Strong Looks Better Naked

by Khloé Kardashian

  Being late does not make you special or important, it makes you unreliable. Respect yourself enough to keep your word and your commitment to being prompt, whether in business or pleasure. If you agree on a time, stick to it.

  This happens a lot when I meet friends for dinner. I ask them what time works, and they tell me, and we lock it in. And I’m always right on time—usually early, in fact—and they saunter in fifteen, twenty, even thirty minutes later. What is that about? Didn’t we agree to meet at eight?

  And it’s interesting, because if it’s about them—if, say, they’re in therapy—they’re always on time. How many people are late to their shrink? None. And you know why? Because they’re going to talk about me, me, me, and they’re going to make every minute count.

  I respect other people’s time and I think they should respect mine. This may seem like a small thing, but it’s part of building a strong mind. It also speaks to character and reputation. Instead of becoming known as the late one, try to become the reliable one. Good habits are like exercise. The more you practice them, the stronger you get. And when people talk about me, I like to hear them talking about my strengths.

  All of this basically boils down to respect. When you deal with others, be on time, follow through, keep your promises, and don’t make excuses. Does it get any simpler than that?

  Getting Organized

  Another healthy habit relates to being organized. People are always complaining that they have too much to do and that there aren’t enough hours in the day, but there are twenty-four hours in every day, for all of us, and it’s really about making the most of them. (Do I need to bring up Oprah again?)

  A great way to maximize your time is to make a to-do list. Early in my day, usually after my workout, I make a list of everything that needs to get done, and I get it done. For me, it’s visual. When I see something written down, it’s real. A solid list on paper is much more effective than a vague list in my head. I have a plan and I know exactly what I need to do to get through it.

  And the main reason I’m motivated to complete my tasks is pretty simple: I find it really stressful when I don’t complete them. Instead of worrying about everything I’m not getting done, I do it. It’s really not that complicated. You do what you need to do when you need to do it, and then you move on to the next task.

  Again, it’s like working out. You do enough reps, you start getting strong. Before you know it, it’s a habit, and you don’t even have to think about it. You just focus and get it done.

  If I make it sound easy, it’s because it is. Generally. Because we all have days when we’re not feeling it. But here’s the thing: You can sit around and whine, or you can get on your bike and start pedaling. And make it a fun ride! If I have to clean out my garage, for example, I don’t think, “I’ve wasted my entire Sunday!” Instead, I invite a few girlfriends over and lay out some healthy snacks (maybe a little wine, too) and we’ll gossip our way through my chores. And if no one is available, there’s always music. Haven’t you ever cleaned house with Beyoncé or Michael Jackson blaring on the speakers?

  Chapter 4

  Make the Best of Everything

  “No Whining” Zone

  This brings me to the subject of whining, which I cannot tolerate. It’s one thing to have a bad day, but chronic whining is toxic—for you and for everyone around you—so get it under control. Nobody likes to be around a Negative Nancy. It’s contagious. If you’re miserable, you don’t have the right to impose your misery on the rest of the world.

  We create the tone and circumstances of our lives by using the Law of Attraction. It is the principle by which all things manifest (or fail to manifest), and it affects every area of our lives. Negativity is seriously damaging. Now that you know that, doesn’t it make sense to change the way you live?

  I’ve often heard parents turn to their kids and say, “Stop whining!” Well, I wish we could do that with adults! Don’t those whiners ever listen to themselves? It’s like they are actually regressing—becoming little kids again—but they can’t see it because they’re as self-absorbed as children. (I hope you aren’t one of those people, but if you are, change—quick!)

  Not long ago I read an article about a group of people who signed up for an experiment: They wouldn’t complain for an entire month. Researchers learned a lot from the study. When we complain, our brains release stress hormones that negatively impact our cognitive function. In other words, when you whine, your brain doesn’t work as well. They also said that listening to someone moan and groan was as bad as secondhand smoke, which I found truly alarming. But here’s what I learned from this study. First, avoid complainers. Second, turn your complaints into solutions. In other words, instead of sitting around obsessing about the problem, look for a way to change your situation.

  I like to say, “You bring me problems, I’ll give you solutions.” I come from a place of yes, from a place of We can do this, fix this, make it better. Few things in life can’t be fixed. And even if they can’t be fixed, they can be made better.

  Now please don’t get me wrong. I like to think I’m a sympathetic, nurturing person, and my friends know they can rely on me when they hit a wall. We talk the situation through, look for a solution together, and move on. Nobody wants to be around a whiner. But whining is different from talking about a problem. Whining is unjustified self-pity. I feel fat. I hate my hair. My boyfriend never brings me flowers. Trust me, whining only makes things worse. Negativity begets negativity. How do you change it? By taking control. And you do that by taking one baby step at a time. It’s sort of like doing reps, but in reverse. Today I’m going to make a concerted effort to whine less. Tomorrow I’ll do even better. And within a week—miracle of miracles!—I hope not to be whining at all. See how it works? Not all that mysterious, is it?

