Hapless Self-Help

Maggie: It's all right, honestly, really. I didn't really like him very much. I liked him even less after he committed suicide.
Andrew: How did he do it?
Maggie: Threw himself off a building. He couldn't even do that properly. It was only a one-storey building. He would have survived, only a car ran him over. It's not funny...
Andrew: It's a little funny. What sort of books did he write?
Maggie: Self-help.
Andrew: Oh, of course.

— Peter's Friends

Fiction loves it when people have ironic jobs. That's the reason that the Preacher's Kid tends not to be a good person and The Cobbler's Children Have No Shoes. This is when the cobbler's children have no... help. Or, rather, self-help.

Self-help is a global billion-dollar industry. It encompasses authors (common in fiction, given that Most Writers Are Writers), motivational speakers, coaches, influencers, nutritionists, and more. As a result, a lot of fiction has centered on the disparity between the values espoused by self-help, and the usually imperfect lives lived by those who've made a lot of money out of it. These two general stereotypes act side-by-side in the creation of the useless and/or actively corrupt self-improvement guru and are the epitome of a Hypocrite.

The Shrink (especially the useless subtrope) and the Psycho Psychologist cover this trope as it applies to therapy. This sister trope covers all other elements of the self-help industry, especially the more corporate aspects. They may be one among Horror Hippies who are true believers in whatever they sell a Punch-Clock Villain who is Only in It for the Money, or a Girlboss Feminist who appropriates progressive language to further themselves.

The trope also covers a broad spectrum of morality, from an outright Villain with Good Publicity who uses their claims of helping themselves and others to let loose their true sadism, to someone who wants to do good but is simply a Hypocrite or unlucky. The important part is the Dramatic Irony that mismatches the character and their circumstances with their profession.

Break the Motivational Speaker is a common occurrence for when their hypocrisy is exposed. Compare Bad Influencer, which is often related but more specifically revolves around Internet subcultures and that form of Internet fame, and Mean Character, Nice Actor, when this trope applies to actors.

Commonly overlaps with the Church of Happyology. Not to be confused with Fake Faith Healer, Greedy Televangelist, and False Prophet. They all share some elements, but this trope is most secular and not religious.

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Examples:

Comic Strips

• One Dilbert strip has a motivational speaker introduced as being a professional athlete before drugs and alcohol became his downfall. As he staggers onstage, it's pointed out that he'd be more inspirational if he'd managed to stop the drugs and alcohol.

Film — Animated

• Anomalisa: Michael is a self-help author who is desperately lonely and suffers from Fregoli delusion, which makes him unable to form lasting relationships with anyone.

Film — Live-Action

• Donnie Darko: Jim Cunningham is a motivational speaker whose bright, cheesy self-help videos are an obsession for Donnie's town, the school in particular, who foists him on their students. He's also a pedophile with an enormous amount of child pornography who is shown openly groping a boy, to which everyone but Donnie seems oblivious.
• Little Miss Sunshine: Richard is a Social Darwinist who believes that "there are two types of people in the world, winners and losers." He's a motivational speaker who lectures his whole family on the importance of being "winners" - then his family's financial future gets a serious blow when his motivational project doesn't sell, leaving them in debt, and he's viciously told that he's "not viable."
• The Love Guru: Pitka consoles others on their romantic lives with completely nonsensical advice despite always being in messes of his own making.
• Love Happens: Burke Ryan wrote a self-help book about getting over loss, but he doesn't follow his own advice and has not healed from his wife's death. At least part of this is guilt that he was driving the car, and not her as he claimed.
• Peter's Friends: Maggie tells Andrew about dating a self-help author who killed himself in a Bungled Suicide. She also published a book called "You May Already Know", and becomes convinced that her friend Peter is the man for her, although he is possibly gay. He gently rejects her because he's now celibate and no longer having sex because he has AIDS.

Literature

• Animorphs: "The Proposal" has Marco find out that a self-help guru is recruiting for the Sharing (the Yeerk's organization to get more host bodies under the guise of helping the community), so the plot of the book is discrediting him by making him look like a Straw Hypocrite who hates animals. This is helped by his Yeerk being genuinely unhinged, a violent and bombastic type stuck pretending to be a charismatic All-Loving Hero, and not helped by Marco having morph issues all throughout the book caused by his dad remarrying (when Marco knows his mother is still alive and host to Visser One).
• Idol: Sam is a cross between this, Bad Influencer, and Girlboss Feminist. She's a "feminist" influencer who preaches healthy living and self-esteem while being a narcissist with a severe eating disorder who sexually assaulted her best friend, which threatens to bring down her empire.
• Mr Monk Helps Himself: Miranda Bigley is a very successful self-help author who commits suicide while on a retreat in full view of the other guests. Due to her teachings, Natalie can't believe it was suicide. She's right, it wasn't. But Miranda's company was still involved in very shady things and Miranda faked her death before being killed by her cheating husband.
• The Undoing: In the book only, psychiatrist Grace has written a book called You Should Have Known, which is a self-help book about the ways people delude themselves about aspects of their life. She is completely oblivious to the fact that her husband Jonathan is a serial cheater who is secretly unemployed and murdered his mistress.

