TruBlog

By Mike Parnes

Prior to becoming a San Diego personal trainer I had quite a different idea of the sorts of issues I would be dealing with when needing to get clients to achieve their goals. The typical speculations came to mind regarding the sort of work I’d be doing: guiding individuals’ metabolic nutrition habits, fixing postural deviations and muscular imbalances, making the proper program design adjustments accordingly, etc.

Setting off the discussion like this isn’t intended to now tell you that I don’t do much of that. Indeed, I do. However, where I was mistaken in my expectations of my profession was what sort of problems would be the major roadblocks for people in achieving their goals. My expectations were that I would educate and guide my clients in sports nutrition and functional exercise and that these would provide the vehicle for the change that my clients desired. This is where I was wrong. While these play a dominant role in helping my clients achieve their goals, one issue that I failed to consider is the extent to which psychological roadblocks would stand in the way of people achieving their goals. It turns out it is not nearly enough to deliver sound information to people and ways to incorporate them in their lives. My clients that have experienced tremendous results have one thing in common: they overcame psychological blocks that prevented them from truly committing themselves to the lifestyle adjustments necessary in any successful exercise and nutrition program.

One issue that routinely comes up is a general lack of confidence in oneself. More specifically, a lack of confidence in one’s ability to commit and execute the things asked of he or she. Each one of my clients had a different source responsible for this lack of confidence but nevertheless with help found ways out of it that enabled them to achieve their goals. What follows is a type of guide that, I hope, will provide at least a starting point for any reader that feels this insecurity within him or her.

I’m a philosophy nerd. That is what I have a bachelor’s degree in. The philosopher that had the strongest impact on my life’s outlook and worldview is a 17th century Dutch philosopher, Benedict de Spinoza. In his posthumous magnum opus, Ethics, Spinoza wrote extensively, among much else, on human psychology. From this work I cite the following, “Confidence is a pleasure arising from the idea of a thing future or past, concerning which reason for doubt has been removed.” To fully understand what is encompassed in this citation requires approximately 90 pages of reading so for obvious reasons, I will touch only on the part that matters most for this discussion. So properly understood, confidence entails not certainty in one’s abilities and thereby outcomes pertaining to one’s actions but rather reasons for removal of doubt in one’s abilities. This is an important distinction because people often confuse confidence with arrogance. Arrogance is found when people have a blind certainty in one’s abilities when faced with the fact that deductive certitude is impossible for nearly every form of knowledge except mathematical truths and certain philosophic axioms. I raise this distinction because when I have worked with people in attempts to establish behaviors that would raise their confidence I have often been fought along the way due to peoples’ worries of becoming arrogant! So it is for this reason that I want to point out that confidence merely entails that one has good reasons for not having doubt in one’s abilities. Going from lacking doubt to absolute certitude is a logical jump for which proof is not provided.

Now how does the average person go about building his or her confidence? Start small. Set a goal for yourself that you know will not be tremendously difficult to achieve. For instance, say your long-term goal is to lose 30 pounds. Break this large goal of 30 pounds into incremental goals of losing two to three pounds per week, and try to accomplish that much smaller yet healthy weight loss week after week for ten to fifteen weeks. After four weeks has passed you will have lost eight to twelve pounds and more importantly you will have removed the doubt for your not being able to lose more weight in the coming weeks and thereby acquire a psychological pleasure of having confidence in yourself to persist in your endeavor.

This is just one of many ways that you can begin to build confidence through productive behaviors. The attainment of your own confidence is not something that will come easy nor is it something that is unwavering and an end in itself. Instead, confidence is gained in the very pursuit of it. As you have setbacks you’ll likely lose some confidence but in overcoming your setbacks you will have again gained reasons for removing doubt in your ability to persevere through roadblocks. All of which will contribute to the growing confidence in you.

It helps to end this with a sobering reality. No beneficial change comes easy or with comfort. But take a second to reflect on anything that you regard as a true good in your life and ask yourself whether the struggle for its attainment was worth it in the end. With this being said I’ll let Spinoza have the last word in motivating you to begin to strengthen your confidence, “All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.”

Tags: Healthy Weight Loss, Metabolic Nutrition, San Diego Personal Trainer, Sports Nutrition

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 16th, 2010 at 7:44 pm and is filed under Healthy Weight Loss, Metabolic Fitness, Metabolic Nutrition, Nutrition, Personal Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.