Over the years, self-help books have had a bit of a bad reputation over the years. However, I believe the millennial generation has changed that, reclaiming the importance of self-help books as another necessary resource that helps us become our best selves. Wellness, self-love, and self-care are buzz words that seem to pervade our everyday lives these days, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing.
In fact, it shows that more than any generation prior to today’s generation is acknowledging and encouraging the benefits of self-help tools, including books, as a form of self-care. In my opinion, that’s something to celebrate. Below, I’ve included seven self-help books, discussing many facets of self-care, for the millennial reader and anyone else who wants a little extra help becoming their best self.
Creator of the blog ‘The Anna Edit,’ Anna Newton’s An Edited Life is a book I picked up last week and have since not let go of. For the past several months, I’ve been trying to be more mindful of my spending, my wardrobe, and put simply, my stuff. In other words, I’ve been looking to downsize and minimize everything that I have because it’s gotten to the point where I have so much stuff — clothes, trinkets, things of all sorts — that I can’t think clearly. I thought I was doing okay reading different blogs and articles and whatnot, but what I saw in this book from the minute I picked it up is a curated book where all the information I needed was in one place.
Anna replaces the often overwhelming idea of minimalism for a less intimidating term and practice: editing. She suggests that editing your life means not needing to pare something down so significantly that you’re only left with, for instance, a few shirts, bottoms, and shoes to live off of, but rather an ongoing — and perfectly imperfect — process of working on a life with less stuff. She makes the process of seeking minimalism less intimidating and more realistic, which she talks about in relation to Life, Work, and Home. She talks about streamlining your workspace, your home, your social life, and your money, all of which come together to help you live your best life.
A not-so-typical but just as helpful self-help book is Rebecca Pacheco’s Do Your Om Thing. Pacheco’s book details yoga for the modern beginner yogi, in such a way that the practice of yoga — for both physical and mental wellbeing benefits — become attainable. For me, this is most definitely a self-help book, as it helped me in a time of dire need and taught me what it meant to exist mindfully — my om way. If you love yoga, are curious about yoga, are looking to learn more about how yoga can become a way of life, I recommend Rebecca Pacheco’s Do Your Om Thing.
The tagline for this book is, “Stop Believing The Lies About Who You Are So That You Can Become Who You Were Meant To Be.” I feel like that says it all. Rachel Hollis’ book isn’t your ‘typical’ self-help book but, really, all self-help books these days I believe have turned a corner and become something even more than what one might believe is a traditional self-help book.
Girl, Wash Your Face demystifies the lies that we tell ourselves in order to help us see — and be — the best of ourselves. She encourages her readers to be their most authentic and joyous selves without shame or guilt. These are the self-help books that inspire and ignite confidence in me because, when it all comes down to it, we’re all human and we’re all capable of being the people we want to be. It’s those pesky lies that tell us differently. Be confident that reading Rachel Hollis’ book will help you, too, ignore the lies and acknowledge (and revel in) the wonderful truths of who we are.
Author of the best-selling book, The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth tackles the difficult topic of suffering and shares how to transform suffering into peace. When we are immersed in suffering it often becomes very difficult to extract ourselves from said suffering and see how we can overcome it.
Self-help books like Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth provide his readers with the objective knowledge we need to learn how to overcome suffering, whether that’s grief, anxiety, depression, etc. Tolle teaches us how to separate ourselves from our egos, allowing us to see our experiences and emotions from different perspectives.
Reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love and watching her multiple Ted Talks have filled me with great inspiration at different times in my life, and I believe Big Magic is no different. Creativity is a huge topic in my life. After finishing school, I felt that I spent a lot of time figuring out how I wanted to bring creativity back into my life. Yet, I would always get stuck, thinking I wasn’t good enough, especially when there was a huge population doing the exact same thing.
Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic addresses such fear and turns it on its head. By talking deeply about her own creative processes, she encourages her readers to embrace curiosity as an initial first step to tapping into one’s creativity; we all have it inside us, but it takes embracing curiosity to coax it out of us.
If you haven’t watched Brené Brown’s TedTalk on ‘The Power of Vulnerability,’ do it. Right now. She is funny, captivating and oh so right when it comes to understanding humans at their deepest core. Brené Brown encourages us to lead and to lead with courage. The act of leading can be scary for most of us because it means exercising bravery when we don’t know how or feel like we can’t.
In Dare to Lead, Brown uses her fascinating research and stories to answer the seemingly simple question, “How do you cultivate braver, more daring leaders, and how do you embed the value of courage in your culture?” And one of the answers to this question, I suspect, is to be a leader yourself. Yet, to do such a thing can be scary but that’s where Dare to Lead comes in, arming you with the tools and inner courage needed to help you become that leader.
Who said a memoir could be considered a self-help book? Well, probably everybody now that I think about it. What I’ve come to realize is that the most thought-provoking, heartfelt, and truly helpful self-help books are those written by individuals who have experienced situations and emotions we, as humans, don’t often know how to navigate. It is through another’s experience — and ultimately their retelling of that experience through words — that we gain what I believe is the key to self-help: learning how to navigate this often messy thing we call life.
Mitch Albom is an author known for tapping into the core of our humanity in such a way that renders his readers speechless but usually never tearless. His books, like Tuesdays with Morrie, are so entrenched in wisdom about the human condition that, to me, this is absolutely a self-help book. Tuesdays with Morrie chronicles Mitch Albom’s the several visits he takes to see his former sociology professor Morrie Schwartz who was, at the time, declining from ALS. For many readers, his memoir has helped provoke questions about one’s own mortality and the choices one makes during the journey.
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