“Look at my dinner, look at what I’m eating!”
Amanda had chicken and rice for dinner. Great! You probably also know what she had for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
How do you know?
Because she posts pictures of every meal on social media. She makes sure we know about every last bite she puts in her mouth.
Then there’s Todd.
Todd trained his abs today: he did hanging leg raises, planks and crunches. Naturally, he followed that up with a selfie session to let us know just how much he put himself through during his workout.
How do we know?
Because he documents and shares every single workout, along with all his shower-room selfies, plus selfies next to his car both before and after his workout. Every single day.
Do you know any “Amandas” and “Todds” like this?
Trends in the fitness industry
We’ve reached a point where the trends are no longer particular diets or training itself. The trend is showing the world what you eat or how hard you train. And that covers a very broad spectrum: food photos, workout photos, progress photos, transformation photos, selfies, ab photos, butt photos and so on and on and on. Add to that the Facebook fan pages people have created for themselves, along with constant workout-related status updates such as “BeastMode”, “LegDay” or “KillingIt”.
Is that a bad thing?
There’s no clear-cut answer, and it isn’t necessarily bad. I, the author of this article, post about fitness too. I’ve taken selfies.
What’s the problem?
The problem is becoming dependent on the approval you get from your posts.
When working out, documented in endless blog posts and photos, becomes a means of winning approval for its own sake, that’s a problem. If your only motivation to train is being able to show everyone afterward, something’s wrong.
“Likes”, “favorites” and “followers” will never truly teach you the discipline of healthy eating or how to endure and love the effort. All these invented forms of virtual approval only make you more dependent on them.
Building your motivation around “likes” isn’t wise. That approval, and the apparent motivation it creates, is a fragile, inconsistent force that won’t do much to move you forward in the long run.
Seeking approval for its own sake is really lame. Receiving and giving recognition certainly matter, but if you’ve lost the ability to be happy, train and push yourself without approval, you have a problem.
The marathon runner who never ran
I once worked with a woman who decided to start training to run a marathon. We all congratulated her and praised her decision, and you could see how much the attention that came with our approval meant to her. She eagerly made sure everyone in the office knew what she was planning to do.
A few weeks later, the same woman was going around just as enthusiastically telling her colleagues how much she loved painting, how she was going to become a painter and would soon be selling her art, and so on.
She never entered a running race or finished a painting. For all her aspirations, she never got very far with any of the ventures she announced.
The issue was that her efforts had very little to do with actually wanting to do these things. It was more about enjoying the praise others gave her for her potential ventures and goals. Praise that was effectively credit given in advance for things she hadn’t actually done yet.
It was as though she lived through other people’s eyes, finding satisfaction in the attention her words attracted rather than in the work, effort and progress themselves. Admiration and praise were all she needed.
Have you ever tried examining your own motives this way: do you do things for the reactions you get from other people? Do you do things to be envied or admired? Or do you do things because you love doing them?
We’re all at considerable risk of falling into this trap.
If your goals of working hard, eating healthily, training, running a marathon and so on are solely about winning approval, pursuing goals built on that foundation isn’t sustainable in the long run. Motivation fueled by external approval will only take you so far. It’s very hard to make eating well, training and healthy living a normal part of your life purely for other people’s approval if you don’t actually see the benefits yourself and enjoy these things.
Do the opposite
Some people say you should broadcast your goals to everyone because that will get you moving toward them. Yet announcing your ambitions usually proves very little, except perhaps that you want to enjoy a pat on the back.
How do you plan for long-term progress? Think about the person you want to be and why you aren’t that person yet.
Immerse yourself in the work your goals would require, get started, build a habit and try to find satisfaction in that habit or activity without depending directly on approval. Gradually, you’ll become someone who is confident and capable of achieving what you want, rather than what earns other people’s praise. The question is whether you’re doing it for yourself or for others.
Whatever the case, learn to love and enjoy the effort and hard work. Learn to love everything that comes with work and dedication. Learn to seek out and find answers. Learn to set yourself goals and work toward them.
Prove to yourself first that your goals aren’t about what other people want to see, and that you’re doing what matters to you.
Before announcing your goals to the world, develop your skills, strengthen your resolve and learn what commitment means. Share and post things worth sharing and posting. Nobody cares that you had rice and chicken for dinner again tonight. Believe me, we’ve all seen plenty of plates of chicken and rice.
If you take action and succeed, people will notice anyway. If you make progress and achieve success, people will come asking anyway. But let recognition be a pleasant side effect, so to speak, of your success, progress and hard work, rather than the main reason for it.
Take a look at yourself and think about this: healthy living and training matter even when they don’t appear in selfies, blogs and status updates. You still need to set goals, and you can work toward them even when the public knows nothing about it.
“Got up, had breakfast and I’m about to ‘kill’ my back.” This isn’t a particularly significant event, and that information doesn’t need an audience, believe me!
Translated by Janar Rückenberg
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