What would happen to your life if you surrounded
yourself with all things beautiful?
What does it mean to be beautiful? Beauty is something that we all recognize instinctively. Even three-month-old babies smile longer at faces that appear more attractive.
Most of us would agree that beauty is pleasing to the senses and to be beautiful means to possess qualities that give great pleasure to see, hear, touch, feel or to think about. In other words, these qualities delight our senses.
So seductive are the charms of beauty that we spend huge amounts of money with reckless abandon at the slightest hope of looking younger, fresher, more attractive. This has spawned a huge industry that is often criticized as shallow, self-indulgent and materialistic. Increased mental health issues are blamed on massive advertising spending that encourages an obsession with looks, youth, and attractiveness. Most religions promote a more austere, conservative outlook more focused on the life after death than the pursuit of beauty, seduction and aesthetic.
Nature has engineered us this way. We are vulnerable to its charms and this isn’t going to change anytime soon. The global beauty industry is forecast to grow to $217 Billion by 2017 and this doesn’t include the personal care, fitness, aesthetic surgery or fashion industries. This massive industry is driven by people’s desire to look and feel good combined with rising incomes, aging populations and changing lifestyles.
Consider this: Americans spend more per year on beauty than they do on education. In other words to most people, looking good is more important than knowledge and social skills. Improving one’s capability is considered slow when compared to the quick fix possible in the cosmetic looks department.
Are we overlooking the positive benefits of investing in beauty? Of looking our best? Of surrounding ourselves with more beauty? Perhaps if we avoid the pitfalls of the extreme ends of the spectrum and find a middle road we can arrive at an optimal balance that is just right.
This would enable us to benefit from nature’s engineered payoffs including:
- Increased social standing
- Increased ability to earn more money
- Help us appear more confident
- Help us appear more intelligent
- Help us succeed more at work
- Increased ability to attract a beautiful or wealthy partner
- Increased perception that one is better in bed
- Communicates health, vitality, and fertility
- Increased attention
- Increased mood level
- Feeling happier, healthier, younger and more vital
- Increased creativity
- Feeling more self-expressed and real
Perhaps love should be added to the list… With all the benefits of beauty, is it any wonder why people lust after it so much? Beauty provides us with influence over our own pleasure senses as well as those of other people. This is just, pure competitive advantage.
In other words, beauty = influence and influence = power.
Given the stimulating effects of beauty, why then do so many people settle for functional, plain and boring? Perhaps they don’t feel worthy or a religious authority encouraged austerity.
Nature is abundant with beauty.
Consider other areas of beauty; nature, architecture, furniture, decor, cars, roads, streets, cities, buildings, offices, technology, work, food, cuisine, service, art, poetry, sculpture, photography, film, performing arts, etc.
We are surrounded by expressions of beauty and yet so many aspects of our lives are functional, mundane, ordinary. We think in boxes, we live in a box, sleep on a box, watch tv on a box, eat out of a box, drive to work in a box, work in a box building, in a box office, at a box desk, on a box computer, talking on a box phone.
Most of these functional boxes contain no passion. No juice. No inspiration. No joy. No pleasure inducing qualities to delight our senses.
What would happen to your life if you raised the bar on yourself? If you expected more than a functional box, more than a functional existence? What would happen to your life if you surrounded yourself with all things beautiful?
Whatever you appreciate rises in value!
In order to do that requires a new appreciation for the value of beauty. We have to admit to ourselves that beauty is important. What this will do is provide an updraft effect that spirals up and up leading to more and more beauty and less and less ugly. This will improve your results in life and will have you feeling more beautiful.
Ten tips to feeling more beautiful:
- Make beauty important, include your personal appearance and your work, living environment, working environment, self-expression, lifestyle, etc.
- Surround yourself with more and more beauty. Look for areas to add more beauty to, or to enhance.
- Eliminate as many ugly elements as you can including music, smells, clothes, furniture, conversations, language, environments, cars, traffic, long lines, etc. The most important elements to eliminate are ugly thoughts and feelings.
- Invest more in quality craftsmanship, products, and services. These tend to be more beautiful and have that something, something. You will feel more beautiful using them.
- Eliminate cheap and tacky products and services. This requires a shift from price shopping to value shopping. Usually, the lowest price isn’t the best value when you consider a wider view. Cheap and tacky is usually ugly.
- Surround yourself with authentic people who value beauty and aesthetic and who value beautiful manners and conduct! Most important ensure that they encourage and acknowledge the beauty inside of you.
- Eliminate ugly language from your vocabulary and ugly behavior from your repertoire of actions. You will feel more beautiful.
- Transform ugly thoughts, feelings and negativity into more positive expectation, uplifting feelings and look for the good purpose in unpleasant situations. Everything can be transformed into a useful experience.
- Commit to always look and feel your best, even when no one is looking. Do it for yourself. Be authentic. Fake is always ugly.
- Immerse yourself in uplifting experiences, filled with beauty. Explore environments that are uncomfortable and a little confronting. This is how we grow and expand our sense of beauty.
Authenticity is the most beautiful of all. When we are authentic we are attractive. We are real. The inside is reflected on the outside and the outside is reflected on the inside.
If we are inauthentic, then whatever we attract from that place will bring with it fear of loss. We will be afraid that they will discover “who we really are” and will leave. So we cover up and become more fake. This is no way to live!
Be real. Be authentic. Be FREE!
Good luck and be beautiful!
XOXO
Leadership Advocate and Co-Founder of the Goldzone Group. I help leaders to master the new rules of leadership for the new economy. Over the past 30 years, I have visited more than 500 cities in 54 countries to explore, learn from, and help many of the world’s leading companies, leaders, and luminaries in science, technology, health, finance, and entrepreneurship.