A LITTLE (AND LONG) StORY ABOUT SHELF HELP

• We are the world’s first global self-help book club and we are dedicated to celebrating, inspiring and supporting personal development.

• Founded in October 2017 by British journalist Toni Jones, the Shelf Help Club is now a global online and offline collective with a network of over 20,000 readers and seekers worldwide.

• The Shelf Help Club exists to celebrate and promote self-help, connecting as many people as possible with books, ideas and experts to inspire them to create healthier and more positive relationships with themselves. And also to connect these people with each other. Because self-help is great, but it’s even better with friends.

• Whilst we believe that a better relationship with ourselves is the first step in improving our lives, we also know that ‘self-help’ is actually most powerful when we come together to share the adventure.

• And so it is our mission to create a global movement that supports individual and collective healing through self-development.

• And to re-brand self-help as self HEALTH, something that we can all aim for and that we should all be working on all of the time.

• To do that we create Content and Community to make self-help more accessible and collaborative (and - we think - quite cool) and that will inspire positive change and good mental, emotional, spiritual, social and physical health.

• We are making self-help a team sport, working with local Hosts all over the world to create online and offline experiences that support and inspire people to work on themselves.

• And everyone is welcome in our club, whether you're an enlightened meditator who reads A Course In Miracles for fun, or you think the Dalai Lama lives in London Zoo. The only criteria to join is an open heart and a kind and curious mind…

MORE ON OUR STORY

We started life as a local book club in Chiswick, West London, and 5+ years on we have thousands of members in our digital family, have created meetups all over the world, from Amsterdam to London, Los Angeles and Essex, have hosted best-selling author events in London and the USA, appeared at festivals and retreats and created workshops and events for big brands and publishing houses including Soho House, Pernod Ricard, MC Saatchi, Weber Shandwick, Marks & Spencer, Bluebird, Ebury and Harper Collins.

Self-help was pivotal in turning around Toni’s mental health in her late thirties and she started Shelf Help as a way to share everything she was learning, using her skills as a journalist to connect people with the incredible books, ideas and experts that were changing her life, and that she hoped might inspire others to look at themselves in different and more positive ways, too.

Toni wants to help people to like themselves more, because she believes that too many of us don’t like ourselves enough (or even at all), and knows through personal experience, as well as expert advice, that improving our self-compassion and self-worth are actually the first and most fundamental steps towards creating a brilliant life.

And then once we like ourselves more we can start to help other people do the same. And how cool is that.

Because it’s ok not to feel ok. But there’s SO MUCH we can do to feel better, and through the tools and strategies gleaned from our favourite books and experts Toni and the Shelf Help Club want to empower this community to take charge of their mental well-being and to help themselves, and each other, create lives they love.

We’d love you to join us on this incredible journey.

 Toni’s story - short VERSION

Founder Toni Jones is a an editor, writer and producer who lives in Norfolk with her husband, photographer Dan Kennedy, and rescue dog, Mylo (currently still processing her move to the East Anglian countryside after landing there in 2020 having lived in London for 20+ years).

Toni created The Shelf Help Club because it was something she needed as she started to explore her own story and purpose, aged 35, and realised that although there was a lot of information out there, there wasn’t much in the way of support to help process and understand everything she was learning through the books and other types of therapies she was having.

Prior to launching The Shelf Help Club, Toni was a Lifestyle and Fashion Editor with 15+ years experience working on newspapers, websites and magazines including the MailOnline and The Sun. As a freelance writer and content creator her work has appeared in The Telegraph, The Times, MailOnline, You magazine, Women’s Health, Forbes.com, The Evening Standard, Grazia, InStyle, Stella, BBC, The Huffington Post, The New York Post, The Hollywood Reporter and Billboard Magazine.

Toni’s story - LONG VERSION (grab a Cup of tea and settle in)

Founder Toni Jones is a an editor, writer and producer who lives in Norfolk, UK with her photographer husband, Dan, and wonderfully nutty rescue dog, Mylo.

She embraced self-help when leaving a full-time career in journalism, at the age of 35, gave her time for introspection and self-analysis for the first time, well, ever, and she wasn't sure she liked what she saw…

Toni says: "I spent most of my 20s and 30s working and playing hard as Fashion and Women's editors on some of the world’s most notorious news titles. Until one day I realised that ‘working hard’ wasn’t working for me anymore, and ‘playing hard’ wasn’t actually all that much fun. Maybe it never had been?

"I thought I loved living with constant pressure and deadlines and jet lag and hangovers, but had I actually just designed a life that made it easy to bury or numb anything I might have (should have) felt given a bit of space?

"My childhood story isn’t totally rosy, but it’s not that much different to many others, I’m sure; a drunk, disinterested dad, a very busy single mum, a huge, complicated family and a load of assumed responsibility at an early age. And with no one to tell me that it was ok to feel sad or confused or angry, or to tell me that I was interesting or important, and no tools to help me process any of the feelings of guilt or shame that come with all of the above I did what most girls with unresolved ‘daddy issues’ and zero self-belief do: ignored it, worked too hard and went to the pub. For, oh, about 20 years.

