in the affirmative as is self-awareness, self-confidence, self-respect and even self-control. Yet all are alternative names or potential outcomes of self-help. Only the term “self help” generates cynicism – largely because it brings to mind angst-ridden under-confidents lurking in the wrong part of the bookstore and being sucked in by the hyper titles and surgically-whitened grins on the cover. It all seems so embarrassing – like asking for something horrendous at the pharmacist. Yet it also appears synthetic: a bit trashy, sleazy – dare I say it, even a bit too American for us stiff-upper lipped Brits. We’re happy being crap thanks – especially when it comes to our emotions.
...which makes even the self-help writers a little defensive.
In fact my book is no more than a self-help book that begins by dissing the genre. It then nicks its best ideas. Isn’t this how everyone muscles their way in? Certainly, I remember from my political theory and philosophy classes at university each guy demolishing the thesis of the previous thinker before adding his or her view on top. Given this, just maybe I shouldn’t be so embarrassed at the notion of being a self-help writer and, indeed, should use the School of Life talk to “come out” as a wannabe self-help guru. Either that or be “outted” by the other speakers, it seems.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Allen Carr for the soul
When researching What’s Stopping You? I quickly became disenchanted with nearly all of the self-help books I’d read over the years. It wasn’t their recommendations that bothered me – in fact many contained some great tips and methodologies that have been included in my book (TBP February 2011 by John Wiley & Sons). It was more fundamental than that. I had a problem with their premise.
The main issue was what they promised, which was a cure for mental conditions such as fear of failure and low self esteeem. Researching my book meant talking to psychologists and researching both academic and popular psychology texts. And each time the same fundamental truth screamed out at me: our fears and insecurities – including fear of failure, low self-esteem, anxiety and poor confidence – are innate. Once and however inflicted we are hardwired to our inner beliefs. Sure we can treat the symptoms but our core beliefs are here for life. As I say in the book, that monkey on my back (you know the one – he whispers doubts and fears at the very moments we need confidence and resilience) isn’t going to just disappear after a few motivational passages from a self-help guru. So why are so many self-help books promising to “change your life – forever” when it is something they simply cannot deliver?
Of course, there’s a chance many of the authors realise this but know that offering progress (via their techniques) without the all-important promise of wholesale changes to our personality would compromise their marketability. They surmised, probably rightly, that people are looking for a cure for their insecurities – in fact they are looking for a cure that is pretty much instant. And while the books were incapable of delivering on their promises in full, they reasoned that any application of their techniques would deliver some progress, which would justify the over-promising.
Yet this just wasn’t good enough for me, or – I thought – the many intelligent people out there that are hampered by their insecurities. Sure, they want help, but smart people only have to pick up most of these books to see through the over-promising. They are turned off by the smiling face of “Mr Successful” beaming out from the front cover, before making statements such as “it worked for me, it’ll work for you”. Indeed, words like “mastering” “unlimited” “guaranteed” are everywhere. And everywhere they put off intelligent people that, nonetheless, want to navigate their insecurities.
So while I thought there was a market for a book that didn’t treat the reader like a child – that told the truth about our condition but then helped us use self-help methodologies to make strong progress anyway – I did worry whether such a book would have any resonance with a wider audience (than just me, that is). Just maybe those smart people were also too self-conscious – or maybe too British – to ever buy a book written with them in mind.
Luckily I had one, somewhat unusual, example as a potential template: Allen Carr’s the Easy Way to Stop Smoking (1985). Despite helping millions of people give up smoking – and despite the book’s name – Carr offers no miracle cure for the nicotine addict. The first half of the book simply describes the life of a smoker – exploding many myths and delusions about the impact of smoking (for instance, explaining that it causes rather than relieves stress) – and the nature of addiction (explaining that it is no more than a mild feeling of emptiness, that dissipates in a few days).
Crucially, Carr – a former 100-cigarettes a day addict – then tells us that the desire to smoke will not simply disappear. Even after a period of not smoking – even when we think we have finally conquered the addiction – we will occasionally be triggered by situations where we had previously “enjoyed” smoking. Carr states that these are the moments we must guard against and plan for. But, with his help, the smoker can navigate their way such triggerings via self-awareness and clear thinking.
Carr’s trick is to describe, not only the false paradigm that is the world of the smoker, but how we will behave once we quit. First, the “monster inside us” (in fact a similar creature to the monkey on my back) will kick and scream as it copes with nicotine withdrawals. But it will soon realise it has to get clever – suggesting a reward for “having done so well” or claiming that it was so easy “we could quit anytime” – or even going for the “just one puff” honeytrap. Then it will get angry and try anything to trap us: for instance inventing rows with loved ones so we can shout “look what you made me do” as we grab the fags. Yet through self-realisation that this is happening we are no longer fooled and can call the monster’s bluff.
Carr made the smoker mentally ready for the battle ahead – not through any self delusions (except perhaps in the title of his book) – but through self awareness. And that was my aim when writing What’s Stopping You? I’m not promising a cure. The clinical evidence suggests that we will have to accept the news that we are who we are. The fears that dog us now will always be with us. But that doesn’t mean we are helpless. Far from it. It just means that we must take account of our fears and insecurities as we make progress. We need to be aware of our faulty wiring – helping us benchmark judgements that take account of the fact we are likely to be making fear-based, rather than rational, evaluations.
