Adele looked blooming in the recent photo she released of herself after losing 7st.
Pity she followed it up by paying tribute to Untamed, by American life coach Glennon Doyle.
Oh no! Not another boost to the overinflated and potentially harmful self-help industry that dominates the publishing lists, our Instagram feeds and even our T-shirts. Want one that says Live Your Best Life? Yours for upwards of £8.99.
Doyle has made a multi-million-pound fortune through books, which combine her personal story with trite, ego-boosting messaging, and stadium speaking tours.
She’s a modern-day Billy Graham in a cream jump suit. Now credit where credit is due. It clearly takes some kind of genius to make serious money out of phrases such as ‘When women learn to please, we forget who we are’ or the equally insightful ‘Every time you pretend to be less than you are, you steal permission from other women to exist fully’.
Adele (pictured earlier this month) looked blooming in the recent photo she released of herself after losing 7st
And to have gathered a celebrity cheerleading girl gang that includes not only Adele, but Emma Watson, Reese Witherspoon and, naturally, Oprah. You might say my views are a case of sour grapes, but I disagree.
While I fully support anything that builds confidence and offers help and support to people who need it, investing in the idea that slogans can change your life, and that blind self-belief and self-obsession are the paths to success, can be genuinely damaging.
They’re fine for those who are able to read or hear such messages and filter them for the odd worthwhile idea.
But they are false gold for the many who gobble up the words of one guru after another in a search for answers to the condition we all share – that of being alive. Life is messy and unpredictable.
Plans get wrecked, hopes get dashed and often you come across people who are plain unpleasant. We all, and this applies to both sexes (whereas it’s noticeable that a large amount of this self-help industry is aimed at women), have our down moments when everything feels out of control.
Similarly there are other times that are joyful and fulfilling. We come across unusual kindnesses and fascinating people. We find ourselves at exciting forks in the road. It’s a rich tapestry for sure. The self-help industry thrives on the idea that life is a battleground to be conquered.
American life coach Glennon Doyle (pictured) has made a multi-million-pound fortune through books, which combine her personal story with trite, ego-boosting messaging, and stadium speaking tours
That our starting point is as victims in need of a combat strategy in order to thrive, an infallible game plan to follow by the letter.
When I give occasional talks about my career, I am struck by how, in recent years, questions from the audience have become increasingly driven by the belief that there are definitive answers to how to succeed – climbing the career path; juggling work and motherhood; looking good and feeling great round the clock.
And self-help gurus feed this fallacy. In itself, there’s nothing wrong with looking for answers but their teaching rarely includes the fundamental truth, which is that some things go right and some wrong.
Live your best life all you want but often solutions or part solutions are complex and pragmatic – ideas that don’t fit so neatly on an Instagram feed.
The problem with this trend for mantras as crutches, and wishy-washy feminist memes (‘I am woman. What’s your superpower?’) as a replacement for common sense, is it encourages the more unsure and vulnerable to put their trust in something that may well not work.
It replaces intelligent coping strategies with slogans, while the current fad for identifying syndromes, like the much-talked-about impostor syndrome, exacerbates the notion of suffering in some way, rather than accepting that you are simply experiencing perfectly natural doubt or insecurity, which is far less worrying. I’d better stop. I’m starting to sound like a self-help guru myself.
On a lighter note, Adele’s snap with her Rapunzel-style ringlets is more proof of the appeal of curls.
It’s amazing that a huge business has grown up around straightening, when so many people look so much better when they let their waves back in – even if Adele’s might have had the benefit of a good hairdresser just out of frame.
Was anyone’s else first thought on seeing the tent pitched outside Boris’s holiday cottage that it was an excellent place for him to escape Wilfred’s urgent trill for a night feed?
A sleeping bag and torch would be nirvana compared to the utterly exhausting demands of a baby at night.
I know during the height of the pandemic Britain’s leading fashion house Burberry helped out with PPE, but surely now is not the time to price a mask made from offcuts at £90.
It’s not just that the optics aren’t good – it looks plain greedy.
Britain’s leading fashion house Burberry has released a mask in light of the coronavirus pandemic priced at £90
Marks can survive – as a local hero It IS no surprise that M&S is shedding 7,000 jobs. This was sadly likely to happen even without the pandemic, which is crazy.
The company is still the largest clothing retailer in town, and although it may no longer be the place where the nation buys its knickers, even those who haven’t been near the place in years care about its fortunes. I bought two pairs of leggings from them yesterday.
Clicked and collected at my local M&S food store, where I also bought some roasted almonds, bananas, dark chocolate and a Grazia magazine. Nothing to complain about there. The store is attractive, the staff helpful and the food pretty good. And it’s around the corner from home.
Food is not M&S’s problem, though. It’s the clothes and, despite endless articles like this suggesting that there are too many different brands under the M&S banner selling too many similar styles, it doesn’t get the message. The policy seems to veer between positioning a few of ‘this season’s must-have’ pieces among the fashion press for publicity, and flooding the website and depressing stores with a baffling array of unnecessary choice.
I don’t subscribe to the view that some of this failure in clothing is due to the fact that the CEOs have all been male, but there does seem to be a disconnect between how M&S thinks about clothes shopping and the reality – remember that almost all clothes for the family are bought by women. In any imaginable future, it’s unlikely that profitability lies in acres of floor space filled with endless rails of clothes.
Which makes M&S’s new plan to expand into out-of-town retail parks properly insane. Some of the success of M&S food is down to the fact that it provides what people want in places they already are.
Why don’t they apply that to clothes, now that unfortunately so many smaller businesses are vacating their stores? Try out some pop-ups, fill them with the things that we all need – the classic white T-shirt (but please no stretch), black tights, a navy cashmere, school uniforms, pyjamas and, yes, some simple basic underwear. Even banking facilities. We can drop in, grab what we want and then maybe add something else to the basics on a whim. Just as I did with that chocolate.
The etiquette around greetings has become as complicated as Victorian courting rituals. Is it polite to offer only a wave, or do we need to elbow-bump? Is it acceptable for anybody to hug?
And when will we be able to stop the first moments of conversation being about what we all think is right to do, now that one person’s friendly embrace is another’s poison?
As we consider how ghastly our lot is in the UK, it might be worth sparing a thought for how unspeakably terrible Abdulfatah Hamdallah’s life in Sudan must have been to make him attempt a Channel crossing in a supermarket inflatable with spades for oars – when he couldn’t even swim.