"And so I found self-help at the same time as many hundreds of thousands before me, at the lowest point in my life, with ‘40’ looming. On the outside things were were good, there was no obvious trauma or drama to cope with, I was a busy and successful woman with everything going for me.

"But inside I was shattered, and lonely, and sometimes really sad, and these feelings were manifesting themselves in careless and increasingly self-destructive behaviour that with hindsight I can see was a big fat cliched cry for help.

"I didn't know why I felt like this (now I know better, I do better). But I did know that I was tired of the relentless wheel of 'work hard and play harder' that I had created for myself and I needed to get off.

"Leaving my full-time job as an editor was the first step in my 'journey' towards self-awareness and self-love, and it was bloody hard because I had spent almost fifteen years grafting to create a media career in these tough news publications. 

"My job as a journalist defined me, working for big-name publications validated me, and it definitely kept me way too busy to think about anything that really mattered. Like why I needed external validation anyway. 

"And you don't have to be Freud to work out that's probably why I chose this career path in the first place. Being too busy to think can seem like an excellent strategy when, left to your own devices, what you think is mostly that you are not important or interesting or ever quite 'enough'.

"Abandoning the comfort of a punishing but familiar full-time job to go solo was terrifying. Who was I, with no title, no company, no team, no boss and no pay cheque (faaaaaack!) to endorse me? Ultimately I knew that I was doing the right thing giving myself time to pause, but rather than enjoying this QT out of the rat race I felt even more lost than before.

"Trying to make friends with myself after decades of neglect was tough, and I soon started to struggle with lots of new and unfamiliar feelings, thinking that it would be much easier to abandon project TJ, rebury everything, ignore any glimmers of insight and go back to the Company/the pub/being too busy to care.

"And then along came Paul McKenna. An unlikely guru? Possibly. But when the pupil is ready the teacher appears and I was obviously ready for something (anything!) when his book ‘Change Your Life in Seven Days’ fell (jumped?) on the floor in front of me in the local Oxfam.

 "Self-help isn't an instant fix, and it took me over a year to read that book about changing your life in seven days (ha!), because the concepts in it - that we are not our thoughts, that we can let go of limiting beliefs, that we can learn self-confidence, that we create our own reality -  were so new to me. I'm still working on a couple of them several years later. Before then I'd never spent any time really looking at my behaviour, or focusing on my thoughts or emotions. I didn't think I really had many emotions (lol - I've since discovered I was very wrong about that).

"The first question posed in the book is actually really simple: 'What would it be like if you woke up one morning and a miracle had happened - your life had become exactly what you wanted it to be?'

"But I didn’t know the answer. What was my dream life? What did the best future version of me look like? How was I planning to get there? No clue! And not knowing the answer led to me to start questioning everything, about myself, my life, my childhood, my choices, and all the experiences that had shaped me into this person who didn't even know what made her happy anymore.

"That first journey into self-analysis was uncomfortable, fascinating, painful and enlightening all at the same time. And when I (finally!) finished that Paul McKenna book the self-help seed had been well and truly planted.

"Since then I have become a card-carrying member of the self-development tribe, devouring everything from soothing Louise Hay affirmations to mind-blowing Quantum Theory tomes in my quest for a bit more peace and self-awareness. 

"Self-help has (and does) make me laugh, cry, cringe and often ask WTF?! Yes there is a some pseudo-science and properly naff stuff out there, but there's also so much incredible inspiration, motivation and insight too.

"Some of the books I have read in the last few years have fundamentally changed me forever. And once I plucked up the courage to talk to my friends about my experiences I learned that some of them were having similar struggles, realisations and breakthroughs, and it was brilliant to be able to finally share fears and feelings, as well as 'out-there' book recommendations with people who got it and - even better - got me.

"I still work too hard, sometimes. And I still play too hard, sometimes. And in between I am working on cultivating some inner peace and quiet and busting some limiting beliefs with the help of some magical books and magical people (shout out to my life-saving therapist, my amazing and kind husband, my brilliant crew of friends and my wonderful Shelfie community).

"And that is the aim of The Shelf Help Club, to be a platform to bring together books and people and ideas based on principles of kindness, confidentiality and no judgement, to take the stigma out of self-help, and to create a brilliant, empowering community that can really make a difference to its' members lives.

"I don’t doubt that I’ll have many more challenges to contend with on this crazy ride called Life. But I think that is what is helping make Shelf Help so authentic, empowering and hopefully successful: I’m not perfect and I don’t expect anyone else to be either. I’m working on myself at the same time everyone reading the books or commenting on the Instagram page is, so we’re building this brilliant support network together.

"Thanks for reading, and I’m glad you found us."

Toni 💛