Does Self-Help… Help?

A story about transcendence, manipulation, and the fear that binds them.

We walk into the seminar room, the low hum of conversation filling the space. My wife heads straight for a seat in the back row while I stop at the refreshment table for a cup of coffee. A croissant catches my eye among the trays of breakfast options, but I leave it untouched. On stage, a bold backdrop declares, Find Your Magic. I take my seat and the thought slips in uninvited: “Am I wasting my time here?” By the end of the day, I’d know the answer.

The speaker — let’s call him Jason Wood — finally takes the stage, a smile fixed firmly on his face. His hands fly with a flourish any Italian would admire, and he paces from one side of the platform to the other as if determined to hit his 10,000 steps before lunch.

“I want you to walk slowly,” Wood said, his voice gentle. “Bring your awareness to the nature around you. Take your time — notice the details, the beauty in it. Can you give this moment to yourself?”

The fifty people in the audience answered in unison: “Yes!”

My wife and I rise with the other attendees and file toward a door at the left side of the stage. Beyond it lies a garden, lush and quiet, waiting for us to explore. We begin walking slowly among the plants, pausing to notice details we’d usually overlook — the curve of a leaf, the stillness of a flower. Around me, others are caught in the same spell. One woman stands transfixed before a plant, her head tilted, mouth slightly open, as if she’s seeing it for the first time.

No one rushes. The silence is thick, charged with presence. As I walk, textures deepen, and time seems to stretch. I can hear my own heartbeat, the steady rhythm of other people’s breaths, and for a moment it feels as though even the plants themselves are whispering.

Then we return to the seminar room, where Wood invites us into the next exercise: to sit with a stranger and meet their gaze.

I glance to my right and meet the eyes of a man in his fifties. He nods, and we pull our chairs together, sitting face-to-face. Our eyes lock, and the seconds begin to drag, each one longer than the last. The pressure builds until I can’t hold it anymore and burst into laughter. Almost instantly, he joins me, his laugh spilling out as if he’s been holding it back the whole time.

Around us, laughter begins to ripple through the room. I catch my wife’s voice among the mix, rising and falling with the others. When the exercise ends, the man and I shake hands, both of us still grinning, recognizing the odd, unexpected moment of connection we’ve just shared.

Wood gives the audience a round of applause, and the room quickly follows. My wife and I add a few hesitant claps of our own. He invites people to share their experiences, and a few in the front row jump in right away. Then his eyes lock on me. For a moment, it feels like we’re at a poker table — and he’s the one holding the best cards. Just as I’m thinking, “he knows I’m not fully sold…”, he slices through my thoughts with a question:

“Blue t-shirt at the last row” — he’s still staring at me — “Can I ask you why you decided to come here today?”

I wasn’t looking for the spotlight, so I offer a boilerplate answer, hoping he’ll move on. Instead, he tilts his head and says, “You sound like a teacher. Do you work in a field that involves teaching others?”

I shake my head slowly. Such a simple question, yet my mind races to places I hadn’t anticipated. Wood catches the hesitation and answers it with a smile.

Wood then finally launches himself into speech mode. His presence on stage is palpable, every word precisely chosen, full of conviction. He tells us we’ve been robbed of our magic, that it’s still within reach, and that only his process can help us reclaim it.

Midway through, he invites a young man from the audience to join him. The man’s voice trembles as he recounts how the program lifted him from a fog, how he began to feel like himself again. The room leans in, suspended in his raw honesty.

When lunch break comes, I approach the young man, who is sitting with two women I soon learn also completed the program. As we talk, it comes out that all three now work for Wood. “We discovered that our magic is helping other people find their own,” one of them tells me. Out of the corner of my eye, I spot my wife at the back of the room—impatient, eager to eat. I wrap up the conversation, and as I step away one of them calls after me, “see you after lunch.”

Something about that conversation lingers as we return from lunch. The afternoon begins with Wood introducing a new exercise: sit with three strangers in a closed circle and, one by one, share a difficult experience from childhood. He encourages us to speak only as openly as we feel comfortable, then explains the rules: one person shares while the other three listen. Afterward, each listener reflects on how they relate to the story. Then the circle moves on, until all four have spoken.

