Breaking Habits

My wife and I have realized how difficult it can be to break a habit... not ours, but our daughter's. Vienna is 21 months old and up until a week ago was drinking all her milk from the bottle.

A bottle on rising in the morning, a bottle before lunch, one after her nap in the middle of the afternoon, and one just before bed time.

Our family doctor told us that, for the benefit of her teeth, we shouldn't feed her the bottle anymore. So we stopped.

But to get her to drink milk out of anything else has been impossible... and we've tried. We tried about five different cups, heating the milk, not heating the milk, adding chocolate, pretending to drink it ourselves, or feeding it to her teddy bears. It doesn't matter what we try, she sees right through our tactics. Nothing is as good as milk out of the bottle!

For about a year Vienna has been drinking all sorts of fluids from sippy-cups, normal cups, through a straw, juice boxes, but milk has always been consumed from a bottle. We tried a few months ago to get her to drink milk from a sippy-cup, but to no avail.

As parents, we suddenly realised the error of our ways, and good that we recognized that before our second is born (due in six weeks). Try not to establish habits that you know in the future you will have to break. Rather, try to establish the habit of flexibility and variation. If only we had our daughter drinking milk from more than one container from an early age, phasing out the bottle wouldn't be an issue.

Instead we've abandoned the bottle completely and with it, her milk consumption has dropped by 80%. So now we scramble to add milk or cheese to her diet where possible.

I know this will be a short-term situation, but it's frustrating because we didn't foresee this problem, but looking back we can see how we helped create it.

Change of Direction

This morning I handed in my resignation without any firm plans of where I'll be off to next... except to take a solid six weeks off to spend it with my wife and daughter, my parents who are coming up from Australia in mid-August, and the second child we're due with on September 6th.

One of the suppliers I regularly deal with said it was admirable that I would take off so much time, when people today are so focused on money, money, money. But I told her that in the last 12 years I have taken almost three years off work to travel and experience life.

Balance in life is a bit like communism... it's good on paper, but somehow it doesn't work in the real world. I've tried throughout my whole life to attain a kind of balance, and the best I've managed is three years off in twelve. But what's more important is to attain happiness. If you're happy at work and happy at home then the need for balance takes care of itself. The need for balance arises when we're unhappy and are constantly seeking relief somewhere else.

I always find it sad when people spend months and months looking forward to a week-long holiday. It's one thing to be excited for a holiday, but it's another to wish away the majority of your life for a couple of weeks a year. What about the rest of the time?

When I think of life I think of a dripping tap. It drips and drips a little bit at a time. Each drop could represent a day. Individually a drop is not significant, but collect many drops over time and you have a puddle. It's the same with life. To not enjoy one day in your life is not a big deal, but to not enjoy many of them - that's significant. And at some point the tap will dry up, and we don't know when that will be. What would you do with your last day? Would you spend it the way you're spending today? Today may be your last...

Make sure you enjoy every day, and get excellent value from your time. You never know how much more of it you have.

Who'll Be Next?!

After a gruelling day I came home at around 10:15pm after my Dale Carnegie course, chatted with my wife until about 11pm and then went to bed.

At 1am my wife wakes to see me standing at the corner of the bed in my pyjamas, hands outstretched saying, "Who'll be next?!"

For the first time in my life I'm sleepwalking. As I dreamt I thought I was giving the Dale Carnegie class to a bright room full of eager participants.

"Wake up!" she tells me.

"Huh?" I open my eyes and suddenly my mind starts racing. Why is it dark? Where's the class? Why am I in my bedroom? Why am I in my pyjamas? What time is it?

I was quite confused at this time, but staggered back into bed and went to sleep.

They say "you don't take the Dale Carnegie program, you live it."

I certainly am.

Got it done!

I have never been so nervous in my life. I started getting ulcers in my mouth on Sunday, and a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. I have done a lot of public speaking in my lifetime and now have few nerves from that, but today I trained my first session of the Dale Carnegie program.

My throat was dry, and no matter how much water I drank the desert in my mouth remained. My tongue was like an old leather belt and my stomach churned.

As 6 o'clock drew near the terror increased, and then I was up... opening the session and getting right into it. Everything went well, considering and I made it through to the end.

As a "Tandem-Trainer" I deliver half of the session and the experienced trainer delivers the other half, while keeping a watchful eye over what I'm doing. It's a very good way of easing into it, given the high expectations.

Now at the other side of it I've grown in confidence and I know next week won't be so bad.

Woohoo!