What you will find is that the entire world of self-help books can be measured by how much it emphasizes these four pillars: Empowerment, Kinship, Tactics and Creativity. Before I dive into how this template applies, I want to mention that I use a loose definition of self-help. If anything, "self-help" is a misnomer nowadays, and is intended to be an umbrella term for any of the following: business tips, productivity tips, spiritual inspiration, secular inspiration, empowerment, pop psychology, inspiring stories, weight-loss tips, etc.
Empowerment - The purpose is to get you up off your chair and out into the world doing things. Think Tony Robbins. The goal is to make you more confident. The bulk of empowerment relies on one-line zingers, such as "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing." Or "Happiness isn't about getting to a place where 'everything's fine.'" Often memoirs turn out to be empowerment lit, as successful people distill their stories into compact, but inspiring, ideas. Sometimes, empowerment lit comes with formula and charts. Tony Robbins and Stephen Covey do this.
Kinship - Kinship lit aims to simply make you feel better about who you already are. For example, stories in Chicken Soup for the Soul are often of people triumphing over adversity. This makes it a lot easier for us to feel better about our own trials and tribulations. Sometimes kinship lit uses sympathy as a way to make us feel connected. Often the connection is done through a proxy, such as a new keyword to describe your condition. For example, The Highly Sensitive Person helps sensitive people reclaim themselves with, "So that's what's going on with me!"
Tactics - Originally, this is what self-help was meant for. For example one of the earliest self-help books was Every Man His Own Lawyer, which was published in 1784.
Creativity - Creativity self-help is designed to simply open your eyes and imagination. Some books are explicitly designed for creativity, such as The Artist's Way, and others are simply fantastical caricatures of New Age ideas. While New Age spirituality purports to be about the spiritual ideas in of themselves, functionally, they serve to stir people's imaginations and inspire solutions that can't be otherwise logically deduced. For example, externally-speaking, Feng Shui is simply a device to move interior decorating conversations forward. (Internally, though, Feng Shui and other New Age spirituality means a whole lot more to practitioners, and I respect that).
(click on the diagram to view in amazon)
And these books are used like self-help books, but are placed in other stacks:
I found inspiration for this arrangement from the most unlikely of sources: SHAM: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless. In the scathing—and often funny—critique of the "Self-Help and Actualization Movement," Steve Salerno breaks apart self-help into two major fields: Empowerment and Victimization. His criticism of Empowerment is that you only get a temporary and false sense of confidence. His criticism of Victimization is that it teaches us to resign responsibility.
An unintended side-effect of his critique is that he's done a decent scan of the industry. I can tell he consumed a lot of self-help literature to make the book (what does that say about him?). As a result, it's a decent gateway to the entire field if you can see past all the negativity.
And then it hit me, if "Empowerment" and "Victimization" represent natural categories for Salerno, then maybe they can also represent pillars for a template for self-help. "Empowerment" doesn't carry any biased meaning, so I'll keep that term. "Victimization", though, can charitably be renamed "Kinship."
There are two other pillars that Salerno doesn't mention: "Tactics" and "Creativity." Perhaps the reason he doesn't mention those two flavors of self-help is that they're very hard to challenge. The Tactical category of self-help, for example, includes one of the earliest self-help books, Every Man His Own Lawyer published in 1784. This is self-help in that it helps you teach yourself Law.
The Creativity category refers to indirect ways of coming up with new ideas. So even if a book includes tactics, such as "positive visualization," I consider this more about creativity because its real purpose is to get you to think about a variety of positive ways to come up with your goal. In other words, whatever the effect a creativity self-help book provides, any other creativity self-help book could hit the same target. Tactical self-help books, on the other hand, require the authentic expertise and experience of the author to deliver value.
© Philip Dhingra