The Self-help Drum Beat

Self-help is about learning how to apply thinking and action to create positive changes in your life.  Regardless if you are into self-help or not, you have been studying self-help your entire life.  The lessons have been being taught to you, or you have been discovering them on your own, as soon as you are born.

Your first learning experiences through the trial and error of rolling over, crying, and crawling you were helping yourself.  As you grew up, your parents told you over and over eat your dinner, finish your vegetables, don’t eat that junk, clean your room, get up and get to school on time, not too much TV, do your homework, go out and play.   In school amongst the daily learning, there was gym. You had to exercise.  You also studied history and learned how Benjamin Franklin discovered electricity through trial and error.  In the same way he got shocked , you did a lot of that as you touched the hot stove to learn that’s not a good idea. 

Yes, you have been studying the lessons of self-help your entire life.  Some of the lessons you caught the rhythm and were in groove with, others you marched out of step.  But that drum beat keeps beating.  You here the same lessons over and over.  Whatever diet book you pick up, it is going to tell you to eat regularly, eat your veggies, limit the junk. It is the lessons you have been told your entire life.  The drum beat is the same.

You want to get fit, guess what, you have to exercise on a regular basis and do cardio.  The same drum beat that you heard in school.  You want to be successful you have to get up on time, get to work on time, study and do your work and try and achieve “A’s.” It’s that same drum beat over and over.

So when we don’t catch the rhythm and our life seems to be missing the beat, we dive into self-help.  As we do we hear the same thoughts told to us over and over; you need to take responsibility, believe in yourself, realize you are powerful, set and write down clear goals, break your goals down into actions, visualize the results, follow through and be consistent. These ideas and more you will find through all your self-help experience. 

Even though you have heard it over and over again, you need to keep listening, to keep hearing it.  It doesn’t matter if you already know it, because if you really knew it you would be doing it.  Even more, remember that knowledge is not power because it doesn’t matter what you know, power is what you do.  So knowing and not doing doesn’t do anything. Until you catch the rhythm, you are out of step with what you know.

That is why you have to keep listening to the drum beat.  You read book after book, you hear lecture after lecture. Over and over again the message is told to you, the same message you have been hearing your entire life.  Then one day you are sitting at a lecture, reading a book, listening to a podcast, and it clicks.  You all of a sudden catch the rhythm.  In that moment you say. “Wow this expert, author is right, I get it.”  From that moment something changes inside of you.  I love those moments.  I love watching them and participating with people when it happens.  All of a sudden in that split second everything changes.  You can see that the rhythm is clear.  You now don’t feel out of step and you get into the groove of your life.

Even though that moment happens in a nano second, it did not.  It is not that you have heard something new.  It feels like it, it feels like you have heard what you needed to for the first time.  But it is actually the same message you have been hearing over and over you entire life from your mom telling you to eat your veggies all the way through. . It is just in that moment the rhythm clicked in.  That is why I tell people keep listening to that drum beat.  Keep working on yourself and one day, I can’t tell you when, you will catch the self-help drum beat, and when you do you will make beautiful music with your life.

Beating the drum,

Devlyn Steele

This week on the Daily Podcast I will be exploring self-help drum beat lessons and how to catch the rhythm.  Also do a little beating of the drum yourself by cheering and commenting on other members.  Make the music louder by participating in the community.