Stop Sh****ing On Yourself

In Your Erroneous Zones, Wayne W. Dyer writes that you can be happy—if only you’d stop getting in your own way. Dyer argues that the only things standing between you and your happiness are your “erroneous zones”: self-defeating practices that paralyze you and keep you from living a fulfilling life. By recognizing these hurdles and understanding why you have them, you’ll be able to eliminate them and start living the life you want.

In this guide, we’ll explore where our erroneous zones come from and why eliminating them is crucial for happiness. We’ll then break down specific erroneous zones such as people-pleasing, guilt, and procrastination, and we’ll discuss Dyer’s tools for eradicating them. As the book was published in 1976, we’ll also include updated research in psychology as well as tips from other self-improvement authors.

In this follow-up to Girl, Wash Your Face, blogger, motivational speaker, and author Rachel Hollis writes that she’s fed up with seeing women ignore their own dreams because of self-doubt, guilt, and society’s expectation that women put others first. Hollis offers the lessons she learned in growing from humble beginnings to becoming the founder of a multimillion-dollar media company to help her readers shed the weight of expectation and achieve their dreams.

Hollis’s advice consists of excuses to let go of, behaviors to adopt, and skills to acquire. In addition, she provides a step-by-step blueprint to take your dream from fantasy to realization. In this guide, we’ll compare Hollis’s advice to that of other popular self-help authors and expand on her messages through practical exercises.

In The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Mark Manson argues that we are frustrated in life and feel like failures because we value and prioritize the wrong things, thanks in part to society’s emphasis on positive thinking, over-involved parents, and our susceptibility to superficial social media messages. This leads us to pursue emotional highs that don’t lead to lasting happiness.

The solutions are counterintuitive and include: be wrong, fail, tolerate feeling bad, accept pain, practice rejection. Because we can’t care equally about everything, we need to prioritize and focus on what brings us happiness and meaning. In other words, we need to carefully choose what we give our f*cks about.

The book draws from several established philosophies (Stoicism, Existentialism, and Buddhism), and we’ll expand and clarify the book’s messages by tracing their origins to these schools of thought. We’ll also explore some of the psychology behind what motivates people’s decisions, and why we’re driven to give so many f*cks about so many unimportant things.