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Calculating your score for Part III:
Your raw score can range from a low of 7 to a high of 53.
Your Being Beautiful Raw Score
Life satisfaction is just what it sounds like. How happy are you right now, and how pleased are you with the way your life has turned out so far? Self-esteem is a good marker of how good you feel about your ability to get things done in the world and your influence on other people. By boosting your self-esteem, you are able to be more effective in the world and more beautiful in the broadest sense of the word. Finally, two of the questions ask about the role of spirituality in your life. There is good evidence that having a solid spiritual foundation increases your life satisfaction. We’ll have more to say about spirituality in chapter 11.
If Your Raw Score Is
7–19
You’re not that happy with life right now. And you’re down on yourself quite a bit. There may even be other people who are down on you. You might want to talk to a therapist or counselor (if you aren’t doing so already). Depression affects many people over the course of their lives, and it can really stand in the way of your ability to be beautiful.
20–31
There are still days when you wake up and think you could be happier and that you could be doing a better job of living up to your potential. We have a lot of advice to offer. Inner and outer beauty will help increase your life satisfaction, self-esteem, and spiritual health.
32–42
Overall, you feel pretty good about life and your place in the universe. There are days when you can be hard on yourself, but our goal is to help you experience fewer of the bad days and more of the good ones.
43–53
Life feels pretty great to you most days. You probably have a lot of inner and outer beauty already. At the same time, there are a lot of insights in this book that we believe will help you in your continuing quest to make yourself a better person.
Part IV: Understanding YOU
From the list of 60 descriptive words below, pick 5 characteristics that most accurately describe the Current YOU. We know that many of the words could describe YOU, but your challenge is to whittle the number down to the top 5. Next pick 5 words that describe the Potential YOU. Remember, many of the things you would ideally like to be may be things that are already part of the Current YOU. That is, you may be living out some of your ideal characteristics right now.
Since our greatest strengths are often things that are invisible to us, you may want to get some feedback from other people about your strengths. Copy this page and share it with loved ones and coworkers. If they’re the same people, perhaps you can forward this document to Human Resources instead.
Calculating your score for Part IV:
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.
Part I
Looking Beautiful