In the writing of What’s Stopping You? therefore, I have to acknowledge my debt to Allen Carr. Oh, and he also helped me stop smoking in 1991 after 10-years as an "addict". By the way, Allen Carr died of lung cancer in 2006 and, despite probably saving thousands from a similar fate, has never been recognised by the UK government for his work. The reason: according to Carr, the government ignored his recommendations because they were a refutation of the nicotine replacement therapy the government (thanks to powerful lobbying) favoured. So much for self-awareness.
The main issue was what they promised, which was a cure for mental conditions such as fear of failure and low self esteeem. Researching my book meant talking to psychologists and researching both academic and popular psychology texts. And each time the same fundamental truth screamed out at me: our fears and insecurities – including fear of failure, low self-esteem, anxiety and poor confidence – are innate. Once and however inflicted we are hardwired to our inner beliefs. Sure we can treat the symptoms but our core beliefs are here for life. As I say in the book, that monkey on my back (you know the one – he whispers doubts and fears at the very moments we need confidence and resilience) isn’t going to just disappear after a few motivational passages from a self-help guru. So why are so many self-help books promising to “change your life – forever” when it is something they simply cannot deliver?
Of course, there’s a chance many of the authors realise this but know that offering progress (via their techniques) without the all-important promise of wholesale changes to our personality would compromise their marketability. They surmised, probably rightly, that people are looking for a cure for their insecurities – in fact they are looking for a cure that is pretty much instant. And while the books were incapable of delivering on their promises in full, they reasoned that any application of their techniques would deliver some progress, which would justify the over-promising.
Yet this just wasn’t good enough for me, or – I thought – the many intelligent people out there that are hampered by their insecurities. Sure, they want help, but smart people only have to pick up most of these books to see through the over-promising. They are turned off by the smiling face of “Mr Successful” beaming out from the front cover, before making statements such as “it worked for me, it’ll work for you”. Indeed, words like “mastering” “unlimited” “guaranteed” are everywhere. And everywhere they put off intelligent people that, nonetheless, want to navigate their insecurities.
So while I thought there was a market for a book that didn’t treat the reader like a child – that told the truth about our condition but then helped us use self-help methodologies to make strong progress anyway – I did worry whether such a book would have any resonance with a wider audience (than just me, that is). Just maybe those smart people were also too self-conscious – or maybe too British – to ever buy a book written with them in mind.
Luckily I had one, somewhat unusual, example as a potential template: Allen Carr’s the Easy Way to Stop Smoking (1985). Despite helping millions of people give up smoking – and despite the book’s name – Carr offers no miracle cure for the nicotine addict. The first half of the book simply describes the life of a smoker – exploding many myths and delusions about the impact of smoking (for instance, explaining that it causes rather than relieves stress) – and the nature of addiction (explaining that it is no more than a mild feeling of emptiness, that dissipates in a few days).
Crucially, Carr – a former 100-cigarettes a day addict – then tells us that the desire to smoke will not simply disappear. Even after a period of not smoking – even when we think we have finally conquered the addiction – we will occasionally be triggered by situations where we had previously “enjoyed” smoking. Carr states that these are the moments we must guard against and plan for. But, with his help, the smoker can navigate their way such triggerings via self-awareness and clear thinking.
Carr’s trick is to describe, not only the false paradigm that is the world of the smoker, but how we will behave once we quit. First, the “monster inside us” (in fact a similar creature to the monkey on my back) will kick and scream as it copes with nicotine withdrawals. But it will soon realise it has to get clever – suggesting a reward for “having done so well” or claiming that it was so easy “we could quit anytime” – or even going for the “just one puff” honeytrap. Then it will get angry and try anything to trap us: for instance inventing rows with loved ones so we can shout “look what you made me do” as we grab the fags. Yet through self-realisation that this is happening we are no longer fooled and can call the monster’s bluff.
Carr made the smoker mentally ready for the battle ahead – not through any self delusions (except perhaps in the title of his book) – but through self awareness. And that was my aim when writing What’s Stopping You? I’m not promising a cure. The clinical evidence suggests that we will have to accept the news that we are who we are. The fears that dog us now will always be with us. But that doesn’t mean we are helpless. Far from it. It just means that we must take account of our fears and insecurities as we make progress. We need to be aware of our faulty wiring – helping us benchmark judgements that take account of the fact we are likely to be making fear-based, rather than rational, evaluations.
In the writing of What’s Stopping You? therefore, I have to acknowledge my debt to Allen Carr. Oh, and he also helped me stop smoking in 1991 after 10-years as an "addict". By the way, Allen Carr died of lung cancer in 2006 and, despite probably saving thousands from a similar fate, has never been recognised by the UK government for his work. The reason: according to Carr, the government ignored his recommendations because they were a refutation of the nicotine replacement therapy the government (thanks to powerful lobbying) favoured. So much for self-awareness.
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