If someone is making a career out of helping others to overcome obstacles and live the best lives they can, you’d expect these people to have successfully navigated through similar challenges in their own experience.
At a time when anyone can call themselves a self-help professional, most of those that do provide advice that people want to hear, rather than advice based on life-lessons they themselves had experienced.
This is why it’s a relief to find that people like Terrance McMahon decide to devote themselves to helping others.
Mr McMahon is the former CEO of a hugely successful, multi-million-dollar insurance firm. Significantly, he didn’t decide to quit his high-end job to spread the word about how to be successful when you’re essentially already successful – like many self-proclaimed self-help gurus do. Mr McMahon had first gone through hell and back – involving a decades-long vicious cycle of substance abuse, a liver failure, a brush with death and the need to upend his life entirely in order to find balance.
To survive this harrowing experience, Mr McMahon developed a highly organised, methodical approach – as you’d expect and expert businessman to do. Through trial and error, with determination and full understanding of what it’ll take to achieve his goals, he essentially created a formula – an algorithm for happiness, as he sometimes refers to it – by testing it on himself.
It was only once he found that his approach had helped him to arrive at a point where he could call himself happy, or balanced, that it occurred to him to share it with other people.
Setting the specifics of the insights and messages aside, this distinction is what makes Mr McMahon truly stand out from the crowd of motivational speakers. He didn’t start out with the idea of becoming a self-help guide and developing a method specifically to this end. Instead, he discovered a way to help himself, and chose to dedicate his time and career to teaching others how to do the same.
Broadly speaking, Mr McMahon’s message is that of reinvention, rather than improvement or repair. In his book and during his talks, he focuses on the idea of reinventing yourself instead of always trying to meet the expectations you have of yourself and others have of you, instead of accepting yourself the way you are – provided you’re unhappy – or reinventing your surroundings alone. His 12-week method involves discovering, envisioning, and realising your ‘superhero self’ – the person you really want to be.
This message is presented in a refreshingly no-nonsense way, too. Mr McMahon is highly direct and clear in his statements, breaks the self-reinvention process down into methodical, organised steps, and is not afraid to use himself, and his own past struggles, as an example.
To find out more about Terrance McMahon, watch his TEDx talk or visit the YouTube podcast channel he co-hosts, Your Voice to the World.
