Tag: positivity

Let’s get 2015 started

Posted on by philipdodson

You might have looked at the title and thought, has this bloke lost the plot, it’s February 5th not January 5th!!!

We’ll I have to admit I’ve had better starts to a year to be honest. 2nd week of January, my knee swelled up like a football, the redness, the pain….yes I knew immediately it was a gout attack. Now for those who’ve never suffered from gout, imagine a really, really, really nasty pain and then times that by 10. It is without doubt the most miserable thing I’ve ever experienced. I have not had a bad attack for many years, as I have been careful and tried to cure it through changes in diet etc etc.

Unfortunately, without realising it, I have not been looking after myself, so it’s all self-inflicted. Anyway after a week or so of being laid up with a very swollen sore knee, it decide to move into my foot and toe too. So another week of being laid up followed.

Thankfully, I have some good people in my network and people helped covering the business. So Last week of January arrived and on the Monday I hobbled back to work.

Then the next bit of the nightmare start to 2015 arrived, in shape of a phone call from my Mum in France to tell me that my Dad had passed away at lunchtime, thankfully in his sleep and without pain.

He had been unwell for sometime, so while it wasn’t a shock, but even so it still is very upsetting.

By the way I’ll get to the point in a minute and I am not writing this so that you feel sorry for me.

So the last few days have been spent still recovering from the dreaded gout and sorting out all the stuff with the family and taking time to grieve about my father.

So Tuesday, I finally got back to the hub and back to working a ‘normal’ day again.

The point of all of this is, that bad things happen in life, thankfully no where near as often as we fear and anticipate and it is how we react to them is so important.

It will obviously take a while to heal from the loss of a parent or someone very close, but it is also for me a motivator too. What I mean by that is that losing a parent brings into focus your own life, as a parent myself, and it makes me realise in the natural order I am next. Therefore, it is time to really focus on getting on with my life and get on with doing all the things that I want to achieve.

The other thing in all of this is that you can either wallow in the bad things or just say that these things happen, you can’t control them, just accept and then get on. We can all choose what mood or attitude to have when things go wrong.

So I am super positive about 2015, I know that my gout will go away soon, I know that I have to get back on the focus on my health and looking after myself. I am determined, which I know my father would have wanted, to use his passing as a motivator to me to push myself and get on with life.

My father died at age 86, he had a great life, he was mainly happy, always able to laugh and not take life too seriously. He didn’t suffer and he spent his last Christmas together with all his family and grand children. He didn’t chase material things and money, he focused on the important things in life. Even in his final days he still was able to laugh and joke, including his pleasure of persuading the hospital to let him have some beers.

So whatever, you are up against, it will pass and we all get just that one opportunity to make it happen, don’t be an extra in your own film, step out of the shadows and become the star.

New Year resolutions….don’t bother, I’ve got a better idea

Posted on by philipdodson

Here I am again. 750Words.com it’s been a while.

I am sitting here starting to type, after having had a week or so off. I have previously done over 100 days since first joining in September 2014, with only having missed 2 days in 3 1/2 months. I had bashed out over 85k words.

New year resolutions

Each day that has passed since I decided to take a break has left me feeling a little less keen about restarting. Then the other voice has said to me ‘taking a break is good – it freshens things up’.

This is a dilemma that we face with most things in life, taking a break from any regular activity is definitely good, however, consistency and keeping the momentum going is also good.

Life is full of these pro’s/con’s situations and at this time of year, we are not only bombarded with diets and holidays offers, but we are inundated with self-help guru’s and experts.

They all have the magic formula for success and they all have their different ‘pearls of wisdoms’ and different takes on the same old things.

Wow that’s 176 words done, I guess the break has rejuvenated me and starting this again isn’t anywhere near as hard as I had built up in my mind it would be.

So what is the answer to all this annual ritual of New Year resolutions?

The answer is don’t make them, don’t have them and don’t set yourself a tsunami of new things you’re going to change this year. Don’t set yourself all these silly goals that you will run out of steam on within a month or so.

The answer is make changes in life all the time, but make the changes that are needed at the right time and take one thing at a time. Make life changes or life resolutions.

Don’t set them all at once, don’t set ridiculously huge changes and set yourself realistic expectations and realistic timeframes.

For example, I lost 7 1/2 stone, but I lost it over 4+ years and I didn’t do it via a fad diet, I did it in a series of small steps, changing habits and sticking to them. The changes I have made, have been life changes. The habits I have broken took years to break, that’s because, like most habits they took years to build up in the 1st place. Things take time.

Other changes I have made to other habits have equally taken years and some I am still in the process of changing and I know that I am still slipping back on some of them.

Here is the other thing, it’s OK to slip on them, I am human and in the past I would have beaten myself up about it, then not felt happy with myself. Then that would have triggered the things that created or made the habits worse in the first place.

Life isn’t about success or failure, money, achievements, etc. Life is about happiness. Happiness is a difficult thing to define, it is very woolly as a concept. It is subjective, as what ‘happiness’ means to me, is different for you.

Happiness is really about positive emotions and things that create well being within us.

We are all conditioned to think about working hard on goals, jobs, projects, relationships, New Year resolutions etc…We believe that once we achieve all these things, then we will be happy.

The most successful people (fill in your own bits here as to what success looks like to you) are the ones who are happy first.

If you are happy with positive thoughts and emotions, you will do happy things, others will want to be around you and you will create with them more happiness/wellbeing etc. When you do happy things it energises you and again it is what you define as happy things, you can’t read a book on it and become happy.

Today, for example, I gave some money to a regular homeless person I see, that made me feel happy. I then found £10 dropped outside the hub and found who’s money it was and that made me happy. I walked my daughter to the station this morning, as she was getting the train to school for the first time and was a bit nervous and sad that the holidays had ended. That made me happy to spend time with her and help her to feel happy. So today has been a great day at work, why? because I feel happy. I am typing this with a smile on my face – it feels good.

Success in what ever shape you want it to come in, comes to those who are happy.

So the only resolution you should have, not just on the 1st January, is to have a life resolution to be happy.

That is it, job done for the rest of your life. It is, like all things, very easily said, slightly less easily written and requires effort and the right mindset to achieve.

Whatever number of grains of sand are left in mine or your’s ‘egg timers’ of life, none of us know, but we are going to have that time, every one of those days. So we can make the choice to approach that positively, with happiness, with a sense of adventure, a sense of fun and with an open mind or we can choose to hope that we can change it all with will power and long list of things we want to change in January, just because it is a new year.

Be happy – the rest will follow.