daily post – broke-single-dad

August 22, 2017August 21, 2017

Short ones..

A collection of times my cubs have made me laugh

#You babe; draw back your bow, you babe; draw back your bow!

‘Actually darling, it’s “Cupid”.

‘That doesn’t make any sense…’

‘Yeah. I prefer your version’

#You babe….

Cub 1 to cub 2; ‘Tickle Punch!’

Cub 2, punches her squarely in the face.

‘DADDY!!’

Play with the bull; get the horns. Both of you; naughty step.

‘Darling; start to take your hair down so we can wash and plait it’

‘Ok dad. Have a look; do you think I’ve still got it in my hair?’

‘Got what?’

‘DO YOU THINK I’VE STILL GOT IT IN MY HAIR!?’

‘Darling, if someone doesn’t understand what you’re saying, rather than shouting you should find a different way to say the same thing’

Silence

‘DO-YOU-THINK-I’VE-STILL-GOT-IT-IN-MY-HAIR!!!’

‘Did you understand what I just said to you? that was just slow shouting..’

‘I miss mummy. I think she understands English better than you.’

‘Naughty step’ (not really, but I thought it)

‘Daddy?’

‘Yes?’

‘You say “Christ” a lot’

‘Just asking for help darling’

‘Maybe you should try the Police; at least we know their number’

BSD

August 20, 2017

If you learn one thing; make it this.

You have the power to save a life.

Potentially anyway. Effective first aid, CPR and even simply calling for help can make all the difference when seconds count.

BSD is my alter-ego. I use him to express things that I might not be able to professionally, or just to get things off my chest. The real me knows a bit about saving lives, having dedicated over two decades to it.

CPR, Cardio Pulmonary Resuscitation can greatly increase an individual’s chances of survival if administered as soon as possible after an accident or incident. In basic terms, pumping the chest and breathing exhaled air into someone else’s mouth.

Education

A debate rages in this country as to whether CPR should be taught in the national curriculum; it’s one that has gone on for ages but seems to be going unanswered. My opinion is ‘don’t wait for the state to educate you’ in what I think is one of life’s greatest skills.

From a very young age children can comprehend things such as helping someone. We’ve all heard seen those videos of a cute child calmly explaining to an emergency call handler that ‘mummy won’t wake up’ and we’ve no doubt all held our breath waiting for the sound of sirens.

There are some advocates that teach preschoolers to do chest compressions but personally I think this can be counter-productive. It’s unlikely that they will have the strength the do effective chest compressions and while something is better than nothing, I would rather that the under 5’s know the following.

How to call the emergency services
Where they live

and at the most,

How to check for breathing
How to clear an airway.

Every child will be different and some will have better language skills than others but that initial summoning of professional help is vital as seconds will count.

Once children get older, the more advanced lessons can be taught, such as DR,ABC.

Dangers
Response (and assistance)
Airway
Breathing
Circulation.

Knowing these five things really makes a world of difference. Wound management such as controlling bleeds and infection control can also be introduced, depending on aptitude.

Learn now and remember forever

Exactly how to resuscitate people changes year on year as more information is gathered from clinical practice and elsewhere and because of that, I purposely haven’t gone into great detail on here.

My advice is this: seek out trained professionals and learn the basics. In the UK we have many providers such as St John, the Red Cross et al. Heck; I’m sure if you knocked the door of your local ambulance station they’d run through the basics with you (they are extremely busy though).

As I said earlier, I speak from experience, both professional and personal.

In his first 18 months my son suffered from a series of febrile convulsions and a full tonic/clonic seizure. It was terrifying. With everything I know the shock rendered me able to do very little, other than summon help. Thank God, our amazing ambulance service were at our door in minutes.

He’s fine now but the whole episode reinforced what I already believed; we should all get some training.

If you use it once in your entire life to save a life, then it’s time well spent.

BSD

July 22, 2017October 24, 2017

CONTROLLING THOSE LIMITING BELIEFS – time to stop running and start hunting. pt.4

Time to start hunting.

My inspiration; and my first plug

I was introduced to this book 10 years ago when I started going through management training. I was very skeptical at first. It’s plays quite heavily on religion and even though I was a Christian at the time (more on that paradigm shift later!) I found it quite heavy going. I was missing the point.

Move forward a decade and the pages of my copy are well thumbed, dog eared and colour coded.

I’ll try not to make this a War & Peace length post but here’s my interpretation of this bestseller

Be proactive. (Get ahead)

Don’t wait for things to happen, make them happen! One great excerpt from this chapter is “act or be acted upon.” There have been times in my life when I’ve procrastinated myself into a needless situation. No more. I now practice Flexible Planning.

