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The Six Pack

August 12, 2018

The other day I met someone whose sense of humor is just on another level. We were talking about health and fitness, and how much people struggle to have a six-pack. Then from nowhere he said something that left everyone who heard him in guffaws, tears and rib aches. This is what he said, “You know what I have is a six-pack waiting to be properly arranged”Actually it is the way he said it and how he packed those words into that one statement that left everyone in stitches. I couldn’t stop laughing every time I thought about his words and so eventually, out of curiosity, I just decided to go online to find out what six-pack actually means.

 

According to Wikipedia, a six pack is “an array of six bulges of human abdomen, rectus abdominis muscle”. I went on further to find out what the definition of bulges is and this is what the online dictionary I use had to say;  a rounded swelling which distorts an otherwise flat surface.  By this definition of a bulge, I guess my friend was right when he said that he had a six-pack waiting to be properly arranged. In other words, he needed to cut down his one bulge into six small bulges that were not so conspicuous like his current bulge was. 

 

Of course this was all being said from a humorous point of view but as is the norm with me, suddenly I saw a connection between his statement and various aspects of our lives. How now, you might be asking? Keep reading and you’ll understand.

 

For those of you who are staunch fitness enthusiasts, you will agree with me that the toughest part of the body to work on and maintain is the stomach, especially if you have a potbelly or distended stomach. For starters, you will have to avoid all the nice juicy foods such as pastries, soft drinks, most meat products, all processed products, etc. In other words, you will have to develop a discipline for eating healthy foods always. As a matter of fact, if you can be able to manage not only what you eat but also your eating habits, you can be assured that your distended stomach will become deflated within a very short period of time. Indeed, like some health and fitness guru once said, “you are what you eat”. 

 

Eat enough croissants and your midriff will start having ridges like those of a croissant. Eat enough veggies and roughage and you’ll have no ridges or improperly distributed bulges around your abdomen. Again, like you must have heard, “Abs are made in the kitchen”. In other words, if you want a six-pack, you must be ready to eat right then follow that up with exercises. However, like I said already, eating right and working out are the two most challenging disciplines to acquire. Why? Because they involve saying no to immediate gratification. And that, my friends, is the one reason why there are more people with a six-pack that is yet to be aligned as opposed to those with a properly aligned six-pack that they are proud of showing off and taking care of. 

 

And that is the basis of my message today.

 

By the way, in case you have a challenge losing weight or creating a proper weight management program, get in touch with me and I will share with you one I personally used and got results from. Moving on...

 

Each one of us came to this earth with a mental six-pack waiting to be aligned. In other words, each one of us came to this world with a combination of talents in us, but only after working them out and feeding them right will we discover what they are. Just like in the physical, working your mind out and feeding it right is not the most interesting thing for most people to do, and that is why you find that most people end up just working on one talent when they could have developed more than one. Just like in the physical, feed your mind the right food (literally) and the right content (i.e. what you consume through watching, listening, mediating on, etc.) and you will reap the benefits of having a nicely developed mind which can be flexible enough to  do many different things. 

 

Let me give you an example...

 

I have said this before but for purposes of being understood, I will say it again. If ten years ago anyone would have told me that in 2018 I would be doing half the stuff I do today, it is possible that my response to that person would have been to just smile at them but deep inside myself I’d have been thinking of all kinds of bad thoughts in relation to that person,  the major one being that the person must be mad. At that time I never imagined that it was possible for me to become a trainer, or a motivational speaker, or a writer, or a strategist or even a personal coach considering that I was one shy person, who was very insecure and lacking in confidence. Besides, I didn’t know how to play around with words like I do now, didn’t have much to say to anyone,  because I didn’t think I had anything worth saying. 

 

Looking at all the facts on the ground then, I had many genuine reasons to believe that any person who thought I could amount to anything needed to be detained in a mental hospital. I guess like many other people, I just didn’t know that my brain was a “six-pack” waiting to be properly arranged.  In other words, I needed to train my brain, feed it the right food and right content and as I kept on doing that, it developed the six-pack you all see read today. It is through personal development that I have been able to realize the many talents that my creator had hidden in me. Sometimes I wonder where I’d be now had I not taken time to discover the talents I ride on today, though I am still discovering more talents as time goes by.

 

Today I want to challenge you to do a few things, regardless of how old or young you are.

  1. Take some time to list all the talents you believe you have.
  2. Look at each talent carefully and enumerate the things you can do (or are doing) using that talent.
  3. Look at each talent and determine what you can do to sharpen it further so as to make optimal use of it.
  4. Look at what other skills/talents you might require in order to combine or blend them with the ones you have already identified, to create even more powerful talent-combos for yourself.

 

By doing the little exercise above, you will discover many things about yourself that will actually surprise you. Doing this every three months helps me determine whether or not I have grown as a person. When you keep doing a talent-audit, you keep refreshing yourself because sharpening your skills and acquiring new skills become the order of the day for you.

 

Talent management is not just for the Human Resource department. You are responsible for your own talents i.e. acquisition, growth and maintenance. In other words, you identify your talent, you do everything possible to grow it then you look for all possible ways of ensuring you do not lose that talent.

 

That is why this week in the ongoing #52BooksIn52Weeks2018 book reading challenge I am recommending Think BigUnleashing Your Potential For Excellence by Ben Carson. According to Audible.com, a review of this book stated that the book shows readers how to recognize their talents as gifts, gain insight from people and books, be nice to all people, recognize knowledge as the key to living, develop in-depth learning skills, and keep in touch with God. 

 

Remember, your mind too can be trained to acquire a six-pack. How? By feeding it right and training it tight. To quote Ben Carson himself, “When we feed our fourteen billion brain cells with information that will enrich us and help others, we are really learning to Think Big.

 

Be ignited. Be inspired. Be influenced. Become the bet version of yourself you can ever be.

 

 

PS: This article was originally published in Tanzania's Guardian On Sunday on the 12th August, 2018, under my weekly column "Thoughts in Words".​​​

 

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