  One of my friends got married and moved away, and her life didn’t turn out exactly like she’d hoped or expected. It happens. Her husband wasn’t the man she thought he was, and she wasn’t all that thrilled about being a wife and a homemaker, so it was unpleasant all around. When she first mentioned it to me, I suggested couples therapy, but she wasn’t into that, and eventually I began to make other suggestions: Why don’t you learn to cook? Why don’t you take your husband on fun dates? Why don’t you plan a romantic weekend getaway? But she did none of that; instead she kept whining until finally I got tired of it. “Look,” I said, “every time you call me, all you do is complain, but I don’t see you doing anything to make things better.”

  That didn’t go over very well, so she began to unload on our other mutual friends, until they too got tired of her whining. And I’d like to tell you that this story has a happy ending, but it doesn’t. She is still with her husband, and she is still miserable, and I imagine her husband is pretty miserable, too. But whose fault is that? Hers, of course. She hasn’t been proactive. Everything we suggested fell on deaf ears. Instead of trying to change the situation, she blamed her husband and the town they had moved to and even the new people they met.

  I don’t mind trying to help my friends. On the contrary, it brings me joy. I also love the fact that they trust me enough to come to me with their problems. But I do mind people who look for help but won’t try to help themselves.

  Life is about moving forward. Blaming others and whining about your situation is about living in the past. Of course it doesn’t work!

  In our family, when something shitty happens, we are of course affected by it. But we deal with it and move on. It’s water under the bridge. And we even learn to laugh about it. If no one has been hurt, if there is no lasting damage, the best thing you can do is move on. And even if people are hurt, they can’t be unhurt, so stop the woe-is-me crap and figure out how to deal with the situation.

  Sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying. And sometimes you have to learn to embrace even the bad things, because every experience shapes you, and some of the things you think of as bad may later turn out to be genuine blessings.
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  If you want to whine, here’s my suggestion: Take out your journal and write down every little thing that comes into your head. Then read what you’ve written and ask yourself, “Honestly, would I want to listen to myself?” I think you know the answer.

  The upside is that by writing it down, you will (hopefully) have gotten it out of your system, so you won’t be walking around with all of that negative energy. When you complain—about money, family, your body, whatever—the negativity begins to weigh on you like a ton of bricks. Who needs that? Worse, who wants to be in the company of a person stooped over under the weight of those bricks? Think about that the next time you are tempted to whine.

  Whining is pure negative energy. Is that what you want to carry into the lives of the people around you? I certainly don’t. On the contrary, I want people to light up when they see me, to get excited. “Hey, here comes Khloé!”

  Bench Presses for Your Mind

  I became mentally stronger in the same way I became physically stronger: I took little bites. One doesn’t start out by saying, “I’m going to bench-press two hundred pounds by the end of the week.” You slowly add weight over time. The changes are small and incremental, and you steadily make your way toward a place of optimum health.

  This approach makes perfect sense, but for some crazy reason, people still struggle with it.

  Take my brother Rob. I love him and he knows I love him, but he fell into a deep, dark place and couldn’t find his way back. I’ve tried to help him, as has the entire family, but our efforts have largely been in vain. From time to time, though, he decides he’s going to fix things his way, and he plunges in headfirst. Inevitably, it doesn’t work.

  Not long ago he took a cue from me and started working out. He came out of the starting gate like a Thoroughbred, and for two weeks he never lagged, but on the third week he decided he’d had enough. Working out was not his thing. It was a waste of time. He decided he couldn’t change his ways. The truth is, he wanted too much too soon, and his unrealistic expectations totally short-circuited his efforts.

  I have another friend who became depressed and turned to food and gained thirty pounds in three months, which only made her feel worse. She decided to get into the best shape of her life and committed to losing the weight by summer, and she was seriously motivated for about two weeks, but the combination of exercise and diet became too much for her, and she quit and gained even more weight.

  She was unrealistic and impatient. Instead of telling herself she was going to lose thirty pounds in three months, she should have made a commitment to getting healthier. That’s a manageable goal. If you aim too high, you’re going to give up on yourself, and nothing is worse than giving up on yourself. When you have no passion for your own life, other people won’t be passionate about you either.

  The key is to set reasonable goals and to move toward them at a reasonable speed, and it always goes back to the issue of motivation. We all know that it’s tough to get motivated, just as we know that without motivation, we seldom make progress in any area of our lives.

  It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.

  —Confucius

  That was certainly the case for my brother Rob. I was doing everything in my power to try to help him, and my entire family accused me of being an enabler. They even brought it up on the show, totally ambushing me, and I proceeded to defend myself by attacking them. I was the only one who was there for him, I said. They didn’t care.

