Celebs self-helping themselves

By Susan Daly
Wednesday Sep 15 2010

Even the wealthy, the beautiful and the famous need a hand to be happy from time to time. Religion, after all, is not only the opiate of the masses.

Tom Cruise gets his jollies from Scientology, Richard Gere found peace with Buddhism and Madonna has embraced Kabbalah.

As for those who believe that God helps those who help themselves, the self-help industry is booming.

Julia Roberts is pounding red carpets all over the world right now to bring her movie version of Elizabeth Gilbert's self-discovery memoir Eat, Pray, Love to the masses. The Power, the follow-up to bestseller The Secret, is flying off the shelves.

The self-improvement biz is worth billions and self-help books sell in their millions. Some celebrities have decided they know so much about success that they are qualified to write their own.

Two recent additions to the genre come from Sex and the City's Kim Cattrall who wrote Being a Girl: Navigating the Ups and Downs of Teen Life, and pop singer Jessica Simpson who penned I Do: Achieving Your Dream Wedding. Because you want your teenage daughter to take tips from Samantha Jones, and you really want wedding advice from a woman who put her newlywed life on reality TV and then got divorced.

Some celebrities wisely stick to being believers. Demi Moore is a big fan of spiritual guru Deepak Chopra and Naomi Campbell has applauded the work of I Can Make You Thin hypnotist Paul McKenna.

What better endorsement can a self-help book have than to be photographed under the arm of a celebrity?

We take a look at what star has been spotted carrying which self-help book -- and whether they seem to be learning anything from them ...

THE BOOK: Toxic Friends -- The Antidote For Women Stuck In Complicated Relationships, by Susan Shapiro Barash

THE CELEB: Lindsay Lohan.

Spotted with the book in July, a week before entering jail for violating her probation.

DID IT WORK? The book helps the reader to identify 10 types of 'toxic' female friends that need dumping.

These include The Trophy Friend, The Doormat and The Misery Lover, who only likes you when you're down.

Ah, that explains it. Li-Lo's troubles were because she had the wrong people around her. Problem solved.

THE BOOK: Living In The Moment by Gary Null

A natural health guru advises how to have a "blissful" existence by freeing yourself from consumerism and slowing down your life.

THE CELEB: Paris Hilton.

She displayed the book on walkabout in front of the paparazzi after a break-up with a boyfriend in 2008.

DID IT WORK? Null believes in freeing oneself from the traps of materialism. In July, Hilton spent €3,000 on 12 pairs of sunglasses while on holiday in St Tropez.

In August, she was charged with cocaine possession. It is possible Hilton misread the subtitle of Living In The Moment: A Prescription For The Soul for self-medication of an entirely less spiritual type.

THE BOOK: The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

Former depressive Tolle discovers that the ego, with all its emotional baggage of memories, stands in the way of spiritual awakening.

THE CELEB: Jim Carrey.

The actor opened a lecture for Tolle last year saying he now understood "how thought was just an illusory thing and how thought is responsible for some, if not, all the suffering we experienced".

DID IT WORK? Some would argue that with a man who built his success on Dumb and Dumber is already a convert to not thinking too much.

Saying that, a Time magazine interviewer to whom he recommended Tolle's work in 2007 said that Carrey "wasn't at all annoying. Yes, he's a little too happy, but he seems very comfortable and mellow and unguarded and unpretentious."

THE BOOK: The Secret by Rhonda Byrne

Every positive thinking message spouted in the past 80 years repackaged as an ancient guide to having it all.

THE CELEB: Oprah Winfrey.

The queen of book endorsements. She dedicated two of her 2007 shows to The Secret.

DID IT WORK? The Secret claims you can have the perfect life if you just wish hard enough for it.

Oprah is certainly worth a bundle but with her ever-fluctuating body weight, we wonder what she thinks of The Secret's advice to weight watchers: "If you see people who are overweight, do not observe them, but immediately switch your mind to the picture of you in your perfect body and feel it." That's right. Only look at Oprah when she's down to a size 12-14.

THE BOOK: The Rules by Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider

Two dating coaches teach women how to snag a husband by responding to one out of every four emails from a guy and not having sex until the third date at the earliest.

THE CELEB: Beyoncé.

The Rules gals quote B on their website as telling US Weekly that although "there are certain things in there that are unrealistic, it [The Rules] has worked for me".

DID IT WORK? Well she's married, ain't she?

