I see and hear many people these days accusing personal development and life coaching of all being one big money-making scam that doesn’t get people results. The skepticism is understandable, but I want to share my experience with you as someone who grew up disabled with very low self-esteem and has been a student of multiple companies.
Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in June 2018.
I turned 32 this week, but for me, I don’t know if I’d be here without personal development. If I was, I’d be in heavy therapy and still very depressed, I know that.
Between the ages of one-and-a-half and 3, I had two strokes. The doctors told my parents I’d be a vegetable. (Meaning I’d be severely mentally disabled and maybe totally paralyzed.)
Obviously that didn’t happen, as I’m standing here, leaning up against a bar at my coworking space writing this. But I do have a significant limp that may need a hip replacement and my left arm is pretty weak. A lot of people assume I have cerebral palsy, if that paints a picture for you.
When I was little, nothing weighed me down too much and I was CONFIDENT. My mom tells a story of us being at an airport when I was 5, and seated next to a cute 20-something, I – quite intentionally – put my hand on her leg and started rubbing it!
Despite having to relearn talking and walking twice, I was a very outgoing and happy little guy.
And I think I held on to a lot of my outgoingness throughout my childhood and young adulthood. I was always generally well-liked.
But the confidence was a very different story.
At some point in middle school and into high school, my self-esteem collapsed, and I just never learned the full set of social skills and intelligence. My Dad loved the hell out of me but struggled with mental illness. And my mom supported me like crazy but was a more introverted, generally sensitive woman doing her best just to take care of a disabled child and a mentally ill husband.
I also played the hell out of my disability card to the point of becoming a victim to it, and exploiting accommodations at school – extensions on assignments, exams, anything I could get away with. Some of it I needed, but a lot of it I didn’t.
I was always very intelligent and a good student, but I figured out how to work the system to sometimes even outright cheat on exams.
I had a lot of acquaintances and a few close friends, but I was so insecure and never part of the cool crowd. Even though I helped out the sports teams and they all liked me.
I bought stuff for people I didn’t even like in high school in hopes they’d like me more and respect me. L.O.L.
I took one of the younger football players I looked up to socially to my junior prom because there was no way in hell I could get a date.
Friends set me up with a girl for senior prom, I payed for everything but her dress because she couldn’t afford it, and she promptly ditched me as soon as we got there. I payed for prom photos, then threw them in the trash during class as soon as they arrived at school.
Therapists can be great for a lot of people and you should talk to one if you’re struggling, but seeing them weekly throughout high school and much of college, they didn’t do much for me, personally.
Antidepressants were a bandaid at best. I don’t think I was ever even clinically depressed. I was just insecure and clueless.
The therapists supported me and helped me with individual shituations, but they never significantly helped with my underlying insecurities and beliefs about myself.
“Junior high is hard. It’ll get better,” I was told.
“High school is hard. It’ll get better.”
“College is a hard adjustment. It’ll get better.”
Nothing really got better. It got more painful.
I now understand that, although bullying is definitely a problem, you also teach people how to treat you. I allowed myself to be bullied and ganged up on, and my desperate neediness either pushed people away or made me the butt of all the jokes.
In college, I let people borrow my car in the dorms in college just because I was too insecure to say no.
A lot of my college experience was positive, but at one point, I straight up stopped talking around my then-main group of friends because they laughed at almost everything I said. I just didn’t have a clue, or much self-respect.
Women always told me I was “such a good looking young man! The ladies must love you!!” But my neediness, insecurities, and epic cluelessness rendered my looks useless.
I cried a lot in high school – sometimes publicly – and college.
There was one night in a dorm room where literally everyone else was having sex (or something) while I lay on the bed with no clue what to do…So. Fucking. Alone.
I cried my cheesey eyes out to James Blunt’s “You’re Beautiful” the next morning as I drove to the local pancake house to numb my sorrow in pumpkin pancakes.
I can just hear people: “Oh great, an entitled college guy crying about being left out of an orgy.”
But do you know what it’s like to feel like you’re just missing that part of the brain? Like being on the sidelines for dating and sex is your life? That scene from the dorms was a microcosm of my entire college social life. Always around craziness, but never involved. Everyone dating or getting laid but you.
Alone and worthless to the opposite sex. It and my other social struggles ate at my sense of worth as a human being more and more.