Begin with the end in mind

You need to know where you want to end up, but not necessarily how you’ll get there. Take those first tentative steps and you’ll be surprised at what doors open.

Put the first things first

Estimate a timeframe. How long you think it should take to achieve. Then work backwards. If I want to be achieve X in 5 years time, where do I need to be in 2.5 years? I’ll need to have achieved Y. To achieve Y in 2.5 years where do I need to be in 1 year? Where do I need to be in 6 months etc, all the way until I have an idea of what I need to do next.

Taking those tentative first steps is a little easier when you know where to plant your feet. The importance here is to be flexible! Life tends to get in the way of plans but stay focused!

Think win/win

This took me a while to fully understand. I used to think in a binary terms of win or lose. For me to win, someone had to lose and vice versa. Wrong. This ideology placed me in direct competition with everyone and anyone and is destined to fail. It doesn’t matter how intelligent you are, how knowledgeable you are, how fast or strong you are, someone will be that little bit better than you. Read my lesson in humility here..

I now aim for win/win, or no deal. What if we work together? Imagine what we can achieve? Find others to help you reach your goal and help them reach theirs. If someone is where you want to be or doing what you want to do, learn from them! Read what they read, do what they do and if possible, move in their circles.

Don’t ever compromise your values to achieve a deal. This will not sit right with you and will be unsustainable in the long term.

Seek first to understand then be understood

Shift your focus a little. No one is obliged to understand you. Other viewpoints exist and just because they do not align directly to yours, it doesn’t mean they are wrong.

Senator John McCain defended his then opponent Senator Barack Obama at his own Republican rally, when one of his supporters began a personal attack. What amazing strength of character. I’m a Brit by the way but I’m interested in politics and great orators.

Look to understand someone else’s viewpoint and you will understand what drives them. This involves active listening.

Synergise

Creative cooperation. Working together to achieve more. For example, I’m involved in a number of projects outside of what was the norm for me. It has taken a lot of learning and self discipline to get where I am (I’m not actually broke!) but there is still work to do. I planned this blog for 6 months before I began it but there was only so much I could do alone. I had to jump in and then the second part of my learning could begin. I now learn from you, my fellow bloggers. I read your blogs for information, entertainment and more importantly in order to improve mine.

Sharpen the saw

The principle of renewal and the greatest invest of all; the investment in yourself.

Physical (exercise, nutrition and stress management)
Social/emotional (service, empathy, synergy and intrinsic security)
Spiritual (value, clarification and commitment, study and meditation) and
Mental (reading, visualising, planning and writing).

Balance and clarity in these areas can help you achieve balance in life. I have prioritised or neglected all four of these at one time or another and suffered the consequences. It’s a work in progress.

Time to go and get what you really want.

Sticking to this stuff takes discipline. Mine fluctuates! When I stick to it; life works!

Don’t just take my word for it; read it for yourself.

Follow this link for a hardcopy

Or here for the audiobook

BSD

July 17, 2017July 17, 2017

Still last weekend..

Sunday

It looks like my lazy day has turned into a lazy weekend. I’ve sat in bed; I’ve watched a couple of movies but I just had to get up.

The contents of the fridge are still there so I’ve decided to make something out what’s left. One pack of sausages, one bag of frozen veg, and some potatoes both sweet and normal. It looks like it’s going to be sausage and chips for Sunday lunch.

Time to cook these blues away.

Sunday afternoon

It looks like the cooking has come back with a vengeance, and what I thought was just going to be a boring meal turned into to something absolutely average.

For Sunday dinner it was a pretty lazy/easy cook with everything lobbed into a pan and left 45 minutes.

For some reason my phone has rotated this

I put some broccoli in for extra health, trying to wipe out the poor diet I have had over the last couple of days. Result was nice but then again I’ve always liked roasted sweet potato.

I shall call this ‘Hot Mess’. You should try it

You can tell I wasn’t convinced about this one as I took the pic after starting it. Mayonnaise is optional..

The shopping needs to get here soon though before I get scurvy.

Future goals:

Copy a fellow blogger’s recipies
Don’t ever upload from a mobile. Twice as long

BSD

July 15, 2017October 24, 2017

CONTROLLING THOSE LIMITING BELIEFS – time to stop running and start hunting. pt.3

But as I said last week; a day is just a day. We make it what it is and our internal coach has a huge part to play in that.

Neutrality

Ok; we’ve established that now; there is no such thing as a bad day or a good day, but how do we really live up to that? How do you stop that one occurrence in the morning from clouding your whole day?