Once my turn comes, I begin sharing details I haven’t spoken of in years. It feels both relieving and unsettling. The other three listen closely, then respond with thoughtful reflections.

At this point, something in the room shifts. It’s as if a hidden switch has been flipped. People seem to be more open, as if some invisible barrier had quietly lifted. Sensing the moment, Wood introduces one final exercise.

“I want you to set your ego aside and go around the room revering other souls,” he says, while his assistants clear the chairs to make space in the center.

I’m not entirely sure what he means by “revering,” but it quickly becomes clear. A few people step forward, arms open for hugs, whispering phrases into each other’s ears — “you’re worth it,” “I see love in you,” and other familiar self-help mantras.

A man at least ten years older than me walks in my direction. He glances to the side and notices someone kneeling, bowing low before another participant. Almost instinctively, he drops to the floor in front of me, bowing as if I were a pharaoh or Constantine the Great. I freeze, then glance around — more people are starting to mimic the gesture.

At the back of the room, I catch my wife’s eyes, wide and unblinking, as if about to leap from her skull. I nod awkwardly to the man in front of me, then slip away to join her.

“Maybe we should leave now?” she whispers.

“Yes,” I answer without hesitation.

Together, we walk out — skipping the grand finale, and presumably, enlightenment.

The Garden and the Cage

That experience took place in London nearly fifteen years ago. I didn’t know what to make of it at the time. Was it profound? Manipulative? Both? What I do know is that it revealed something deeper — how much people long for connection, meaning, and recognition, and how easily that longing can be shaped, for better or worse. That tension — between authentic transformation and performative ritual — sits at the heart of self-help. It’s what makes the industry feel both magnetic and unsettling at once.

The global self-help market is projected to reach $90.5 billion by 2033 — nearly double its estimated size in 2024. Which makes me wonder: if self-help truly helps, shouldn’t the market be shrinking, not expanding?

Perhaps more people are opening up and seeking help. Or maybe the same people keep returning, trapped in the promise of one more breakthrough. In business, growth depends on retention — customers who return again and again. In self-help, that often means keeping you one step short of wholeness. Just one more seminar. One more book. One more program.

Much of the industry’s explosive growth depends on selling the appearance of progress. Transformation is offered prepackaged — as a formula, a hack, a neat list of seven steps. But real transformation isn’t tidy. It demands confrontation — with the self, with failure, with the limits of what can’t be solved by a clever quote.

The paradox is that self-help can genuinely awaken something — and yet, the same mechanisms that open us can be used for control. I saw this firsthand.

During that seminar, when we began the eye-gazing exercise, something in me softened. My defenses dropped. The outer performance, shaped by what I thought others expected, suddenly brushed against something truer inside me. The room filled with laughter — a release that felt shared.

Afterward, I was wide open — and, I realized later, more suggestible. My critical mind had quieted. The vulnerability was real, but so was the risk. And I noticed how a skilled seminar leader can take that genuine openness and imply that their process caused it — rather than the simple human contact itself.

These engineered highs can open a space for real insight, but what follows determines their worth. If a teacher uses that opening to help you think clearly, the experience becomes yours. If they steer it toward a pre-scripted meaning that feeds their own narrative, the experience becomes a tool of persuasion.

And that persuasion works because it strikes something ancient in us. Self-help, at its core, feeds on the oldest human fear: the awareness that we are running out of time. Death sits on the horizon — immovable — and with it comes the anxiety of not having done enough, not having become enough. That’s why so many self-help messages lean on urgency — ‘If you’re not growing, you’re dying.’ It’s mortality repackaged as motivation.

The garden walk, the silence, the eye contact, the bowing — all of it gestures toward transcendence, toward a momentary escape from the pressure of finitude. For an instant, time slows. You feel connected, infinite. Then, as the moment fades, the sales machinery steps in to suggest that this fragile transcendence can be secured — for a price.

In the end, the real work isn’t in the exercises or the books. It’s in learning to tell the difference between what frees us and what merely flatters our longing. It’s up to us to discern what’s real and what’s illusion — and where, along that spectrum, we choose to stand.

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