According to Market Research, the self-improvement industry is estimated to grow to £11.6 billion by 2022, that is a crazy amount of money! Looking at the list below collated by Brand Minds, the industry is booming and set to continue with significant year on year growth trends.

  • Self-help audiobooks – £623 million (5.6% growth YoY)
  • Self-improvement books – £705million (6% YoY)
  • Self-improvement apps – £23 million
  • Personal coaching services – $1 billion
  • Motivational speakers – $1 billion

But why are we all spending so much money trying to find ourselves and where exactly are we looking to make these improvements?

When we look to self-improve, we often “seek” – seek to find answers, solutions, advice and explanations. But I would argue that we need to take a “find” approach. I believe whole-heartedly that everything you need you already have, perhaps within you or in your environment, through the people you know and the experiences you have had and are yet to have.

But we seek, we look for other people’s solutions, listen to other people’s experiences, implement other people’s strategies. If we made a concerted effort to look within, to listen to ourselves and to uncover or “find” our own untapped potential, we might get further in our own personal development journey.

Granted we sometimes need tools and different ways of thinking to unlock ourselves, but again finding the ways and developing our own tools is a stronger method to implement long-term change and drive our own realisation, at our own pace, in our own way.

I would usually summarise a blog like this with suggestions and activities to help you start to unpick your values or explore your own identity for personal branding. Still, for this blog, I am going to leave it up to you. To sit for a while and think about a method, tool or technique that would help you feel more connected to you. Or perhaps it isn’t sitting at all; perhaps you are a walker or a talker, maybe you journal or create.

I encourage you to take a few mins and switch off all the noise, the expectations, the books you have read and podcasts you have listened to and consider what you need, what you have and who you are.