Mark: Alright, Michelle. Quick question. If you had to write a self-help book based on your life right now, what would the title be? Michelle: Oh, that's easy. 'How to Have 17 Browser Tabs Open and Still Accomplish Nothing.' It'd be a bestseller. How about you? Mark: Mine would be 'Caffeinate and Hope for the Best.' Which is exactly the kind of desperation that kicks off the wild story we're talking about today. Michelle: I feel seen. That sounds like a cry for help, which is fitting. Mark: It is! Today we are diving into Help Me!: One Woman’s Quest to Find Out if Self-Help Really Can Change Her Life by Marianne Power. And this book has one of the most relatable origin stories ever. Power was a successful freelance journalist in her mid-thirties, living in London, but felt completely stuck—single, in debt, anxious. Michelle: The classic 'looks good on paper, feels like a mess inside' situation. Mark: Precisely. And the whole project was born from a particularly brutal, soul-crushing hangover. She looked at her shelf of unread self-help books and decided to stop just reading them and actually do them. One book, followed to the letter, every single month for a year. Michelle: A project born from a hangover. That's the most relatable origin story I've ever heard. I'm already on board. So where does this wild ride even begin?

Mark: It begins with one of the biggest names in the genre: Susan Jeffers' Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. The core idea is simple: fear doesn't go away, you just have to act in spite of it. Jeffers says to take "a risk a day." Michelle: A risk a day? I feel like getting out of bed is a risk some days. What did that look like for her? Mark: It started with a New Year's Day swim in the freezing Hampstead Ponds in London. She describes the water as feeling like being stabbed by icicles. Then she tackles her lifelong fear of parallel parking, which she describes as achieving a 'park of vague parallelity.' Michelle: I can relate to that one on a spiritual level. But those feel like... manageable fears. Did she ramp it up? Mark: Oh, she ramped it up. She started chatting up strangers on the Tube, which in London is a profound social taboo. She posed naked for a life drawing class. But the peak, the absolute summit of her fear-facing month, was stand-up comedy. Michelle: No. Absolutely not. Public speaking is most people's number one fear. Stand-up is public speaking where you're also begging for approval. That's a nightmare. Mark: It was. She hated stand-up comedy. She practiced her routine for her flatmate, Rachel, who just stared at her blankly, not laughing once. She was terrified she'd forget everything. But she got on stage in the basement of a pub, delivered her routine about her self-help mission... and people laughed. Real, honest laughter. Michelle: Wow. Okay, so did it work? After all that, did she feel... cured of fear? Mark: For a moment, yes. She felt this incredible rush, this sense of accomplishment. She felt like she could do anything. And this is the seductive part of the self-help promise, right? You do the hard thing, you get the reward. But it also created this hunger for the next hit, the next challenge. The month ended with her deciding to go skydiving. Michelle: Of course it did. Because once you've done stand-up, jumping out of a plane seems logical. Mark: She did it, but she said she got no reward from it. It was just terror. And she realized there's a difference between facing social or emotional fears and just, well, scaring yourself for no reason. But this "all-or-nothing" approach set the tone for the whole year. She was going to do self-help, no matter how absurd or extreme it got. Michelle: That's the thing, isn't it? The industry sells you this idea of transformation, of becoming this new, shiny, fearless person. It's so appealing. But it sounds exhausting. And probably expensive. Mark: You have no idea. And that's exactly where the perfect plan starts to unravel.

Michelle: Right, because facing your fears is one thing, but you still have to pay rent. How did she tackle her finances? Mark: With Kate Northrup's Money, a Love Story. The book's premise is that your relationship with money reflects your self-worth. So, to fix her finances, she had to fix her feelings about herself. She tracked her spending, explored her childhood money memories... Michelle: That sounds reasonable enough. Did it work? Mark: Not exactly. Because right after that, she dived into The Secret by Rhonda Byrne. Michelle: Oh no. The law of attraction. I have a feeling I know where this is going. Mark: You do. She's deep in debt, but The Secret tells her that to attract wealth, she has to feel wealthy. So she starts acting like it. She writes herself a fake check for a million pounds, inspired by the story of Jim Carrey. She test-drives a Mercedes she can't afford. She's trying to manifest abundance. Michelle: Wait, hold on. She's trying to solve a debt problem by... pretending she's rich? This is where the self-help train goes off the rails for me. What was happening to her actual bank account while she was "vibrating on the frequency of wealth"? Mark: It was a catastrophe. She eventually tallies it all up and discovers she's over £15,000 in debt. The check from the Universe, as she puts it, had clearly bounced. The more she tried to manifest wealth, the more she spent on things she couldn't afford, digging herself deeper into a hole. Michelle: That's the dangerous side of this stuff. It can feel like a license to ignore reality. It's not just her finances that suffered, was it? Mark: Not at all. Her relationships started to fray. After attending a "Fk It" retreat in Italy—which is a whole other hilarious story—she decides she needs to be brutally honest with everyone. She sends her best friend, Sarah, a long email explaining that she can't hang out in pubs complaining anymore because it's too negative for her new enlightened self. Michelle: Oh, that's a tough one. I can see how that would land badly. Mark: It was a disaster. Sarah writes back, completely hurt, and says, "Self-help is not making you better, it’s making you self-obsessed." She accuses Marianne of no longer caring about anyone else's problems. They stop speaking for a while. Michelle: Wow. That's heartbreaking. She started this whole thing to improve her life and connect with people, and now she's broke and alienating her best friend. Mark: It gets worse. She gets swept up in the world of Tony Robbins, attending his "Unleash the Power Within" seminar. It's four days of high-energy chanting, dancing, and culminates in a firewalk over hot coals. Michelle: A firewalk? Seriously? Mark: A firewalk. And she leaves feeling completely transformed, on top of the world, convinced she's now on the path to becoming "Perfect Me." But this high is followed by an incredible crash. The constant pressure to be perfect, to be happy, to fix every flaw, combined with the debt and the loneliness, leads to a full-blown mental health crisis. She ends up in Dublin, staying with another friend, and can barely speak for days. She's hit rock bottom. Michelle: This is the paradox of so much of the self-help world. The relentless focus on the self can become incredibly isolating. The pursuit of happiness is making her profoundly, dangerously unhappy. Mark: Exactly. She's tried to feel the fear, attract the money, unleash the power, say "Fk It"... and she's more lost than when she started. And it's only from that point of total collapse that she starts to find what she was actually looking for.

