PASSIVITY, OWNERSHIP AND “I WAS TOLD”

As something of a professional curmudgeon, one of the many things that upsets me is the use of passive voice.  For those of you not as in tune with your high school grammar as I (the irony not being lost on me, considering how terrible these blog posts tend to end up in that regard), the best way I can explain passive voice is that it’s what we used as kids to get out of trouble.  You’re playing rough inside of the house, and suddenly you break a lamp.  You go find a parent, and you say “The lamp got broken.”  That’s passive voice.  Active voice is owning it, and saying “I broke the lamp.”  You can observe the difference immediately; one is about an action occurring to an object, absent of a subject to affect it, whereas the active voice puts the acting agent first.  It’s a tough pill to swallow, but it’s ultimately the more accurate story of the two.  Why do I bring up this grammar lesson?  Because I constantly observe trainees employing a passive voice in their training dialogue, and, in turn, taking absolutely zero ownership in their training and their outcomes.

Unless your training looks like this...and even then, he said "I fight for me"

The most notorious of these examples?  “I was told”.  Oh my god do I blow a gasket whenever I hear or read this.  “I was told I need to perform mobility training before I lift weights”, “I was told I need to build a strength base before I do hypertrophy training”, “I was told that noob gains run out after 2 years”, etc etc etc.  Oh really?  You were told?  WHO told you?  “Many many sources”.  Ok, so then NO one told you; you READ/HEARD somewhere.  This is a big difference, and the phrasing is huge.  When you start with “I READ/HEARD that”, now YOU are taking ownership.  You’re saying that you read this material, and then YOU decided that it was worth considering, embraced it, and pursued it.  When you just say “I was told”, you’re taking the responsibility off yourself to critically think.  You’re saying that you were given marching orders to go forth and pursue, and if those orders are WRONG, well it certainly isn’t YOUR fault; you were just told all this.  You were just poor, innocent and naïve, and someone took advantage of that by filling you with bad information.  You poor, poor creature.

No, screw that.  This is YOUR training; YOU should be the one who cares about what you do.  All sorts of people will tell you all sorts of stuff: it’s up to YOU to decide if any of it is worthwhile.  If you want to just be told stuff, at LEAST get told stuff by people that are worth listening to.  I went to a Bill Kazmaier seminar and asked him how to get better at weight over bar, because I had it coming up in a competition and had no idea how to train for it.  No what “I was told?”  “Just show up strong and do it.”  And hey, it worked, and I was more than willing to say “I was told” in that regard, because when the question is asked “by who”, I could say “Bill Kamzaier”.  Bill coulda told me that leg press and lateral raises were the secret to weight over bar, and that woulda been enough for me.  But some random scrub on a forum, or some dude with a blog (yes, that includes me)?  Yes, certainly A data point, but one that must be weighed, measured and evaluated.

Also some of the advice I got from Bill...and it's good

“I was led to believe that…”, no, stop.  You’re an adult (I presume): no one LED you to believe anything.  No one has the power to lead you to believe anything.  If you are susceptible to that sort of stuff, I STRONGLY advise you to stay away from cults, pyramid schemes, Nigerian princes, people claiming you owe back taxes with the IRS, etc etc.  Otherwise, no, you were never led to believe anything: you CHOSE to believe something, because it was far easier to accept something simply because someone said it than to hear something, critically think about it, and make a decision in that regard.  And hey, there’s nothing wrong with hearing something and trying it out for a while, but if it doesn’t work, don’t just keep beating your head against the wall saying “I was led to believe this works, and it’s not working, so something must be wrong with ME!”  Instead, try the null hypothesis that maybe, just maybe, the thing you heard isn’t true.  Now you get to say “I have decided that this isn’t true.”

This is about taking ownership of YOUR fate, your training, your process, your results.  There’s lots of people out there that will tell you things: YOU decide if any of them are worth listening to.  And when you follow a stupid guru because you’re naïve that is YOUR choice.  And when it fails, that is YOUR lesson to learn.  Failure isn’t bad: it’s an essential part of growth.  The only issue is when your ego is so big and fragile that you REFUSE to believe you could have possibly fallen for stupid advice, and so you try to make it everyone else’s fault but your own.  I’ve fallen for tons of stupid gimmicks in my time, and each time it was up to me to say “well, I was certainly stupid to believe that: lesson learned”.  And, in turn, I grew, got bigger, stronger, and better.  I didn’t wallow in what I was told: I accepted what I chose to believe, and then I chose to no longer believe it.