Friday, November 11, 2011

Self Help 101: The Stinky Personality Syndrome

Note: This is a series of awkwardly written articles by the maker of Self Help Radio about popular self-help topics because he's getting all self-help-y after many years of mocking self-help with the title of his radio show. People, it's bad.

You've met the people I'm going to talk about. The geneticists. The people who know who B.F. Skinner is. The people who watched Star Trek & think DNA is magical. They're all the same. They say, "You are who you are." They say, "The environment is at best a mitigating factor because you are born to be the person you were born as to be." They say, "It doesn't matter if your mother locked you in a closet for the first eleven years of your life, you were destined to be a mediocre deejay." (No relation.)

But to this we can say hogwash! We can change, & not just our hair, our jobs, & our opinion about sports teams. We can change our stinky personalities. We can. I swear.

By change I may mean "tweak." But surely something is better than nothing, right?

At the outset we must admit that it's not easy. Despite how delicious antidepressants are, they cannot change your personality. So stop calling your ex. Seriously. No, change is difficult & I will understand right now if you'd prefer to just order a pizza because sometimes a pizza is better than your life. Most of the time. Pizza is just so good.

Here are a few tips I've read about over the years which I am absolutely certain will help change your personality or your money back. Please allow four to six weeks for delivery:

1) Be more positive. Remember, a positive is noted by a "plus" sign. "Plus" signs are good. An A+ is better than an A. A-Positive blood is preferred by vampires over regular old A. The positive side of a C cell battery delivers a more sensual shock to the tongue when licked. Get rid of your electrons & make yourself more positive. & like attracts like!

2) People like passion. Get excited by things, but make sure it's not in a creepy way. If you're excited by something & it seems to other people that's you're drunk, that's creepy. Also, too much passion may be mistaken for religious fervor, & religious fervor costs you ten percent of your income at the door. Just saying.

3) Keep a stiff upper lip. That's an idiom for "be brave." When I was first developing this course, the attendees thought I meant for them to inject botox into their upper lips. I didn't mean that then & I don't mean that now. But they were quite brave in the way they recovered almost twenty percent of the use of their upper lips.

4) Choose the one emotional trait you'd like to improve & stick with it. Take, for example, serenity. Aren't serene people a little annoying? Wouldn't you like to just give them a shove & push them over? Just knock them on their ass. They look really surprised. You won't be able to stop laughing. & when they get back up, knock them over again. It's just as funny the second time. The third time, though, not so much.

Just a quick note: many people have written me letters since I first started writing this that there are some people they've met who don't have a stinky personality. To that I also say hogwash! Those you have met, obviously, are people who have no personality at all.

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