The ‘space of me’ is personal, but it’s big business. It’s the industry surrounding self-help and self-improvement products, covering everything from life coaching to personal training and anti-aging.
This is the industry that will make you rich. The one that will make you thin. It will see you get more balance in life. It will reduce your stress while at the same time promising more ‘success’. It will offer the solution for ‘having it all’. It will make you better. Happier. Healthier. Fitter. Perhaps it will even make you famous.
And because women make at least 75% of household purchasing decisions, it’s an industry that likes to target women. According to 2013 research, women account for 70% of self-help customers in the United States. They’re buying stuff to help them mentally, physically, spiritually and financially – usually from self-appointed ‘gurus’. The proportion of women to men buying these products hasn’t changed in 19 years, according to the research.
It’s hardly surprising given continued mixed media messages regarding how women should be, how we should look, the way we should manage caring responsibilities and domestic duties, and the type of ‘success’ we should be attempting to achieve.
According to Janine Garner, the “space of me” industry is worth an astounding $11 billion in the United States alone. She doesn’t believe it’s making us any happier or offering much by the way of solving some of the biggest business dilemmas we’re facing – indeed, she points to Los Angeles, where the self-improvement space is particularly thriving, as being one of the unhappiest places in the world.
She believes a perceived need for self-improvement stems from a sense of loneliness from feeling underappreciated, over-burdened, and lacking in autonomy at work.
“This sees us regressing into a space of me: a space of self-help and self-discovery. A space where we look to protect what we know or learn, and believe we should ‘fake it till we make it’ in order to make up for what we don’t know,” she said at a forum run by her business, the Little Black Dress Group recently.
Garner believes we need to shift this ‘space of me’ thinking to one of collaboration. That doesn’t mean we can’t spend time, money and energy on trying to personally do certain things better, but it does mean we look to a sense of collective improvement, as opposed to making it all about ourselves.
She writes about the shift to ‘we’ in her upcoming book, From Me to We, noting that the current pace of change of business – particularly the continued demand for innovation along with shifting demographics – is driving a need for collaboration, especially in businesses realising the need to build more diverse teams for decision-making.
“We’re [women] making major decisions in absolutely everything, but then how many women are involved in businesses when it comes to product design and product marketing?”
It’s ok to have your own personal dreams, and to identify your own vision of success. But success, she believes, is better if it has a collective goal in mind. It’s about determining what value you can offer, supporting and leading on change, and challenging the existing status quo.
That requires individuals and existing businesses to adjust from continually looking inwards to thinking externally when it comes to what they can offer and who they might need to help.
Collaboration leads to greater innovation, but true collaboration is only possible if diverse teams are invited in to participate, and if all participants are aiming for a collective vision of success, rather than personal brownie points.
The self-improvement business isn’t all bad. Depending on how you chose to spend your money and the providers you select, there can be benefits for your self-perceived needs. Everyone wants to be better, in their own way, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But what if we really strived to be better, together?