The Two Secrets of Unstoppable Self-Confidence
Since I read my first self-help book back in 1986 (Shakti Gawain’s Creative Visualization), I’ve noticed that broadly speaking they fall into three distinct if occasionally overlapping categories. The first is what I call “image management”, as exemplified by Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. These books aim your attention towards how you come across in various situations, teaching you how to dress for and cultivate an image of success, largely so that you can make feel confident, win friends, and, well, influence people.
The second category of self-help books are all about “the metaphysics of self-empowerment”, as typified by Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich. Here, we learn about how to control the universe by controlling our minds, or at the very least our mindsets. Pretty much every positive thinking book ever written goes into this category, along with The Secret and other books that tell us how if we just think the right things we can be confident that we’ll get what we want as our reward in the world.
The third category in my mini-cosmology is what I would call “self-awareness” books like Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now. These books are less about how to be than about how we already are. They point to the existence of a deeper self that is intimately connected with the divine — a kind of a capital “S” Self…