Live-Action TV

• Columbo:
  • In "How to Dial A Murder", the murderer is a self-help guru with expensive classes that solely include bullying his signups. He's obsessed with the importance of control, but his personal life is out of control: his wife cheated on him with his friend and colleague. And that's before he murders the other guy via Doberman and Columbo figures out how and why.
  • In "Sex and The Married Detective", the murderer is a sex therapist with multiple books about improving your sex life. Despite this, her husband is cheating with her Sexy Secretary and she conspires to murder him while dressed up as an escort herself.
• Desperate Housewives: Dave is a motivational speaker who expounds on the importance of self-esteem and moving on. He's also violent and mentally ill, having gone off his meds to get revenge against Mike, who he believes killed his first wife and their daughter in a car accident. He's also lying about who he is to Edie, and his lies get her killed.
• In Dexter, Jordan Chase is a wealthy and handsome motivational speaker who encourages people to grab hold of their lives and take control. He is a Control Freak who tortures and murders women with a gang of fellow men, most of whom are in fear of him or at least dominated by him, and who was at one point a Formerly Fat Nerd.
• Dietland: Plum and her mother (like millions of other girls and women) were believers in the Baptist Plan, a Weightwatchers/Jenny Craig hybrid diet plan that taught them weight loss and being thin were the solutions to all their problems. As a result, Plum is very depressed and has very low self-esteem in present day, as she's never managed to lose weight. When she runs into the Baptist Plan's heiress daughter Verena, Verena tells her the truth: her mother lost weight once through the Baptist Plan but soon gained weight again. Her father was initially opposed to her losing weight, as he loved her Just the Way You Are. However, with their newfound millions from the Baptist Plan on the line, he forced her to get a gastric band. The surgery went wrong and left her incontinent for the rest of her life.
• The Girlfriends Guide To Divorce: Abby is a self-help author who hides her divorce because she's ashamed of being a single woman in her 40s.
• The Idol: Tedros is a self-help guru who preaches empowerment yet is the leader of a cult who tortures and sexually harasses people. And, in the end he's not even good at it; it's suggested that Jocelyn was manipulating him all along by lying about her Freudian Excuse.
• Saturday Night Live: The Chris Farley character Matt Foley is a motivational speaker whose life is worse than those he is trying to motivate. He always introduces himself by saying that he's been divorced three times and Lives in a Van down by the river. Any success as a motivational speaker seems to come from being so obnoxious and pathetic that people would get their acts together so as not to end up like him.
• Skins: Leon Levan is a life coach and motivational speaker. One of his sons, Matty, has been thrown out of the house and now lives the life of an aimless drifter, and the other one, Nick, feels as though he is imperfect, the inferior son, and finally ends up destroying their kitchen.

Puppet Shows

• Fraggle Rock: In "The Secret of Convincing John", Wembley, after his indecisiveness causes Gobo to fall in a hole, seeks the help of Convincing John, a Fraggle who can convince anyone of anything. John makes Wembley decisive but also arrogant, bossy, stubborn, and prone to dangerous choices. His friends drag him back to Convincing John to have the process reversed, just in time to hear John singing a lament about being unable to make up his mind about anything, including which foot to put out of bed first after a nap.

Western Animation

• Dan Vs.: In "Anger Management", Amber the anger management instructor turns out to hide a lot of anger beneath her smile and insistence that anger is your enemy. This becomes a big problem when Dan encourages her to embrace her rage and she begins to manipulate him.
• The Simpsons: In "Bart's Inner Child", the family encounter Brad Goodman, a self-help guru who brings chaos to Springfield by teaching them to embrace Bart's indifference.
  Marge: The lesson here is that self-improvement is better left to people who live in big cities.
• In an episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks, Captain Freeman realizes that the engineers are overly stressed, to the point that it's affecting their performance. Thus, she has all of them go to a ship whose sole purpose is to help people relax. Despite appearing very calm and passive on the outside, the director is actually a very stressed person who is seen breaking down/freaking out whenever anything doesn't go well. Ironically, making sure everyone else is relaxed is a very stressful job.

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