about The SHElf HELP CLUB
Who are we and why do we do what we do?
The Shelf Help Club is the world’s first dedicated self-help book club and platform.
We’re a social network for your self-development. A place to LEARN from best-selling authors and to CONNECT with people walking the same path of self-discovery.
we are here to HELP YOU READ MORE and feel better, to help you GROW into the healthiest and happiest version of you.
THE HEADLINES
Founder Toni started the SHC as a local book club in West London in October 2017, because it was something she needed as she began a journey to understand and improve her mental health in her late thirties, after years of neglecting it had resulted in physical, emotional and spiritual burnout/catastrophe.
After leaving a high octane (high stress!) career in journalism she suddenly had the time and space to consider her life choices, and didn’t much like what she saw. She also had the time to start reading again, something she had loved so much once upon a time, and so began a glorious love affair with self-help, and a catalogue of life-changing ‘lightbulb moments’ that she wanted to explore further and share with others.
Toni has since read 600+ self-help books (60+ with the community) and done all kinds of weird and wonderful things in the name of personal development (you can read about some of the weirdest HERE). She’s made huge shifts to her life and her Self, and is in a happy and healthy place.
Toni Jones
Shelf Help Founder
And the Shelf Help Club is now a global online and offline collective, reaching over 25,000 readers and seekers worldwide.
Every week we 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 - we’ve learned - it’s even better with friends.
Our mission is to introduce 1 million people to self-help (supporting the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) #3 and better mental health for all) and to support this we create Content and Community to make self-help more accessible and collaborative and (we think) quite cool.
Substack is our new community HQ, a place to grow our global network, continue to share the best in self-discovery and to host our membership and Book Club.
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 curious mind…
Toni’s BIO
Founder Toni Jones is a journalist-turned-bibliotherapist and a social entrepreneur who founded The Shelf Help Club, the world’s first dedicated self-help book club and platform, in 2017. Today the self-help collective has a global reach of 25k+ readers online across Substack, Instagram, YouTube, and the (chart-topping) book podcast, The Bibliotherapists, and offline via local meetups, corporate programmes and in-person events, workshops and appearances.
Toni created The Shelf Help Club because it was something she needed as she started to explore her own story and purpose in her late thirties 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.
Today she works with best-selling authors and global experts to share self-development tools and strategies with her members and followers. Guest appearances include; Hal Elrod, Gretchen Rubin, Marie Kondo, Donna Ashworth, Bryony Gordon, Emma Gannon, Beth Kempton, Mo Gawdat, Ella Mills, Steven Bartlett, BJ Fogg, Candice Brathwaite and Paul McKenna.
She also works closely with the large publishing houses (including; Hay House, Penguin, Hachette, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, Harper Collins, Ebury and Bonnier) as well as commercial brands (including Soho House, Sweaty Betty, lululemon and Hearst) to create content, community and events that support better mental and emotional health for customers, clients and employees.
Prior to launching The Shelf Help Club, Toni was a Lifestyle, Women’s and Fashion Editor with 15+ years experience working on newspapers, websites and magazines including editor positions at 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 lives in Norfolk with her husband, photographer Dan Kennedy, and their rescue dog, Mylo.
Recent author appearances: Marie Kondo, Candice Brathwaite and Paul McKenna
Toni’s story - LONG VERSION
(grab a Cup of tea and settle in)
Shelf Help Club founder Toni Jones lives in Norfolk, UK, with her photographer husband, Dan, and wonderfully nutty rescue dog, Mylo.
She first encountered self-help when leaving a full-time career in journalism at the age of 38 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'.
“Awareness is the greatest agent for change.”
"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.
“And now I’ve somehow managed to create a job and business out of reading and sharing self-help tools and creating spaces for other self-help nerds lovers to come together.
“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”
"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 in our Substack community or on our Instagram page is, so we’re building this brilliant support network together.
"Thanks for reading, and I’m glad you found us."