Gok Wan vs Gordon Ramsay

Most of us will be familiar with Gok Wan and Gordon Ramsay. Gok Wan is a fashion consultant and the presenter of 'How to Look Good Naked' and 'Gok's Fashion Fix' while Gordon Ramsay is a chef and very well known for his programmes 'The F Word' and 'Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares'.

What should be immediately obvious is how differently they approach issues of 'change' on their programmes. Gok Wan focuses on positivity and inspiring people to feel confident about their appearance just by changing how they see themselves. Gordon Ramsay uses intimidation, confrontation and bullying to get people to change how they run their restaurants.

Although what they are each trying to achieve on their programmes is completely different, they are both ultimately trying to get other people to meet specific objectives or goals. What is less important is what those goals are. What is important, and is the focus of this blog, are the behaviours they each employ to try to persuade these people to meet their objectives.

In 'How to Look Good Naked', Gok Wan has the task of trying to persuade someone to walk on a catwalk as a fashion model to overcome a body image problem, and to reveal their naked body to the audience. He starts by getting the man or woman to stand in front of mirrors in their underwear and tell him why they hate their body. Using this, Gok can give them mountains of self-confidence and get them to love their bodies by using a number of methods including new clothes, correct underwear and asking the general public to point out positive things about the person's body.

Gordon Ramsay in his programme 'Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares' has the task of helping failing restaurants turn themselves around and become popular by cooking great food and pulling in customers. However, in order to do this, Ramsay quite often tears the business to shreds and a lot of restaurant owners do not react well to hearing that they do not know how to run a business!

How do these differences of approach affect those people in the programmes who are trying to meet their respective challenges? It should come as no surprise that people respond more readily to a positive approach. If you tell someone they can do something, and make them believe this, then this is a powerful and very persuasive mechanism in allowing them to meet their chosen challenge.

People respond far less positively to bullying and intimidation. Being shouted and sworn at does not lead anyone to believe they are capable of fulfilling the challenge they have been presented with. They respond out of fear, not necessarily because they think they can meet the challenge. It also leads to loss of self confidence and self esteem. It can actually lead to the person believing that they are incapable of meeting the challenge, which is surely the complete opposite of what is intended.

The abundance of self help gurus and life coaches should tell us enough to know that positivity and inspiring someone to believe in themselves is perhaps the most powerful means of getting someone to meet a challenge. Self belief is a powerful mechanism.

An obvious question then must be why do we see so many programmes where the presenter uses intimidation, confrontation and bullying, when they are so ineffective? Why are Gordon Ramsay, Marco Pierre White, Jean Christophe Novelli (why are so many TV chefs also bullies?) and their ilk afforded so much time on our televisions?

One answer is that they make for entertaining viewing. The aim of these programmes is not to instil confidence in anyone, or to raise their self esteem. It is to simply attract the maximum number of viewers, to raise their ratings! It is a typical tactic used by the more sensationalist corners of the media.

It is the same reason why programs such as Big Brother, Wife Swap and other reality TV programmes are so popular. People enjoy confrontation and polemic.

So while the Gok Wan approach may be far more effective, the Gordon Ramsay approach would appear to be far more popular!

Does the portrayal of such behaviour on television send out the wrong message to younger, more impressionable audiences? There's probably no conclusive evidence to support this hypothesis, but it cannot be an unreasonable assumption to make to link an increasingly higher level of bullying on television with increasingly higher incidences of bullying in schools. It cannot provide any kind of positive example to see celebrities shouting and swearing to get their own way, often to the point of making another person break down in tears.

It would be far more beneficial and provide a far more positive example to people if more programmes used presenters like Gok Wan. If people watched these programmes, and copied the behaviour of the presenters and employed positive traits in their own dealings with people, wouldn't that be a better place to be?

To quote Gok - 'It's all about the confidence!'