In the last email, episode #1 of this email series turned into an article that you can (re)read here, I revisited the distortion of the personal development message since Aristotle.
In just a few years, we have moved away from the idea that effort and perseverance were the keys to success, to see the emergence of methods selling a life without fear, without failure, without pain, with the promise of creating results easily and quickly.
Miracle morning, visualization, positive thinking… Does it really work?
Several thousand years ago, Aristotle already highlighted the importance of HABITS in shaping character and pursuing happiness.
For him, virtue, acting justly, is not innate. It develops through the repeated practice of virtuous actions, which, over time, transform into habits.
It is through repeated actions that we become just, courageous, or temperate.
For Aristotle, the individual must adapt their actions to avoid extremes and find the appropriate balance (what he called the golden mean).
For him, virtuous habits should be cultivated flexibly, as the golden mean depended on each context and could vary from one situation to another.It was a constant journey.
Today, authors like Hal Elrod, the author of "The Miracle Morning," have helped redefine the contours of the notion of habit.
5 minutes of meditation, 5 minutes of positive affirmations, 5 minutes of visualization, 20 minutes of exercise, 10 minutes of reading, and 10 minutes of writing… all of this, "imperatively" before 8 am! Every morning. Whether it rains, whether it's windy, or whether you woke up on the wrong side of the bed.
While Aristotle used habits to achieve a state of wisdom and moral balance, for Elrod, on the other hand, habits primarily serve to increase personal performance.
Both, therefore, use habits for different purposes.What should be noted, however, is that over time, we have lost the notion of flexibility.
Habits have become imperatives to which we must adhere to hope to achieve our goals.
Yet in the 1980s, researchers like Till Roenneberg formalized the concept of chronotype and explained that each individual functions optimally at different times of the day.
By transforming into peremptory injunctions to conform to this or that practice without considering the particularities of each person, personal development does not really help people…
And this is not the only subject prone to this kind of drift...
The Stoics, for example, were fervent users of a technique that is also very popular in modern literature: visualization.
The worldwide bestseller "The Secret" by Rhonda Byrne greatly contributed to propelling this technique to the forefront, presenting visualization and positive thinking (under the name of the law of attraction) as a key tool for attracting the object of one's desires.
But science disagrees. The work of researcher Gabriele Oettingen has shown that positive visualization is sometimes counterproductive, and that people who fantasize about achieving a goal often do not realize it.
Why ?
Because to take action, studies by the same researcher have proven that we also need to do what the Stoics called negative visualization (premeditatio malorum), which, by visualizing negative scenarios such as loss, suffering, or failure, allowed one to prepare mentally and emotionally to better accept and manage these situations if they were to occur.
By regularly practicing this technique, the Stoics developed a form of resilience and detachment from things they could not control.
It was not about having control over events and bending destiny to our will, but rather about accepting what could not be changed – a big difference from the personal development culture, convinced that one can find the magic formula that would protect us from the (inevitable) difficulties of life.
Even if the effectiveness of the law of attraction is not supported by science, that does not mean we should dismiss it out of hand.
This practice can be part of spiritual beliefs, and even if science sees nothing effective in it, we cannot ignore the role it plays for those who find inspiration in it.
It is just about finding the right balance: thinking that all our ambitions will come true by staying on our couch. Very certainly not. But creating the circumstances by taking action, yes.
In the same vein, another technique raises some questions…
Medieval Christianity placed a lot of emphasis on the importance of faith and encouraged believers to trust in God's plans by maintaining an optimistic attitude, even in difficult circumstances (these being perceived as God's trials, inevitable but ultimately rewarded by the salvation of the soul).
This unwavering optimism finds resonance today in all modern literature that deals with the power of positive thinking, which always invites us to see the glass half full and focus on the positive side of things in a logic of "positive attracts positive."
Yet, we know from studies conducted by psychologist Steven Hayes in 1996 that attempting to avoid negative emotions leads to a cycle of rumination that reinforces these emotions in the long term, which resurface with even greater intensity.
The problem with the modern approach is that, unlike the medieval approach which recognizes suffering as an inevitable part of the human experience, the positive thinking of personal development often tends to make us feel guilty for experiencing negative emotions – and therefore, paradoxically, to intensify them.
It could be, therefore, that paradoxically, the people who feel the worst and have the most difficulty coping with the challenges of daily life are the followers of these methods.
These are the same people who, after having taken several courses and devoured the most well-known books, think that the problem with their successive failures comes from them.
But that is not entirely the case.
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