Unsolicited Advice: SMILE, THANK, and IGNORE
Many times in life you are faced with people who offer you unsolicited advice . Trouble is, most times they just assume that you share their goals without bothering to find out if this is the case or not. How can they possibly give good advice if they dont know what you want? Its like a doctor prescribing a random medicine without even bothering to find out what the patient is dying of. In these cases, its best to just smile, accept their well meaning advice politely, ignore it, and quickly change the subject.
Here is a great example from my personal life. Many people just dont get time management. I accomplish a lot more in a day than most people. Why? Certainly not because I’m smarter but because of my time management skills. Boiled down to a one bullet point, good time management means doing the most important things first.
I have been given well meaning advice from people that the reason our house gets so messy is that I dont put things away right after I use them and if I were to do that the house would stay clean all the time. Smile, thank, and ignore. Their goal is to have a clean house all the time, mine is to get all my top priorities accomplished and a neat and tidy house appears nowhere on my goals list. Its much more time efficient for me to be a productive tornado then spend 10 min at the end of the day putting everything back in its place. I dont *want* to spend my whole day keeping the house clean! Yes, before the family comes home I do my reverse-tornado and put everything back in its place so they dont have to see my mess but if someone drops in during the day they are in for an eye-opening disaster scene. Filming days are the worst, stuff *everywhere*.
This goes for fitness and all other aspects of live as well. Very well meaning people will give you advice without bothering to find out what your goals are. This happens at work, at family gatherings, with friends, and ALL the time at the gym. People at the gym always ASSUME that the entire world shares their fitness goals when its very unlikely given all the possibilities.
SMILE, THANK, and IGNORE … but avoid the biggest mistake of all
The biggest fitness mistake of all is to assume you know everything.
The real problem that many in fitness have is not the fact that they take bad advice but the fact that they naively assume that they already know everything! You know the type, the closed-minded curl monkeys who will not listen to anyone who says that doing curls daily is not optimal. Listen to others, read lots of points of view, experiment, and challenge your own assumptions and beliefs.