Self Help: $10 Billion for What?

When performer, rock musician and writer Beth Lisick woke up Jan. 1, 2006, and the only New Year's resolution she could think of was learning to do the splits, she decided to aim a little higher.

Instead, she spent the year availing herself of all the advice out there to better her character, physical fitness, parenting and sex life, along with her financial, organizational and time management skills. Lisick read Chicken Soup for the Soul, by Jack Canfield, and The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen Covey; she went to seminars with John Gray of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus fame and financial superstar Suze Orman; she consulted with Oprah Winfrey's organizational advisor; learned about giving her child time-outs from a book called 1-2-3 Magic; gave Deepak Chopra (who she had previously considered 'spirituality lite") a chance, and went on a "Cruise to Lose" with fitness guru Richard Simmons.

During the year, Lisick tried to put aside her cynicism and refused to dismiss Covey for his Mormonism or Canfield for his love of golf and fast cars. Now she can always find her keys and ask for things in a direct way, and has embraced the concept of abundance instead of scarcity and negotiated a lower interest rate on her credit card.

Lisick chronicles her yearlong journey through the self-help world in her new book Helping Me Help Myself: One Skeptic, Ten Self-Help Gurus, and a Year on the Brink of the Comfort Zone. She recently shared that experience with AlterNet.

Emily Wilson: Do you think your life is better now after a year of helping yourself?

Beth Lisick: I actually do. Like I said in the book, I thought it would be funny, in a way, if nothing changed. I don't feel like I am a totally different person than I was before I started the book, but I think that if you immerse yourself in anything for a year, it's going to change you, and it definitely did change me for the better. I feel like I am more organized, and I do have a better grasp of time management and organization that I really didn't before. I started thinking about goals, and I had never had done that before in my life. And it was weird because it wasn't like I was a person who could never get anything done. I do a lot of stuff, but I just think I did so much stuff it was almost like I was spreading myself too thin. That was probably the big one. I feel like I'm more organized and more focused.

You talk about reviewing the day before you go to sleep at night, which is something Jack Canfield and Deepak Chopra do. What are some other concrete things you do now?

I'm a lot better at looking around my house and if I see something and I'm cleaning up, just saying, 'Where does that thing go?' Before, a lot of things in our house, we just didn't have a place for them, and we were always losing certain things like the digital camera, or my keys. Now when I'm cleaning up, I can say, 'Where does that thing go?' or if that thing doesn't have a home, then I have to sit there and think, 'OK, where can be a place for this thing that we just move from desk to table to couch?' So that's something I do differently. Those were my favorite things. Like the 1-2-3 Magic thing with Gus -- the things where I could see immediate benefits. I could see immediate results with that.

You say early on in Helping Me Help Myself that you are a Godophobe. A lot of these books are very focused on God or a higher power. How did you deal with that?

I think the first thing I did was I realized the Godophobe part of me was really a holdover from adolescence. It was just when people would talk about their higher power and I would be like, "Can't you figure out another way to talk about it without saying that," and then as I was reading these books, and it was just everywhere; it was impossible to escape. Then when I started thinking of those synchronicities and things I thought were cool, I was like, "Well, I've known for a very long time people substitute the word God for something bigger than me, something I can't control, something that is mysterious and out there." And then I mention in the book a big thing for me is my friends who were recovering drug addicts or alcoholics, who, for so long, were unable to do the 12 steps because they could not accept the higher power part, and it just held them back for so long, and once they decided just to surrender that and say, "OK, I don't even know what that means, I don't understand, but I can think of it as this or that," then they were able to get sober and healthy, so I think about it in that way too.