So I found some dating advice from “pickup artists” on the internet. A lot of it was manipulative and trying to cover up insecurities rather than actually healing them, but it did show me a lot of the ways I was being needy and shooting myself in the foot both with women and just socially.
I started to understand a little bit of flirting and a little bit of healthy male camaraderie. I had more fun with people. And I started creating better boundaries.
I even got a date with a really cute, cool girl in my final journalism-major class. She liked me – that was very clear. But when I went on the date, I was still way too insecure to form a romantic connection. Forget about it.
More tears and embarrassment.
So I found a much healthier alternative to pickup artist bullshit and took a weeklong bootcamp in LA.
This company’s coaches taught me self-esteem, how to relate to people in different situations, and yes, relating to women emotionally and flirting skills.
Mostly, they gave me good self-respect and beliefs – about myself, my disability, women, and all people – and pushed me through some of my fears.
It. Was. Fucking. Life-changing.
There were times during that week that I learned and healed more in an hour than in YEARS of therapy. And I was far from the only one in the room who felt that way.
Therapy wasn’t a true education for me. This was. And rather than light suggestions therapists would make, the coaches could give me tough love and TELL me what I needed to change when I needed to hear it. And they could be with me in real life to push me out of my comfort zone and point out where I was holding myself back and not allowing myself to shine with people.
I started enjoying life more and having more fun with people – friends, women, and strangers – everywhere I went.
I felt so much better about myself!
Even my disability could be a gift.
I started asking for what I wanted throughout my daily life.
I went from desperately settling for sex with a woman I didn’t even like once a year (if I was lucky) to having a more regular dating life.
And I moved from where I went to school in Oregon to LA – where I’d always kind of wanted to live, and where the weather is much easier on my left side – where I already had a network of like-minded friends from the personal development company’s community of alumni.
My entire life shifted.
I started running towards fear instead of away from it.
Was I instantly cured of all my insecurities and shortcomings? No. When those good beliefs I was instilled with were really tested, they were still pretty shaky. But I kept working on it and surrounding myself with good people.
Eventually, I got hooked up with Dave. He was working on the East Coast at the time and he spent a lot of time with me on the phone for free because he liked helping people. He challenged me to take my beliefs about myself to the next level.
And then he discovered Brian and knew that Brian could really help me get those good beliefs I wanted to have more into my bones. Brian helped me do that and just be more direct and authentic with people.
He – and Dave, once they started working together – helped me learn what “just be yourself” actually meant and what it felt like.
They took my goals and beliefs about myself and what was possible – in my dating life and relationships, in my career, with my disability, and with my lifestyle – to the next level. And beyond.
My life changed again.
I went skydiving. Six times. I was terrified of that idea before. My goal there now is to develop my left arm and balance enough to solo skydive. Maybe even wingsuit one day.
I learned to be more present with people and get out of my head.
I take more risks and go on more adventures.
I have a personal trainer, am in the best shape of my life (besides my left hip/leg-that’s a tough degenerative thing but I’m working on even that), I eat healthier than I have since at least junior high, and I drink less caffeine than since I started college. I also drink less alcohol. None of these would’ve happened without personal development.
I realized I’d still been pushing the women I was really attracted to away and self-rejecting, not the other way around. All of my standards went way up, and some of the crazy experiences I’ve had with women would be unfathomable to College Mike.
Really, much of my life now would make College Mike ecstatic.
It’s funny, I have some fear and shame about leaving that allusion to sex in, but that’s part of my growth, right now as I write this. Sex – and even, wild, adventurous sex – is a beautiful, awesome part of life as long as everyone’s being authentic and honest and respectful with each other.
Like Matt says, we can talk about and depict violence and the death of humans galore in society, but one of the most natural things people can do – something that keeps the human race alive, and provides great pleasure, health benefits, and human connection and intimacy – god no, we can’t talk about enjoying that!
I keep growing…and I also still have a lot to work on, but I’m pretty damn conscious of most of it now, and I have the tools and support networks to work on it.
And I’m just living so many “dream life” moments already.
From depressed (at least according to therapists and doctors), massively insecure, no dating life, lightly, but fairly frequently wishing I was dead or at least could start life over, and a victim to my disability…to the life I’m living and developing now.
So is personal development a scam? If by “scam,” you mean more valuable than my entire formal education combined, then yes, it’s a HUGE scam.
Personal development saved my life from possibly ending in suicide or at the very least, being stuck in decades of therapy and great emotional turmoil, making very slow progress at best.
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