Please shut up: advice from no life coach, ever

Despite the celebrity endorsements, this ‘self-help’ book is just as irritating as all the rest.

Musical theatre star Josh Piterman has written an autobiography which details struggles including bulimia, self doubt, and losing his voice. Picture: Jake Nowakowski

You can now listen to The Australian's articles. Give us your feedback.

You can now listen to The Australian's articles.

Responsibility for the collapse of Western society can be evenly apportioned between Thomas Anthony Harris’s I’m OK, You’re OK (1967) and Wayne Dyer’s Your Erroneous Zones (1976) which lived next to Bex powders in the toolkit of every troubled 70s housewife. From them, mum learned it was OK to be traumatised – kinda’ cool, in fact – and that the best thing to do was to talk about it.

Her kids, and their kids – your kids, probably – have been yammering about little else since.

Boozing husbands and bullying fathers must accept their cut of the blame, so it’s appropriate that men have been saddled with authoring the lion’s share of a genre obsessed with “empowerment”, with only one woman (Rhonda Byrne, author of 2006’s hideous The Secret), featuring in the top 20 all-time beanbag-and-incense bestsellers, despite women making up the bulk of the readership.

Nebraska bacon salesman Dale Carnegie got the barrel rolling in 1936 with How to Win Friends and Influence People, a con-artist’s handbook that took the social-manipulation methods of Edward “father of public relations” Bernays and transposed them for individual use – the privatisation of propaganda, if you like.

“Talk to someone about themselves,” Carnegie shrewdly advised, “and they’ll listen for hours.”

How true that turned out to be.

We’re all phony, it seems, and the sooner we admit it the better. So writes the author of Behind the Mask, Josh Piterman, a musical theatre performer who hit the big time on London’s West End a few years ago when he played the lead role in Phantom of the Opera.

That his value to the world necessitated a mask appears to have struck Piterman like a thunderbolt up the kazoo.

 

“We are rarely our whole selves,” he writes. “Each mask is a different role: the role of the parent, partner, work colleague or friend … And until we can know and love the person behind these masks, we will find ourselves chasing the next thing to be, the next mask to wear.”

What looks like a memoir thus behaves like a sermon on personal development. Behind the Mask is filled with “lessons, learnings and wisdoms” the 50-something author has juiced from various “coaches, teachers, gurus, guides, mentors, therapists” and, of course, “self-help books”.

Let’s not go making spectacles of ourselves by questioning the academic credentials of those who presume to distribute learnings to the learnless. The year is 2025, and, just as one can have one’s head shrunk on one’s own couch these days, one can embark on a university-grade education from the same settee. If uneducated boobs like Abe Lincoln, Frederick Douglass and Simon Cowell could do it, there’s no reason why Josh Piterman can’t teach us a thing or two.

The question is why this singer of songs made the decision to preach, rather than to simply tell his story. It’s not as if he doesn’t have a good tale to spin – shy Melbourne boy, descended from Holocaust survivors, climbs from suburban Melbourne to the top of his theatrical game – and the best bits of Behind the Mask are Josh’s backstage recollections of performance horrors and the boyish wonder at seeing his star ascend. But such moments are as precious as cigarette breaks at a wellness symposium, for the star of Behind the Mask is, in fact, “you”, the bewildered student, Piterman going so far as to set homework within the confines of breakout boxes that conclude each chapter.

“Journal exercise: who are you? … What are the unconditional qualities that define you? WRITE THEM DOWN!”

So much for escaping this badgering existence by getting lost in a book.

Marxist philosopher and delightfully weird polymath Slavoj Zizek believes man’s search for his inner self is not only futile but hazardous. “If you go deep into it,” he says, “you find deep shit there … monstrous fantasies, and so on”.

The only way to overcome our pitiful insignificance in the world, he says, is to “identify with the mask”, to build an identity for ourselves that serves as both protector and a goal towards which we can aspire.

Piterman probably wouldn’t buy it. There’s a “real you”, he insists, beyond the persona, the T-shirt, the greedy bugger at the ATM. He began his “journey” towards discovering his authentic self while attending a “men’s circle” in 2020, which Piterman (unlike Ray Shoesmith) found to be “one of the most profound therapeutic experiences I have ever taken part in”.

Those who’ve been frank with their buddies will know the feeling.

Original thoughts are few in Behind the Mask, though Piterman is at least upfront about his inspiration, everyone from Ekhart Tolle to the ubiquitous Dalai Lama scoring guernseys in the index. A more trim version of Behind the Mask is undoubtedly the award-winning 50 Self-Help Classics: 50 Inspirational Books to Transform Your Life (2003), with Tom Butler-Bowden similarly transparent about the fact he’d done little more than distil the works of others (correctly assuming, perhaps, that ­nobody would take life advice from someone who couldn’t even decide which surname to use).

To be fair, Piterman has been through his own wringer. A ­leisurely wipe-out last year saw his surfboard spearing his throat and mashing his cricothyroid muscle, “the one that makes you sing well”. Josh credits the return of his singing voice to a scrum of pathologists, otorhinolaryngologists, “an energy healer and a reiki therapist”. It’s a broad net that catches the fish, so they say.

While the irony of a singer being struck in the throat is not lost on Piterman, he doesn’t seem to have considered this event as God’s way of telling prospective life coaches to shut up.

Jackson Marx has been through the wringer but only talks to his wife about it.