Turning a page on life by the book Self-help salesmen regularly offer the chance to promote various "awesome" products aimed to "helping" others get more awesome. I RECEIVED the following email: "Hi Wendy, Has anyone told that you were awesome recently? On some level you know it! You're Awesome! So if I can say one thing to you today it's this: Realise your awesomeness by being who you really are today. Have an Awesome Friday! It was from a self-help salesman who regularly offers me the chance to promote various "awesome" products aimed to "helping" others get more awesome. As I said to my Facebook reader-friends: "I hope you don't consider me rude but I replied with simply Unsubscribe!" I didn't request to be removed from his PR list (which I never subscribed to anyway) because I already know how awesome I am. Sometimes I do think I'm pretty awesome; like when in one day, I've got the kids to school with healthy hand-made lunches, then done a good day's work, spoken to a friend, walked the dog, not drunk too much coffee, not been too stressed when communicating with my husband and seen one of my parents. Plenty of other times I think I'm pretty crap; like when the morning routine is a manic rush, I've forgotten to sign a form, someone's left their bathers at home and at the end of the day, I've realised I didn't really listen to people around me whom I know and love. That's not awesome and I don't need to be told - like many women I'm my own harshest critic. Why I reacted strongly to that ingratiating email was because I find the tactics used by some sectors of the "self-help" industry quite insidious. That email contained a psychological hook trying to get me to love having my ego stroked and, in future, love promoting his. Were I younger and less secure, that may have been my exact reaction. And when I was younger and less secure, I did read some of the offerings for the world's $10 billion a year self-help industry. It took only two books to get a glance at the psychological equivalent of the Wizard of Oz frantically working the smoke- and-mirrors machine. I am not saying all self-help authors are snake-oil salesman, in fact qualified people such as Stephanie Dowrick PhD do a lot of good by facilitating people to see the good already in them and help them to enjoy their spiritual and emotional lives. The problem is that becoming a self-help "guru" seems about as hard as saying a few years back that you were a trained pilates instructor - just about anyone could do it and some risked harming people. One book - although a huge Melbourne success - struck me as not being grounded in reality but having the potential to make people actually feel worse. In The Secret, millions of readers were told that if they learned to think positively enough, the "law of attraction" would deliver their dreams. "Positive thinking can create life-changing results such as increased health, wealth and happiness" is a harmless message in and of itself, but what if thinking as positively as you can doesn't produce the golden egg? Wow, you must be a REAL loser, with zero chance of reaching the heights of awesomeness everyone else does. Here's one random description of the basis for "the law of attraction": "The idea that people and their thoughts are both made from pure energy and like energy attracts like energy." One example used is that if a person opened an envelope expecting to see a bill, the law of attraction would "confirm" those thoughts and contain a bill. A person who decided, instead, to expect a cheque might, under the same law, find a cheque instead. So if you were a vulnerable person, worn down by misfortune or mental ill-health, and you invested in this stuff and got the bill, where does that leave you? Feeling like you need to buy a few more self-help products most likely. That is why I tried to de-couple my in-box from this type of potentially destructive bunkum. The bad news is, the emails are still coming.