Helping others is the best self-help

You want to know a business that keeps killing it year after year? Take a look at the self-improvement business. It's a $10 billion dollar a year industry and growing.

It seems a lot of us are always looking to be a better version of ourselves. Whether we're reading books or listening to podcasts or downloading an app or getting fired up by the latest motivational speaker, we are paying a lot of money to other people to help us become the people we want to be.

To be fair, I consume a fair amount of that material myself. And if I'm being honest, many times it's driven by a pressure to catch up and live up to some picture of myself culture has created for me. It's not as much about being who I want to be as much as it is being who all the successful people on Facebook lead me to believe I should be. Or at least all the images of success.

I think the success of the self-improvement industry is a measure of just how unsuccessful many of us feel.

A British journalist, Will Storr, who has studied the high prevalence of suicide in the United States and Britain, wrote the following: “We’re living in an age of perfectionism, and perfection is the idea that kills,” he writes. “People are suffering and dying under the torture of the fantasy self they’re failing to become.”

When I think of how much of my life I've spent trying to be thinner and stronger and faster and smarter and more productive and more efficient and richer - oh, the ever present pressure to be richer - AND - when I consider just how unfulfilled almost all of those efforts have left me feeling about my life, I realize why the self-improvement business keeps growing.

We just don't give up easily on this idea of becoming our fantasy self. It's a vicious cycle.

As a follower of Christ, I know Jesus came to relieve that torture in my life. Jesus tells me that even if I can somehow become my fantasy self, I will still feel like something is missing. I'll still be headed to Barnes and Noble to seek out the latest self-help book.

Jesus tells us the path to being our best selves is where our world intersects with him. And the aisle of books that would point us in the direction of that intersection would be titled helping others and not ourselves.

Philippians 2 tells us this:

If you’ve gotten anything at all out of following Christ, if his love has made any difference in your life, if being in a community of the Spirit means anything to you, if you have a heart, if you care— then do me a favor: Agree with each other, love each other, be deep-spirited friends. Don’t push your way to the front; don’t sweet-talk your way to the top. Put yourself aside, and help others get ahead. Don’t be obsessed with getting your own advantage. Forget yourselves long enough to lend a helping hand.

Jesus tells us the intersection of this world and him is love. Jesus tells us that being committed to loving others is the best self-help hack there is out there today.

Jesus told the rich young ruler who felt like he had it all together in this world but yet was still looking for some self-improvement advice from Jesus: go sell everything you own and tag along with me to love on some people.

I think it's always helpful to find ways to be a better version of ourselves. The question we have to answer is why do I want to be better.

For the Christian, that question is am I striving to be a better reflection of the person I think the world wants me to be - or am I trying to be a person who better reflects the kind of love Christ told me the world needs?

Maybe when we start loving people the way Christ showed us to love them, we'll discover that helping others is the most beautiful way to help ourselves. Maybe we'll discover that the most powerful way to feel fulfilled by who we are is through accepting and loving others for who they are.

The $10 billion a year self-improvement industry doesn't want us to ever believe it's that simple, but the people around us sure do.