She dated rapper Jay-Z for six years before they wed. That's in direct contravention of Fein and Schneider's rule that if he likes it, then he should put a ring on it after no more than two years.

Nor is it easy to picture her taking on this top 10 tip from the ladies: "Take care of yourself, take a bubble bath and build up your soul with positive slogans like, 'I am a beautiful woman. I am enough'."

THE BOOK: Skinny Bitch by Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin

"A no-nonsense, tough-love guide for savvy girls who want to stop eating crap and look fabulous."

THE CELEB: Victoria Beckham.

The former Spice girl was papped taking the book down from a shelf in an LA boutique in 2007.

DID IT WORK? Surely the question should be, 'Did she need it?'

Posh Spice was already thin as a rake when she brandished the diet book. It is possible that she was having a laugh at her own expense and at critics of her pin-thin figure by waving it at the paparazzi.

The book's straight-talking advice sounds pretty suited to Victoria's rigid body control though -- the authors tell readers "you are a total moron if you think the Atkins Diet will make you thin" and that "soda is liquid Satan".

THE BOOK: Collected Poems of Derek Walcott, 1948-1984

Not quite a self-help manual but Walcott, who emerged from the isolation of an ex-British colony in the West Indies to win a Nobel Prize for Literature, is probably an inspiration to the self-made man.

THE CELEB: Barack Obama.

Not quite a celebrity, but definitely rather famous, Obama was spotted carrying it while leaving his daughters to school the morning after winning the US Presidential election in 2008.

DID IT WORK? One of Walcott's most famous works is his 1973 autobiographical epic poem Another Life in which he tells the reader: "You want to hear my history? Ask the sea."

Obama could adopt it as the perfect talk-to-the-hand response to the 'birthers' who claim that he is not an American citizen because he was born in Hawaii.

That should keep them guessing.

FIRST PUBLISHED HERE: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/celebrity-news-gossip/lilo-has-toxic-friends-beyonceacute-plays-by-the-rules-and-posh-is-a-skinny-bitch-2337799.html

The Secret to (her) success

The author who found The Secret to success with a best-selling self-help book is about to unleash a new tome on having it all.
(I wrote this for last Saturday's Review section in the Irish Independent - The Power was published yesterday)

The key to success is apparently now one of the world's worst-kept secrets. When self-help manual The Secret was published in 2006, it claimed to contain a formula to personal fulfillment that had been jealously guarded by some of history's finest minds down through the centuries. Four years later, The Secret has been imparted to around 16 million people who have bought the book.

Not content with sparking one global pop cultural phenomenon, The Secret's Australian author Rhonda Byrne is launching a follow-up, The Power, next Tuesday. Her publishers say it is set to reveal everything Byrne has learnt and attracted to herself since the release of her first book.

The basic premise of The Secret was that if you focus hard enough on what you want most from life, the universe will deliver it. It's a simple credo that certainly seems to have worked for Byrne. The slim tome became an instant hit, championed by the likes of Oprah Winfrey and Ellen DeGeneres. It went to No 1 in Ireland on its publication here in 2007. It has remained on the hardback bestsellers' list for so long that the publishing industry hasn't been this geared up for a sequel since the release of the second Harry Potter book.

Byrne herself has somewhat retreated from the public eye since the 2006 launch of The Secret. Time magazine named her one of the world's most influential people in 2007 but she hasn't given any major interview in the past two years. She doesn't need to: the global spread of The Secret has taken on a self-promoting life on blogs, TV chat shows and by sheer word-of-mouth.

Back in the early 1990s, Byrne was a prominent reality TV producer in her native Melbourne. Even then she showed a knack for having a finger on the pulse of popular culture: she specialised in programmes about UFOs and near-death experiences. Her Prime Time production company created the much-syndicated World's Greatest Commercials series and Sensing Murder, which had 'psychic detectives' tackle famous unsolved murders. Former colleagues recalled that she was ambitious and hard-working.

By 2004 however, Byrne experienced a plunge in her personal fortunes. She was divorced and a single mum to two children, she had fallen out with her business partner and her father had just died. It was at this low point that her daughter handed her a copy of The Science of Getting Rich, a get-rich-quick classic published in 1910. Byrne began to devour other self-help manuals and realised that they had a key message in common: the power of positive thinking.

