"Did I ever make the claim – implicit or otherwise – that I had read Sylvester Stallone’s fitness book?"
These were the words I uttered to my editor when she omitted a paragraph from my book that I thought was of utmost importance to readers. In it, I conveyed my thoughts about a reader’s review of Stallone’s book on amazon.com – a review that revealed, at one point, a mindset that’s all-too-common and explicitly disempowering.
"…after all, we can’t all have a body like Sylvester Stallone’s"
The above is a paraphrasing of part of a sentence I saw in that review.
My response within the omitted paragraph in my book: "Why the hell not?"
Was this reviewer claiming to be dispossessed of the basic physiology necessary for packing on a few pounds of muscle and shedding a bit of unsightly body fat? In that case, I guess I’m to conclude that he doesn’t have a normally functioning endocrine system. Or was he alluding to a legitimate genetic (and thus objective) distinction – like his bone structure not resembling Stallone’s? He didn’t make it clear.
I suspect (but don’t know) that this particular reader/reviewer was providing himself with a safe haven for a subconscious mindset that’s all too common among us: ‘I don’t have what I want but it’s ultimately because of forces outside of myself.’
Actually, hidden within that reviewer’s sentence is a ‘self-belief’ masquerading as a ‘global belief’. When we have doubts about our abilities and ourselves, we tend to make global generalizations that help us feel better through reassurance of: ‘Hey… I’m no different than most people.’ Hence, the word "we" can’t all have a body like Sylvester Stallone’s.
So much of our results in fitness and physique improvement are dependent on what’s going on with us at the subconscious level. This is no different than performance in other areas of life. Specifically, it’s the alignment (or lack thereof) of our individual values and beliefs that often make or break us when we set out to do something that takes us out of our comfort zones.
Since values are what’s ‘important’ to us and beliefs are what is ‘true’ for us, it’s apparent how they need to be in alignment in order that we get our desired results. If you value having a lean, strong, muscular body and yet you mistakenly believe that having one is only for people with some kind of ‘gift’ for it, then you can end up with a subconscious conflict that might leave you living vicariously through others. You can end up reading fitness books by famous people and assume that those who write them have an edge that you don’t possess.
The remedy for this is to change our beliefs – specifically, the one’s we have about ourselves that have been formed in the realm of subjectivity. As long as we are reasonably healthy individuals, then the beliefs that form our self-concepts in the context of fitness and bodybuilding definitely fall within that realm.
So what is it that wouldn’t fall within the subjective realm? Well, I guess if I wanted to play basketball like Michael Jordan, then I’d need to relegate those thoughts to the world of night time dreaming. I’m five-foot eight and I just turned 43. Playing in the NBA requires physical attributes that definitely fall within the realm of "objectively measurable". For this reason, no amount of positive conditioning of my subconscious beliefs can change the fact that I’m not tall enough or young enough to play professional basketball.
Why do I mention this? Because a big key to success is having the ability to distinguish between objective reality and that subjective world where we rob ourselves of the success we could enjoy by negatively distorting our self-concept. Consider that the next time you see a lean and muscular body and a part of your mind mistakenly believes you can’t achieve that.
You most assuredly can.