Michelle: So what happens when you hit rock bottom after a year of trying to optimize yourself into oblivion? Where do you even go from there? Mark: You go to the books you've been avoiding. The ones that aren't about quick fixes or manifesting a sports car. A therapist recommends she revisit Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now, a book she'd found impenetrable before. But this time, it clicks. Michelle: What was different about it? Isn't it just more self-help? Mark: It's a different kind of help. Tolle's message isn't about achieving a better future; it's about inhabiting the present moment. He talks about the "voice in the head," that inner critic that's always judging and complaining. His advice isn't to argue with it or fix it, but simply to observe it. To realize that you are not your thoughts. Michelle: That's a huge shift. It's not about changing the thoughts, but changing your relationship to them. Mark: Precisely. And this leads her to the other key figure in her recovery: Brené Brown. She discovers Brown's work on vulnerability and shame, particularly in Daring Greatly. Brown's research shows that connection is why we're here, and that for connection to happen, we have to allow ourselves to be seen, truly seen, flaws and all. Michelle: I love that idea. That vulnerability isn't a weakness, it's the foundation of connection. How did she apply that? Mark: She takes the biggest risk of all. She reaches out to her friend Sarah, the one she had the terrible fight with. She apologizes. They meet for dinner, and she's just honest about how broken she's been feeling. And Sarah responds with empathy and love. They reconnect, and their friendship becomes stronger than ever. Michelle: That feels more real than any firewalk. Mark: It is. And in that conversation, Sarah gives her this incredible piece of wisdom about love. She tells Marianne, "Love doesn't have to be forever... It can be for a day, a week, a year – it doesn't matter. The important thing is that you give something a chance." Michelle: So the answer wasn't to become a perfect, fearless, rich person who gets the guy. It was just to be... a person. A messy, vulnerable, real person. And to realize that's enough. Mark: That's the entire revelation. She realizes her quest was flawed from the start. She was trying to fix herself into someone worthy of love, friendship, and happiness. But the real journey was about accepting that she was already worthy of all those things, exactly as she was.

Michelle: It's such a powerful story. The book is incredibly funny, but the underlying message is so profound. The self-help industry sells this dream of a finish line—a point where you're finally 'fixed.' Mark: But her journey shows there is no finish line. The ultimate takeaway from her year of self-help wasn't a set of rules for a perfect life. It was a single, transformative realization. In her own words, which I think are just beautiful, she says: "I hadn’t fixed myself – I had become myself." Michelle: I love that. She didn't erase her flaws; she integrated them. She learned to live with her anxiety, to manage her finances responsibly instead of magically, and to value the connections she already had. Mark: Right. She ends the book by creating her own personal mission statement, inspired by Stephen Covey. It's not about being a billionaire or a supermodel. It's about being honest, kind, grateful, and trying to live in the present. It's about appreciating, as the dying playwright Dennis Potter said, "the blossomest blossom that there ever could be." Michelle: It makes you think about how much energy we spend chasing this idealized version of ourselves, when maybe the most radical act of self-help is just self-acceptance. Mark: And that's the irony. The book is a critique of the self-help industry, and yet it's one of the most genuinely helpful books I've ever read. It's been an international bestseller, and I think it's because it resonates so deeply. It gives us permission to be imperfect. Michelle: It really does. It makes me want to ask our listeners: Have you ever had a self-help book or piece of advice completely backfire on you? We'd love to hear your stories. Let us know on our socials. Mark: It’s a great question. What are we all chasing? And what if the thing we're looking for is already right here? Michelle: A perfect thought to end on. Mark: This is Aibrary, signing off.