Physical Intelligence - Day 59

With personal branding we accept that the inner chimp is a much more prevalent than any of us would care to admit.  With physical intelligence I am addressing human physical intelligence and that is about going well beyond the mindset of personal brand, connecting physical intelligence to renaissance and action to 21st Century life.  The birth of branding is from the heart of the 20th Century but since these ideas are still fresh, they dominate our physical intelligence.

Go to any public gym and the inner chimp is fully on display, or look at the way people dress up in order to feel good about physical intelligence.  This is what I was doing this time last year, actually thinking about my motivation to exercise or act physically intelligently due to how I look rather than how I live.  Image does play a huge part in how people think about physical intelligence.  A funny run down of how the inner chimp reveals itself is in this sketch called "Gym Stereotypes" - what we laugh at is not just the caricature but our own inner chimp is laughing :

Personal branding has its roots in that world, it stems from trying to either pretend that the inner chimp is not present within us or hide our inner chimp so we rise in status among the higher primates.  An ape is still an ape even if it possesses cognitive ability to deny being an ape.

If the first segway into physical intelligence is motivating our inner chimp, then it should not be a case of how it fits with our personal brand but to expose the primitive.  Ironically, the things we actually do in the actions of physical fitness contradict the things we do to maintain a personal brand but if physical fitness is simply about looking good and projecting body image, then that is body image issues and not physical intelligence.  While the pretty side of personal brand is about a professional look (hiding the inner chimp), the ugly side of body image issues takes us to a darker place of the human psyche - into obsessiveness and fear of being exposed as fake.

Personal brand is not the opposite our inner chimp, it is the exercise of it as a social animal.  Once we accept ourselves as we are, and choose to live in a smaller world where privacy and home becomes important but so long as we live in a society that is predicated on a baseline of the inner chimp, we are moving further away from physical intelligence rather than closer to it, because this intelligence is our own and not what others think or define us as being or how we get caught in the world of image and try to manipulate and manage our image.  For sure we don't want to reveal our inner chimp but the cosmetics and all the expense placed into imagery is there to hide or escape the reality of the inner chimp inside.

A renaissance human being does not have to worry about personal brand.  The outer reality becomes the same as the inner reality, there is no need to call this authenticity anything, or even call it authenticity.  At this point physical intelligence is actually a greater wisdom and it is self-directed not so that our public image is enhanced or we are fixing something broken, which is where lack of self-esteem arises - another evidence point connecting us to our inner chimp.

If there is an external reason to be engaged in physical intelligence then we are addressing social intelligence or even emotional intelligence.  Physical intelligence is a connection with nature and life and not with our primal or tribal being.  Gym culture exposes that tribal or primal being and personal brand has more to do with our animal instincts then it has to do with any form of human intelligence - it is based in the realm of animal intelligence - and that is a form of intelligence though it is primal and tribal in nature.