Self Help to Pete Tong to Happily Ever After

When I was 19, I went to America and worked for the summer. The company I worked with was amazing in that they invested so much time and energy in training, mentoring and encouraging students to be successful at the job. I was also exposed to self help books like The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People and How to Win Friends and Influence People. Now I really enjoyed reading these and it was a whole new world to me - how to get the best out of myself personally and professionally. I went back for a number of summers, each time learning how to grow a business and each time challenging myself to do better than before. I became reasonably succesful, yet knew I could always do better.

As I look back now, I do not regret a minute of the 11 years I worked at this career and I found that many books such as the ones I mentioned above were extremely helpful in shaping the way I think about myself and the world around me. However, I know now that there was an element of this that was not healthy for me.

The reason I am blogging about this today, is because just this last week I have been realising that for all those years I had been trying to help myself to become someone I was not created to be. I believe each of us is born with gifts, personalities and abilities unique to us and only by living authentically in line with these will we be truly fulfilled and happy. I remember the first time I did one of those exercise that identifies your personality type. I wanted to be the one that I thought was the best - you know the stereotypical businessman. Yet I was someone slightly different. I spent years comparing myself to people that were more successful than me wanting to be just like them, but all the time denying the person God had created me to be and as a result hurting myself by expecting things of myself that I could never fulfill. For years I have carried a burden of dissatisfaction about myself and I always related it to not being successful enough at work, so I kept on trying harder or trying to improve my skills, but it never really brought the fulfillment i was seeking.

I am now, with God's grace learning to be content with me, realising that I do not need to do anything to be loved and accepted by Him. This has been an amazing realisation and one that is encouraging me more day by day. I still have days where I find myself trying to be someone I am not, but each time it happens I am so much better at reminded myself to chill out.

I do not have anything against self help books, I learned so much from them and still have a number that I refer to. Its when someone like me is not that comfortable or confident in their own skin that they can misuse them to try and define themselves as a particular type of person.
I remember the VP Marketing for my old company once said in a seminar that the Bible was the best self-help book ever written. Without being too cheesily Christian, I will say, Amen to that!