Recently someone offered me a couple of books on the spiritual healing arts from a respected author—for free. It was the kind of offer I once would have responded positively to, taken them gratefully, and brought them home to sit on my “to be read” shelf. Maybe I would have tried to read them, maybe I would have even completed them. Instead, what I heard myself saying, with unusual frankness, was, “No thanks. I’m sick of self-improvement.”
There is a whole cottage industry devoted to helping us achieve better versions of ourselves. I should know: I’m a psychologist and I make my living helping people shed the unnecessary coping strategies and start to live their more authentic selves. An…
Recently someone offered me a couple of books on the spiritual healing arts from a respected author—for free. It was the kind of offer I once would have responded positively to, taken them gratefully, and brought them home to sit on my “to be read” shelf. Maybe I would have tried to read them, maybe I would have even completed them. Instead, what I heard myself saying, with unusual frankness, was, “No thanks. I’m sick of self-improvement.”
There is a whole cottage industry devoted to helping us achieve better versions of ourselves. I should know: I’m a psychologist and I make my living helping people shed the unnecessary coping strategies and start to live their more authentic selves. And I honestly believe in it, I’ve seen it work, and I’ve experienced it myself.
But either because of my advancing age and decreasing physical vitality, or because of what seems like the relentless assault of marketing with people hawking their self-help wares, or because of a certain inner peace—I’m calling a time-out. I want to ask this question: What would it look like for us to stop striving and simply be?
I don’t think this is a radically new notion. Meditation, Eastern philosophy, and much of the perennial wisdom counsels us to be more in process and less striving to achieve results. What I’m trying to peel back here, which at least for me is new, is that even those methodologies, at least as practiced here in the West, can become their own kind of self-improvement treadmills. It’s really pernicious how easy it is to turn anything into another way to try to get better, to try to improve. Or perhaps a simpler way to say it would be: it’s very easy to turn anything into another way to feel badly about oneself. *I didn’t finish the books, I read them but didn’t understand them, or I don’t remember what they said. I meditated but didn’t focus enough, I focused but didn’t meditate long enough, I’ve been meditating for a long time but I don’t know if it’s making a difference. *That nagging inner voice of “you’re not enough” doesn’t go away through the hard work at self-improvement. It quiets through the relaxation of self-acceptance.
I’ve noticed something interesting each time I say out loud to another person, “I’m sick of self-improvement.” First there’s a laugh of release, then there’s a visible softening in the face of the other. “Oh, you mean I can relax, too? We don’t have to compete with ourselves or each other to be better, to get better, to get anywhere?”
I’m reminded of an exchange I had several decades ago with my middle son, who was then age 4. I asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. He responded, with the total innocence and simplicity only a 4-year-old can embody: “Do I have to be something, Daddy?”
We don’t have to be anything because we already are, in essence, enough. If you want to read those books, take those courses, attend that weekend workshop—by all means do so. But do so because you’re drawn to them, curious about them, passionate about them. Not because you’re trying to improve yourself. You are already enough.