  None of that was true, of course. They all cared. My mother was heartbroken. She was desperate to get him help, and professionals were brought in, but even then nothing changed.

  Okay, one thing changed: I realized I was making life too easy for Rob. I’m a very nurturing person and I was constantly checking up on him, making sure he had the food he liked, seeing if he needed anything from the store, asking what I could do to make him more comfortable, whether I could cook him dinner, etc. Even when I was out of town, I had my assistant check in on him twice a day. My sisters said that I was babying him and that he’d never leave the house if I didn’t let him fend for himself. I argued with them because it was an emotional issue, and emotion tends to cloud your thinking. But looking back, I now realize they were right. I even lent him my Range Rover. Kim said, “If he’s driving a Range Rover, why would he be motivated to get a car of his own?” She was right on that point, too. So I took the Range Rover away, and my mom, who had been very vocal about everything I had been doing wrong, lent him one of her cars! She had been accusing me of enabling him, and she’d been right, and now she was doing the exact same thing. But she couldn’t help it. This was her little boy.

  Enabling starts as an attempt to be kind and helpful to someone, but it backfires because the person needs to be doing it for himself or herself. Good intentions, lousy results.

  Rob still lives with me, and maybe I’m weak, but I’m not going to put my brother out on the street on the off chance that he will make an effort to change his life. If he starts making progress, I’ll be his biggest cheerleader. And maybe from time to time I can point him in the right direction with a gentle suggestion. But beyond that, there’s not much I can do. He will make changes in his life when he is able to motivate himself. And as much as I wish I could light that fire for him, I now see that the chances of that happening are slim to none.

  Over the last couple of years I’ve learned a lot about how to change my life, how to improve it. I’ve also learned the hard way that it is impossible to change other people’s lives if they aren’t genuinely ready to improve their lives themselves. After I’d really taken control of my own life and made myself strong, I realized that you can’t save other people and they can’t save you. If you want to change your life, you have to do it yourself.

  At the end of the day, it’s not about other people saving us, but about saving ourselves. We all want someone to hold us when life gets hard. We want someone to dry our tears. We want someone on our team to help guide us through the tough moments. But in the end, though we can draw comfort from others, we need to pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off, then walk tall and save ourselves.

  I think it’s hard for most of us to see that, especially when people we love are struggling. But all you can do is say, “Hey, I know you have a lot of shit going on, and if you want my help, I’m here.” But you are not responsible for the well-being of others, and if you don’t learn to disengage, you will end up frustrated and unhappy. I see that with parents all the time. They are so hooked into their kids that every bump along the road affects them, and as a result, everyone is unhappy.

  We all have to navigate our own way through life. The sooner we become aware of this, the sooner we will begin to make meaningful changes.

  Friendship

  One element necessary for a good life is friendship, and learning how to pick the right friends is very important. You’ll go through trials and tribulations, and eventually you’ll figure out who your real friends are. Those are the people you really need to hold on to. Everyone is going to screw up from time to time, and they all deserve second chances, but friendship is a two-way street. If you’re always giving, giving, giving and getting nothing in return, you need to take a closer look at why.

  A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out.

  —Walter Winchell

  A lot of times it’s about money, because money and friendship is a tough combination, and if you have money, as I do, it sometimes gets in the way. Some people don’t understand that money isn’t just being handed to me, that I work for it, that my day starts at 5:00 a.m. and doesn’t end until I collapse on my bed late at night, exhausted but fulfilled. So when a friend of mine sleeps till noon, wakes up with a champagne hangover, then decides once more not to look for a job and calls to tell me she can’t pay the rent that month—well, it really pisses me off. “Did you try to get a job?” “Are you working on changing your life?” “Do you have to hit the bars
every night?” “Is this really how you want to live?”

  People like that eventually stop being my friends. How can they be my friends when they can’t even be good to themselves?

  Strangely enough, some of my so-called friends get irritated when I don’t pay for everything. A person who expects me to pick up the tab every time we go out, just because I’m in a good financial place, doesn’t have the right to call herself a friend. She can call herself inconsiderate. On the other hand, if I have a friend who is having money trouble but is making an honest effort to get her life in order, I’m not against helping her. On the contrary, I’m glad to do what I can. But people who don’t try to better their own lives just don’t get it. You’ve got to beat on a lot of doors before the right one opens. I’m glad to support my friends, but I refuse to support laziness.

  I also get irritated when people are easily defeated. That happened once with one of my best friends, and it really tested our relationship. She used to have zero tolerance for frustration. One little thing would go wrong and she’d say, “My life is a shambles!” She had excuses for everything.

  At one point I sat her down and asked her what she wanted to do, and she said she thought she’d like to get into the news business, with an eye toward becoming an announcer. I reached out to some friends and set up all these meetings, and she never went to any of them. I felt like I was helping her get to where she wanted to be and she wasn’t as persistent as she should’ve been.