Michael Roizen - You - Being Beautiful - The Owner’s Manual to Inner and Outer Beauty

See how many words overlapped between the lists you created for the Current YOU and the Potential YOU. For each word you have in common, take 6 points.

0 overlapping words: Give yourself 0 points.

1 overlapping word: Give yourself 6 points.

2 overlapping words: Give yourself 12 points.

3 overlapping words: Give yourself 18 points.

4 overlapping words: Give yourself 24 points.

5 overlapping words: Give yourself 30 points.

Your raw score can range from a low of 0 to a high of 30.

Your Understanding YOU Raw Score

In this section, you described aspects of who you are that can be changed, and your answers will help focus your efforts.

If Your Raw Score Is

0

Get going, tiger. There’s clearly a lot that you would like to be that is not quite the same as who you are.

1–18

You’ve started to achieve your ideals, but there’s still lots more work to go. Part III will help work out a game plan for change.

19–30

You’re well on your way. Keep it up. Remember, you don’t necessarily want Current YOU and Potential YOU to be identical (you always want to be striving for something!).

Your Final YOU-Q Score

Add your raw scores from each part to determine your YOU-Q Score:

The YOU-Q ranges from 15 to 160

Add up your YOU-Q points and start spreading the news. The closer the score is to 160, the more your Current YOU and Potential YOU match. This match between Current YOU and Potential YOU really does tell you a lot about yourself. It tells you how good you feel about who you are. It also gives you a sense of how well you’ve been able to make changes in yourself in the past and how well you’ve addressed challenges in your life.

Just to give you an idea about your score, a score of around 160 is nearly impossible to achieve, and you shouldn’t think of that as a goal. Just as you probably don’t know anybody with an IQ of 160, you probably don’t know anybody with a YOU-Q of 160. If your YOU-Q is 100 or above, then you are pretty typical of people who take this test. Finally, don’t pay a lot of attention to small differences between scores. If you got a 105 and your best friend got a 110, that is essentially the same score. It does appear that having a younger Real Age than biological age helps you achieve a higher score—and more happiness. (Take the Real Age test at www.realage.com.)

To validate the YOU-Q, we gave the survey to 1,174 women and 533 men who had taken it on the RealAge website. The average YOU-Q score for the women was 95 and for men was 99, so both genders have about the same happiness score. This average stays the same across our lifespan, but individuals can increase and decrease their score as they age. If your YOU-Q is way above 100, congratulations! You’re already well on the path to beauty. If it is well below 100, then you have got some work ahead of you. Luckily, your YOU-Q differs from your IQ, because your YOU-Q is easy to change. So no matter what your YOU-Q, you’ll find plenty of great advice in the pages to come that will help that score go up.

As you make changes in your body, your health, and your inner self, you will also experience changes in your life satisfaction and self-esteem. All of these factors will increase your YOU-Q. Periodically come back and take the YOU-Q again, and watch the YOU-Q grow—just as you do.

Glowing Skin

Luscious Hair

Marvelous Mouth

Nice Digits

Sexy Shape

Quick, think of a place that doesn’t have a mirror. Pretty hard, right? Bathrooms, of course, have them. So do cars, department stores, gyms, supermarkets, hotel lobbies, bars, subway cars, purses, bedroom walls, and bedroom ceilings. In fact, you’d almost have to be living in solitary confinement or a single-seat submarine not to have the opportunity to judge your own appearance through your reflection. *

Besides constantly being judged by your own gaze, your face and body often serve as the target for other people’s eyes (and perhaps whistles). While it may seem unfair to be under such constant visual scrutiny, the fact remains that beautiful people have more advantages than unattractive folks. Sounds harsh, we know, but just consider the evidence:

Mental acuity, interpersonal skills, and moral goodness are all associated with physically beautiful people.

Beautiful people are believed by others to have happier marriages and more rewarding jobs. And they’re more likely to be hired, have a higher salary, and be promoted sooner.

Better-looking people are more likely to marry sooner, as well as to marry people who have more money and higher social status.

More attractive babies have even been shown to be rewarded with greater overt maternal affection.

In this part of the book we’ll be examining the elements that primarily determine whether or not you’re perceived as beautiful or not—things like skin, hair, and body shape. But before we start any specific discussion of various wrinkles and jiggles, we’d like you to take a step back and look at the bigger picture.

Though we’ll have plenty to say about the body’s anatomical wonders, the most important body part of all when it comes to beauty isn’t a luscious lip or hardened glute. It’s your brain.

Now, we’re not suggesting that the pituitary gland and hypothalamus are party-stopping body parts the way a silky mane or a plywood-flat waist may be. *What we are suggesting is that beauty is always on your mind. In fact, your brain needs beauty.

Your brain—under intense demand to process an infinite amount of information at any given moment—must make choices about whom to trust, whom to mate with, and whom to run from. It does this by dispensing with unnecessary stimuli—and drawing conclusions from a select few pieces of info. So we’re not programmed to not worry about whether a strand of hair is out of place but are programmed to note the subtleties of facial expressions, whether the slight curve in a lip is conveying anger, sadness, or fear. That process, really, is the foundation of perception—how you perceive and contextualize the facts and faces all around you. †Beauty is not as much a physical property of the person, as the end product of a complex mental process that translates millions of meaningless dots of light on the back of our retinas into 3-D shapes, objects, and faces. Embedded in the software of the mind is a set of rules that are used to decode these raw “bytes” of visual information. Think of these “bytes” as the letters in the alphabet. The perceptual rules are like grammar; they determine how the parts are combined to create a whole.

What’s most interesting is that these observations are automatic—a beauty reflex, if you will. Most of us, especially when we’re young, have a strong sex drive—a drive so strong, in fact, that it often overshadows all of our other natural drives. But nobody instructed us to be sexually attracted to others. We didn’t have to learn about hourglass figures or chiseled jaws. It was instinctive—a genetically programmed behavior.

These instinctive behaviors aren’t conscious acts. They’re spontaneous, irrepressible, and predictable. They’re performed without evident reason, but rather with stimulation. Your beauty detectors, like Doppler radar, are able to scan the environment in real time for signs of an attractive mate and forecast a conclusion about that environment. Your assessments are fast and accurate. For example, you can observe a human face for a fraction of a second and accurately rate its beauty—and what it’s trying to communicate to you, through expressions, nuances, and all kinds of nonverbal signals. Similarly, your appearance affects the first impressions that others have of you. And that first one can be a lasting one.