1. The field is very competitive and so everyone in the field hypes up their success stories. It's easy to go in to a self help book thinking it will work 100% of the time. The truth is that it probably only works 10% of the time. 10% is great unless you were expecting 100%. So failing is normal. And the most common cause for failure is simply discovering change is a lot of work and you'd rather put that effort somewhere else.
2. The vast majority of free self-improvement articles are written by content marketers with zero personal experience. They are essentially writing book reports about different famous people. It's actually a little worse than that--many think up the title and framing, and then farm the words out to Upwork (this happens even for articles you find on Inc.). The downside of this is that the advice has never been tested, not even on the author. So the readers hype themselves up and then find out that the actions they've been given just flat out don't work ever.
3. Otherwise well meaning professionals in this space get obsessed with problem solving. And as a result they talk at you like you have a problem. That's not their call though. You need to be in charge of deciding whether you are happy with your weight or not, or wealth or productivity. I walked out of a Mobile Health Conference once because I was so disgusted by the parade of thin speakers who were talking about how awful fat people are. But it comes up in article titles too--many of the proposals I see are framed as a chance to fix you. I politely talk them into a different framing.
So those are three things our industry does to unintentionally make people feel bad about themselves.
This is the start of 100s of self-help books. Mainly, IMHO, because it's such an attractive pitch, not because it carries any truth.
Authors may try that. But thankfully, you feeling bad isn't actually good for their business.
All of my data on headlines in my publication says the articles always do better if they are framed in the positive rather than in the negative. I'm constantly telling authors not to say they're out to fix you... rather we're here to help you achieve some positive fantasy of who you could become. Almost any topic could be framed either way. "Stop procrastinating vs. The secret of intense focus."
And I've deconstructed a number of top self help books (Tony Robbins, Quit Smoking the Easy Way, Tim Ferriss). They all use a structure of inspiration and social proof to convince you that the change is possible.
Maybe my favorite example book structure is a book about waking up early called The Miracle Morning. The entire first half of the book is a sales pitch for the advice that comes in the second half of the book. At first I thought it was funny that I was half way through the book and I still had no idea what the steps of the Miracle Morning were. But that sales pitch had wormed its way into my subconscious and that made following the steps a lot easier.
All those authors used positive framings and avoided any negativity other than to acknowledge how you might be feeling about yourself when you decided to buy their book.
In any case, thanks for the nice note. I'm pretty sure nobody is monitoring this thread anymore.