I had a fascinating conversation yesterday.

A woman I spoke to shared that she been struggling in a certain area and was looking for resources to help her. As she looked in depth at different programs available, she began to feel concerned about the meta message inherent in the various products she was looking at. That message was, you can’t improve or grow or figure out an issue you’re having without a professional telling you how to do it.

In the end, through a lot of introspection and conversation with a trusted family member, she was able to work through it on her own. She found it very empowering to come to a positive resolution on her own, and after getting clarity on what the real issue was, is confident that the program she was considering enrolling in wouldn’t have helped her deal with it. She would have missed out on all that personal development if she had gone the route of enrolling in a course.

Obviously, there are lots of great courses out there that can enrich someone’s life. And since effective marketing is often about telling people how badly off they are without your product and why you’ll be better with it, there’s going to be a message of ‘buy this for your life to be better’.

She wasn’t questioning if these courses can be valuable at times, and obviously there are times that you can benefit by turning to professionals for targeted assistance. She was expressing concern that the overall message is disempowering and leads people to stop tuning in to and trusting themselves.

Someone else recently shared with me that she’s taking yet another personal development course and she ‘hopes this one will be everything I want it to be’. ‘Of course it won’t,’ I told her with a smile.

How do I know that? Because she has a lot of things to deal with in her life and there’s no course that will give her the results she’s hoping for. The answers she’s looking for are inside of her, and she’s not going to find them by taking one more course and one more and one more and one more.

There are two different components in this message of disempowerment:

1. You need professionals to help you improve your life and can’t trust your own instincts and thoughts, because you aren’t a professional.
3. You start looking for the answers outside of yourself and stop seeing yourself as the locus of control. If something isn’t working, then you need to find a different resource, a different advisor – it’s about them, not about you.

This is an incredibly disempowering attitude to adopt, but it’s one that is becoming more prevalent and we don’t even realize the subliminal messages coming from all directions that lead us to think like this.

As a special needs and foster mom I regularly speak with therapists, psychologists and social workers who express surprise at my understanding of human psychology and child development, and ask me how I know what I know.

Here’s something mind bending to consider: Did you know that you can learn a lot about a topic, even acquiring a high level of knowledge in an area, without getting a degree in it?

While we may intellectually believe this, we somehow still tend to believe that the average person needs an ‘expert’ to tell him how to best live his life.

I got a call a month ago from my health clinic letting me know that the tests I haven’t done that they recommend for someone my age are building up and strongly encouraging me to come in to have them done. I told the nurse calling that I’m concerned about my health, take appropriate steps to care for my health, and if I feel in need of testing in any area of concern, I’ll come in.

Then she asked me, “But how can you know you’re healthy if you don’t do the testing?”

Her response is a perfect example of the ‘expert is outside of you’ paradigm. It’s irrelevant how I feel or what I know after a half a century as to what living in my body feels like – if I haven’t taken a test to tell me I’m okay, I can’t be okay.

In my view, how do I know I’m healthy? I look at myself in the mirror, I see myself, I live in my body – if I’m free of pain, if everything works well, if I think clearly, if I have energy – I’m healthy. There are symptoms that indicate that imbalances are beginning to present in one’s health; disease doesn’t occur overnight. If you’re paying attention you’ll generally notice when something isn’t feeling right, when something is changing.

It’s unfortunate when we accept what others tell us about ourselves as more valuable than what we think or know. Even when you turn to the experts, a doctor can’t make you healthy, a therapist can’t heal your childhood traumas, a coach or course can’t give you self-esteem- they can only support you in taking care of yourself. They would be the first to tell you that you have to do the heavy lifting yourself; you have to make the effort and invest in yourself.

Often you can make those same or better efforts for yourself with your own insight and your own research, as the woman I referenced at the start did. Your success is in your hands; don’t discount who you are and what you know.

When you selectively turn to someone for assistance in furthering your development in any given area, remember that the magic is in what you do with the knowledge they share.

Avivah