Ditch Personal Development and Get Really Lazy!

People, you are absolutely fine as you are. Note that I didn't say you are perfect. We'll come on to perfectionism in a moment. But yes, you are absolutely fine, right here, right now, and always will be.

Which is why you don't need personal development. So, put the self-help book down. Don't take it to the thrift store where some other poor person will get sucked in to a self development dead-end. No, take it to the garden and bury it in a deep hole, or better still, burn it!

There is something intensely puritanical about being told you need help and need improving. And puritanism is something to avoid because it makes you deeply anxious.

Yes, the result of personal development is not a new and better you, but a more anxious you, always searching for a better way to live.

You get your fix of self-development for a moment, the delicious suggestion of a new and better you. Yet having read the newest, shiniest personal development book or blog, you are left with the same old underlying, gnawing anxiety.

Personal development has always been subtly addictive, only we didn't know it. We are always looking for the next fix.

Who would have thought that all those well-meaning tomes in the self-help section of the book store would do so much to undermine us?

So how do we counteract all this well-meaning but ultimately anxiety-producing guidance?

Well, a good place to start is to realise that we are all supremely unimportant. What a relief! Doesn't it take the pressure off you to realize that you are incredibly, supremely unimportant, and so is everyone else?

There is no pressure to become better, certainly no pressure to compete or become perfect because you are very, very unimportant indeed! We all are. So stop all the incessant navel-gazing and relax!

What's the opposite? To feel the pressure of being a very important human being with a very weighty destiny to fulfil, which, if you don't succeed in doing so, will render you a big fat failure? Please.

There is a better way. Relax! Stop working on yourself. Be idle! Realize that none of it really matters. Enjoy life. Stop trying to create a new and better you. All you are doing is producing more and more anxiety for yourself and more and more work to do.

Stop reading the personal-development books and blogs, and the anxiety will start to slip away.