Hi everybody. Dr. Eric Cobb back with you this week.
I hope you’re doing really well.
I want to start this particular week’s video with a quote from our business coach, Dan Sullivan.
Dan actually first attracted my attention when I read this quote from him. It says, “All progress begins by telling the truth.” I love that idea.
Truth is really the governor of progress in our personal lives, our professional lives, our relationships with our family, friends and loved ones, our diet and fitness pursuits, our sports pursuits, whatever it is. Real progress begins whenever we see ourselves and we compare ourselves to what’s happening in the real world. That’s part one.
Part number two, I want to explain very quickly why this is a very important blog to me. I have two daughters. Kathy, my business partner, has a daughter. As I’m watching them grow up, I am constantly reminded of how often they compare themselves to what they see in the media, whether it’s on a magazine cover or on the internet or on a television show. Sometimes it’s not overtly stated, but you can kind of see the wheels turning in their head about what am I supposed to look like, what is real beauty, what does real fitness look like and all those different things.
I talked about women. I also want to talk about men. There is this cultural belief that body image issues are really apportioned to the female gender. That’s not the case at all. Research shows us right now that women and men are both incredibly confused about their body image, what would be “ideal” for them.
What you’ll see after this video is a series of images. I want you to pay attention to them. I’ll have you do a little exercise in a minute. The exercise is simple. You’re going to actually scroll through the images and you’re going to take a piece of paper and you’re going to cover up half the body or face you see.
What you’re going to see are images of well-known celebrities and models, etc. when their picture was taken and then the resulting image after that image was Photo Shopped. If you’re not familiar with Photo Shop, a computer graphics program, it is absolutely stunning how much you can change how much someone looks like by manipulating pixels on a screen.
Why all this is really important to me, I’m not trying to bad mouth the media, I’m not trying to downplay what happens on magazine covers and all that. I understand the marketing aspect of it. The issue that I have is that for deep growth to occur for all of us, we want to have real comparisons for ourselves in terms of how we look, how we meet, how we move, and how we feel.
What we’re going to encourage you to do is, if you have, in the past, looked at models or whatever or looked at magazine covers and gone, “I need to look like that to look fit,” or “I need to look like that in order to feel like I’m athletic,” I want you to begin looking instead for real pictures of real people to use for your comparisons.
As simple as that sounds, I think you will be literally astounded when you look at the differences in the pictures below between what real people look like in the real world, even those that are well known, versus what comes out eventually to be shown to us as the ideal.
I say if all progress begins by telling the truth, we need to tell one another, tell our kids, tell ourselves the truth about what healthy, fit athletes look like.
That’s what we really want to aspire to.
One of the things that I do personally, if I am considering a new training program or something to change my physical appearance, I go on Google and I actually look for athletes that participate in the sports that I like to play or the things that I’m interested and I go, “What does someone about my height and about my weight in this particular sport look like?” That gives me a very, very clear image to shoot for when I look in the mirror.
In terms of keeping me motivated within my own training process, it’s incredibly useful as opposed to going out and picking up the latest magazine and going, “Wow, I need to look like that” every single day of my life because those people don’t look like that anyway.
If you can embrace this idea that you want to tell yourself the truth about your aspirations, I believe that there’s tremendous power in that. As I said, I’m going to ask you to take a look below the video, scroll through the pictures and share this with your friends.
Share it with your family. Share it with your kids. I think it’s super important, as I said, for us to not only understand this, but for everyone that we’re around. I’m not trying to, in general, lower health and fitness expectations.
In fact, I’m trying to raise them across the world through our system, but I want to make sure, as I said, as we do that, that as we’re raising our expectations, we’re raising them about who we’re going to become in relationship to what real people look like, move like, and feel like.
I hope you find this interesting and to some degree very inspiring this week. As I said, it’s super important to me personally. I wanted to take the opportunity to share it with you. I hope you guys have a great week.
I look forward to talking to you soon.
Thanks.
