Training Your Character Is Like Training Your Biceps (Kinda Sorta)

It's a pet theory of mine that character and behavioural qualities are every bit as trainable as physical qualities, and that the same tools of change can be applied. Just as being out of shape is not a life sentence, an affliction upon which you can have no influence, I feel the same is true of undesirable personality traits. Yet we are far more likely to passively resign ourselves to lacking certain character traits than we are to carrying a few extra pounds. We'll shrug and say "well that's just me, I'm a shy person" or "I'm a huge procrastinator" though we'd never say "that's just me, I'm unfit."

This is hardly an original thought, but isn't it odd that we're more willing to try to change our exterior, even though it tends to be the interior that dictates our quality of life?

Anyway, I intend to prove all this in a fairly shallow, tongue in cheek and frivolous way with the Cheat Your Way Dateable Project, in which I will try, with the help of my friends and colleagues, to turn a less-than-super-confident guy into the ultimate modern man. Or something like that.

Enter Gavin...

So then, Gavin's goal is to look better, feel more confident and ultimately get himself a date (or several) and mine is to get him there. But if I am to help him I need to take a truly "holistic" approach. Squats alone won't cut it, Gavin needs to be retooled, rebuilt, rebooted from the ground up. A brief drink with him at the Ten Bells in Spitalfields showed me Gavin doesn't lack personality and is intrinsically a kind-hearted, funny guy. The trouble, he confided, is when he's around a girl he's interested in he simply shuts down. His problem then is not a lack of personality, it's a fear of showing that personality, an inability to access his best qualities around the very people he most wants to display them to.

This is partly down to a lack of confidence in how he looks, and this is obviously something we'll be addressing. This is a training blog after all and part of Gavin's work over the next 6 weeks will be in the gym and at the dinner table, changing his body into something he feels more comfortable in. But I'm hoping we can go deeper than that. I'm hoping Gavin can realise that the threshold for what constitutes “good looking” is lower than most guys think. Really, if you have good posture, clothes that suit you, you carry yourself with confidence and smell good, you're already about 75% of the way to good looking. But so what? That’s not the fun stuff, the fun part of self development is opening yourself up to new experiences, gaining knowledge and skills you never knew you had an aptitude for or interest in.

Or I could be full of it, I could just fall flat on my face here in spectacular style and let Gavin down completely. Either way it should be an entertaining ride and I hope you’ll follow along.

Here’s a quick video where Sam Feltham and I discuss how we’re going to approach this. I promise I’ve put marginally more thought into this whole thing than the video portrays…