“A good advisor helps better than a bad therapy”

Dusseldorf Do you find it difficult to hand off tasks to colleagues? Do you stay in a job that bores you and prefer to sit out conflicts with the narcissistic boss rather than address her? Are you wondering how to better deal with failure?

Psychology guides, podcasts and YouTube therapists shed light on the dense forest of emotions and are currently experiencing a real boom. In the pandemic in particular, they have become an “acoustic antidepressant” for many people and a kind of seismograph of social needs.

Expert Stefanie Stahl has advice on many such questions – the qualified psychologist and author is Germany’s best-known psychotherapist. Her book “The child in you must find a home” has been on the Spiegel bestseller list for over five years. More than 1.8 million copies have been sold, the guide has been translated into more than 30 languages ​​and is a real lifeline for many people. What is it about psychology that fascinates people so much? Stahl: “I think the question should rather be: How can a person get the idea not to be interested in what makes them tick and what patterns they have?”

Stefanie Stahl’s father Walter Stahl was already a bestselling author, because he wrote the legendary nightlife guide “Hamburg from 7 to 7” – in the first edition from 1966 with many striptease shops, music clubs and cult pubs on St. Pauli – research was probably more fun than paperwork. Something that is not at all easy for the psychologist. “Writing is simply exhausting, that’s what many journalists say, that that’s the most annoying part of their job,” says Stahl in the new issue of Handelsblatt Mindshift.

In her podcasts called “This is how I am” and “Steel but cordially”, which have been accessed millions of times, she negotiates big questions and smaller everyday problems. Even with specific problems in the job, which mostly have to do with the ghosts of our childhood, she provides useful tricks with which you can quickly get out of the sandpit again.

Since I’ve been alive, 250 pigs have been driven through the village, which is now the latest health trend that everyone is chasing. But the psyche is always terribly neglected. And that’s why we have all the misery in the world. It comes from a lack of self-reflection and a lack of compassion. Both have psychological causes! And whoever doesn’t care about it, of course, takes the chance to mature internally and to become wise at some point. Stefanie Stahl

Her own childhood was shaped by world politics, because her father was managing director of the Atlantik-Brücke in Hamburg and Bonn for over 30 years. As a child, Stefanie Stahl had to distribute cigarettes to people like former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger at parties with prominent guests at home – that’s where the youth welfare office would probably get involved today.

“That was a completely different zeitgeist back then. It was just a matter of good form that cigarettes stood around at a party and were handed out, ”recalls Stahl. “It was the wild sixties and seventies. People drank there too, and they usually didn’t stop for a glass of wine. ”To what extent these meetings of alpha men who pull their strings in the background with whiskey shaped their own political worldview (“ Donald Trump is badly disturbed ”) , she reveals in Handelsblatt Mindshift.

Today we are talking to Stefanie Stahl about how she came to psychology via detours (“I found Jura grotto boring after a very short time”), whether you can treat yourself with a book (“A good advisor is better than a bad therapy”) , and why we often behave differently at work than we should – or want to. Have fun while listening.

We also wanted to know from Stefanie Stahl:

• Why are some successful at work and others not?
• How can we optimally use our strengths on the job?
• Why are many bosses so difficult to delegate?
• Why don’t you treat yourself to a ghostwriter?
• Which famous people from business would you like to have on your couch?