Doing what came naturally to her, Byrne decided to make a TV documentary based on the teachings of several self-help gurus and motivational speakers. These "transformational experts" as she calls them included already established names in the genre like Jack Canfield, author of the Chicken Soup for the Soul books. Byrne managed to source funding from Australian and US sources but she also mortgaged her own house to make the film.

The risk paid off. (Although The Secret would say that there is no risk involved: if you just focus hard enough on your heart's desire, the universe's Law of Attraction will bring it to you.) A trailer for the DVD became a viral success on the internet, and linked to where the film could be streamed -- for a price. The film is reported to have grossed nearly $20m in its first eight months online and Byrne wrote the book to go with it.

The core message of the book doesn't seem that revolutionary. The power of positive thinking has been a mainstream pop psychology subject since Dale Carnegie's How To Win Friends and Influence People was published in the Great Depression in 1936. Byrne's readers are exhorted to "Ask, Believe, Receive" -- a theory of 'prosperity consciousness' that goes back to Christian Scientists in the 1800s.

The Secret, and Byrne, have their critics. Some question the materialism of the success being sold and the ease with which readers and viewers are told they can achieve it. In the movie, dramatisations show a little boy dream of owning a shiny red bicycle. In the next frame, one appears outside his door. A woman gazes longingly at a necklace in a shop window -- and suddenly, it is around her neck.

More serious criticism has been aimed at messages like the one where readers are told that to avoid getting fat, they should not look at people who are overweight in case the negative image is catching. "If you see people who are overweight, do not observe them, but immediately switch your mind to the picture of you in your perfect body and feel it," says the book.

Byrne writes: "Imperfect thoughts are the cause of all humanity's ills, including disease, poverty, and unhappiness." When asked by one interviewer if this meant that the Jewish people were responsible for the Holocaust, she replied that "many factors" cause millions to die in tragedies such as the Holocaust, but "if their dominant thoughts and feelings were in alignment with the energy of fear, separation, powerlessness and having no control over outside circumstances, then that is what they attracted".

Nonetheless, the simplicity of The Secret is also its power. Wish the dream and then live the dream. Byrne herself claims that she got rid of her reading glasses in three days flat by thinking correct thoughts about her eyesight. Its universally accepted repeat rule that positive thoughts are good; negative thoughts are bad is easy to sell. Oprah Winfrey thought so -- she devoted two shows to The Secret in 2007, exposing it to her audience of 23 million people and leading to a huge sales boost.

The American Spectator has called the initial internet campaign to launch The Secret, "the greatest success story in the annals of viral marketing". It used tease advertising and personal recommendations on blogs to pass information along in a word-of-mouth way that seemed authentic and intimate.

Even the name, The Secret, is genius. It layers up on the persuasive argument of the book that there is just one overarching powerful secret to success that has been known to the best and brightest in history -- and now it was available to you and me. Plato, Shakespeare, Da Vinci, Beethoven, Einstein are all name-checked as 'keepers' of The Secret.

Donavin Bennes, a buyer for major US book chain Borders Books said: "We all want to be in on a secret. But to present it as the secret, that was brilliant."

The now instantly recognisable cover of the book was made to look like a reproduction of a medieval scroll, complete with scarlet wax seal. It's the Da Vinci Code of self-help: seductively suggesting that this is tapping into a vein of ancient wisdom.

"The Secret reveals the most powerful law in the universe," reads The Secret's official website. "The knowledge of this law has run like a golden thread through the lives and the teachings of all the prophets, seers, sages and saviours in the world's history, and through the lives of all truly great men and women."

The Secret also harnessed an immediate fanbase from the already-popular spiritual and self-help experts who contributed to the initial film, such as Jack Canfield and Esther and Jerry Hicks who had already published best-selling books around the laws of attraction. The Hicks declined to appear in a second version of The Secret film.

Now that Byrne has passed on The Secret to the world, it might seem her work here is done. However, her publishers at Atria say that she was inspired to write The Power as a response to the thousands of letters written to her by readers of the earlier book. Of the sequel, her publishers will only say that "Now with The Power, Rhonda reveals the single greatest force in our universe." This air of mystique has understandably sent fans flocking to book advance copies.

As for Byrne, the 59-year-old has become the best advertisement for The Secret she can be. She ended up buying a prestigious gated home in California, just down the road from her celebrity fan Oprah Winfrey.
FIRST PUBLISHED HERE: http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/shes-got-the-power-2297040.html