A High-Level Guide to Ethical Fitness (Part 2 of 5)

This is the second installation of a five-part article on how to build ethical fitness. Today I explain how to think about and define success in ethical fitness.

Being ethically fit isn’t as clear cut as running a race or scoring an A+ on a test, but that doesn’t mean you (or your children) can’t be successful at it. Here’s how to set your expectations and how to define success:

Getting the analogy right

There are two useful analogies I tend to use to illustrate what cultivating ethical fitness is like. First: cultivating your ethical fitness is like (surprise!) physical fitness training. Second: cultivating your ethical fitness is like gardening.

Let’s take a look at the first one.

Analogy 1: Ethical fitness is like physical strength training.

Few of us go to the gym or for a jog because we intend to become professional athletes: no, most of us go simply because we want to maintain a basic level of fitness that helps our overall wellbeing. “Being fit” is a constant and never-ending pursuit that is rewarding in and of itself.

Cultivating your ethical self is similar. If physical fitness is the steady pursuit of physical strength, ethical fitness is the steady pursuit of ethical sensitivities, competencies and behavior. If the goal of physical fitness is maintaining physical health and wellbeing, the goal of ethical fitness is to maintain an everyday disposition that is emotionally sensitive and capable of grappling with ethical dilemmas and decisions both large and small.

Think about what happens when you stop maintaining your physical fitness level: your muscles lose their elasticity and you get out of shape. Ignoring your ethical fitness is the same. Honesty, tolerance and other moral qualities are like little, emotional muscles that need to be exercised on a regular basis to preserve their functionality and strength.

Analogy 2: Ethical fitness is (also) like maintaining a healthy garden.

Anyone who has grown a garden or house plants will probably be familiar with a basic fact of gardening: in order to cultivate life, you must also engage in some low-key killing (i.e. weeding of unwelcome species).

How is this similar to ethical fitness? Similarly to ethical fitness, gardening is a process of maintaining that involves weeding.

Just as gardeners know that weeding is necessary for the overall health of a flower bed, someone who is good at cultivating her own ethical self knows that she has to weed out unwelcome, negative qualities from her other, positive qualities (i.e. the things she has worked hard to cultivate and maintain).

So, what are successfully ethically fit people like?

This is a bit of a trick question — the quick answer, as you might’ve guessed from the two analogies we just covered, is that ethical fitness looks different depending on your personality and context. There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to being ethically fit.

Let’s think back to the two analogies to illustrate this: does everyone who is physically fit look exactly the same? Does an athletic teenager who rows varsity have the same physical appearance as a 43-year-old marathoner or my octogenarian grandmother, who is up before dawn sweeping the patio? No. Yet they each are at their own best level of physical fitness — a level that is appropriate for their particular lifestyle and personality.

Similarly, does every garden you’ve seen look exactly the same? Presumably not: you might have seen some similar flowers or plants, but grown differently based on their surrounding and context.

Despite this, there are some common qualities of all ethically fit people that distinguish them from those who are less “in shape”:

1. You are emotionally in touch and you value your emotions: You acknowledge that your reality is shaped by not only your tangible assets, but also your intangible ones. You allow yourself to feel things (good and bad) when things happen to you instead of numbing yourself to your experiences, because you recognize that your emotions are a valuable part of what makes you, you. When making decisions, you take into account your emotions and temper them appropriately with reason.
2. You care about who you are and are committed to becoming yourself: You know that you are composed of good qualities and not-so-good qualities, all mixed up together, and you understand that it’s okay for you to be that way. However, you have a clear idea of which qualities you want to cultivate and which qualities you need to spring-clean (or chuck out the window!), and you are able to act in a way that grows your better qualities. Your actions demonstrate that you are committed to trying — to yourself and to others who know you.
3. You are more intrinsically motivated than extrinsically motivated: You know that while material rewards may be nice, they are short lived. While you might pursue material rewards as a secondary benefit, what you most value, first and foremost, is your self-esteem and sense of individuality. You are motivated by this sense of your best self when you make decisions in everyday life.

None of this happens overnight, but it all has to start somewhere: we’ll cover the first of 3 techniques you can use to work on your own and your children’s ethical fitness in next week’s article.

Read the next part of the series next week or read Part 1 of the series.

Optional Reflective Exercise for Adults

Use this quick exercise to begin to observe in your own life how you do (and do not) maintain your ethical fitness at this current moment.

Reflect and then write down your answers to the following:

1. What qualities and tendencies have you given lots of exercise — in other words, what are you already good at maintaining? How do you practice these qualities in your everyday life?
2. What qualities do you want to cultivate but haven’t spent time on — what haven’t you been cultivating that you want to? What has been holding you back from doing so?
3. Finally, what negative tendencies do you need to weed out of your garden — what needs to go?