You need to coach your inner coach, and here is why.

You wake up, you stub your toe getting out of bed; what does your coach have to say about that?

“Awesome start you klutz!”

Now at this point, you have a choice; write it off as a one off or let it snowball..to some degree it does depend on what happens next, or more importantly how you reference what happens next.
A thought that becomes an > expectation that manifests into > a reality that forms an > experience.

Let’s go deeper; what if that whole process I described is repeated, and the experience is the same?

Kolb’s Experiential Cycle

This is a theory that really stuck in my mind when I was studying psychology. My mind likes order and I see in models and algorithms.

Concrete Experience

You stub your toe; you lose your keys; you get toothpaste on your tie; you ladder your tights; you’re stuck in roadworks….

Reflective Observation

You think about what’s happened/happening and give that event a label mentally.

Abstract Hypothesis

Here is the watershed; the fork in the road. You can label the event as ‘bad luck’, or ‘That wasn’t the outcome I wanted; I should change my approach’. This is the most important part of the cycle and where thoughts are reinforced in our minds.

Left or right…?

Active Testing

Deal breaker; if only we recognised it.

Active testing is the part of the scientific method (a set way of doing and testing things. This is where in theory, we test our concrete experience against our perception of the outcome. For example, leaving the house at the same time, taking the same route and becoming stuck at the same set of roadworks, instead of either leaving earlier or taking a different route.

OK, I’ve over simplified things in that example but it serves to illustrate my point.

If you attribute too many experiences to bad luck, you will conclude that you are an unlucky person. This isn’t true.

It self fulfils and we now have a behaviour that is based on those concrete experiences that just keep happening to us. We expect it to happen because it has done so many times before. So we find ourselves in the situation again and guess what? The same thing happens..

Why?

This know as a self fulfilling prophecy and usually climaxes with an ‘I told you that would happen’ from that internal coach. It can work for us, stopping us from engaging in harmful activities, or it can work against us, stopping us from pushing through our barriers.

But if our thoughts are that powerful, what would happen if we could only imagine the best for ourselves, all the time?

Breaking the cycle

Now we know what our limiting beliefs are we need to take action to stop them. This is easier said than done, don’t forget you’ve probably had these thoughts all of your life; I know I have.

Perhaps given to you by your parents then reinforced through those oh so real experiences they are now well and truly engrained.

Technically speaking it should take the same amount of time to rewrite them. If that’s correct, I’ve got something to look forward to on my 86th birthday.

Well I’m not having that; and neither should you!

Next week: Let’s finish this. I’ll explore some scripts that work for me in pt.4

BSD

July 11, 2017

Cooking, drinking and thinking…

Thankfully the sun is still shining when I get back to my car and in fact all day, it has been seasonal bliss.
Ingredients time! I intended to do a shop on the train home but I actually fell asleep! I have a habit of keeping late nights and early mornings and my body is starting to rebel.

On the way home I visualised salmon, salad onions and vegetable rice smothered in sesame seeds.

I read somewhere about the benefits of turmeric (I can’t remember exactly what it did) so I got some of that too. Add some paprika and pesto (thinking ahead) and we’re in business.

I must say I really do have the cooking bug now and it’s a lot of fun, and so much easier to eat healthily.
Salmon something

Wash a cupful of rice in [filtered] water. Place in a small pan and add more [filtered] water. I’ll stop with the parenthesis soon. Add a dash of sesame oil and a sprinkle of paprika. Place on a low heat.

Pre-heat the grill to a medium high heat and foil line a grill pan. Wash the salad onions and chop finely. Grab some garlic and chop that too. Drizzle some oil on the foil and add paprika and turmeric. Drop the chopped stuff on it and mix with your hands.

Wash and dry your hands and then realise that your ingredients will stain anything you touch.

Take the salmon and rub it in the chopped stuff; place it all under the grill.

This one is a pretty quick cooker, depending on how you like your salmon.

From coming in through the door to serving up in under an hour; not bad going.

Shame it didn’t taste so good. I think i’ll ditch one of the big spices next time.

Following dinner I spent a considerable part of the evening sitting in the lounge and being with my own thoughts. As the evening drew in I lay there, feet up and sipping wine, thinking.

Where I am right now is where I need to be right now, but it’s not where I will stay.

July 8, 2017

Plan B it is

via Daily Prompt: Jangle

I love the jangle of the bike keys when I take them out of the cupboard.

So here’s the deal;

Sunshine? check
No kids? check
Bike gear? check
Training gear? check
Certificate of roadworthiness? silence
Dammit.

Turns out that the jangle when you put them back is exactly the same.

BSD