Muster Up The Will To Change Oneself

Angelo Siciliano was a £97 stripling. One fateful day, when he’d gone to the beach, a bully kicked sand in his face. Humiliated, young Siciliano joined the YMCA to try out exercise routines to develop his physique. It was while watching a lion in the zoo that he had an Aha moment: “Does this old gentleman have any barbells, any exercisers?” he asked himself. “And yet how is it so strong and husky? And then it came over me,” he reminisces in his memoir. “The lion’s been pitting one muscle against another!” Siciliano concluded that lions and tigers became strong by muscle resistance and went on to develop his famous 12-step method which transformed the scrawny weakling into the “world’s most perfectly developed man”. 

Siciliano also changed his name to Charles Atlas after being told that he resembled the statue of Atlas supporting earth on top of a hotel in Coney Island, where he worked as a strongman.

The Charles Atlas brand revolved around the insult that made a man out of a mac (changed later to “a champ from a chump”). This is not so much about patented weights and pulleys as about belief. Most of us are very good at describing what is. But how many can muster up the will to believe what can be? That calls for giving up old habits of thought and action.

This is not as tough as it may seem. Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer’s research shows that small changes, small gestures repeated slowly and steadily, can make big differences, but “(first) we need to open ourselves to the impossible and embrace a psychology of possibility,” she writes in Counterclockwise.

Rather than starting from the status quo, this argues for a starting point of what we would like to be. In the case of Charles Atlas it began with inner vision of a perfectly formed man superimposed on the reflection of the scrawny weakling staring back from the mirror. It’s a subtle change in thinking. But too many of us believe the world is to be discovered, rather than a product of our own making and thus to be invented.

“Pursuing the psychology of possibility is itself empowering,” Langer insists. “It feels good to have a personal mission, it contributes to a more positive outlook in general, and it works against the idea that the rest of us are soon to follow suit and fall apart. As we actualise the possible, we may find out other interesting things about the world.” 

Vital C Nadkarni