With six of us in our family, getting out of the house on time can be challenging.
It’s quite rare that we actually manage to leave the house at the time that we’ve agreed.
Sometimes the kids won’t get ready until they see that the others are ready.
Because they don’t fully trust that everyone will be ready at the specified time.
“You just get completely ready on time and then you can do something else until the others are ready” I’ll often tell them.
“Not “I can be ready in 5″ because then we have to wait for you for 5 minutes, but completely ready. Shoes on, coat out, bag ready, literally ready to walk out the door. Then go on your phone or whatever until everyone’s ready”.
We had a conversation about it the other day.
And about how different people can be in how they experience the passing of time and their attitude to punctuality.
And my wife told the kids about some of the challenges she has when dealing with some of international companies that she works with.
From countries who have a much ‘laxer’ approach to punctuality and deadlines than we do.
She particularly mentioned some of the African companies that she works with who never, ever meet their deadlines.
Who’s promise of getting something to her at a particular point is made with little intention of that actually happening.
Culturally, for some, deadlines and time frames are a much looser concept.
And, as she talked about this, I was reminded of a course that I went on about 15 years ago.
Which, amongst other things, also covered different people and different cultures’ approach to time frames and punctuality.
But, as I’m sure you’ve guessed from the blog title, the big difference was the speaker referred to this as “Black time”.
Which, as I’m sure you can imagine, didn’t go down too well.
Which led to a number of the attendees switching off to much of what the speaker was saying.
The use of one particular word causing the rest of the message to be lost or forgotten.
As it often can be.
People switching off to “diets” when, in reality, all have a diet.
It’s just what we eat.
And to get different results from something that’s affected by our diet, we need to make some changes to our diet.
All people not liking approaches that involve consideration of “calories”.
When, if weight loss is our goal, a calorie deficit is what needs to be created.
Even if we create it in a way that doesn’t directly involve counting calories.
Or we avoid anything that we consider to be a source of stress.
Forgetting, that stress in life is unavoidable.
Avoiding stress short-term creates more long-term.
The tactical choice of the positive, energizing challenges that create what we could call “eustress”……..
Often minimizers the longer term negative, draining “distress”.
Ultimately, we can all use whatever words we like.
However, if we end up approaching something in a way that doesn’t lead us in the direction that we want to go in because we’re avoiding certain words and concepts……….
Maybe we could question that (and, if we’ve been reading these blogs for a while and not taking the next step to change our life, maybe we could question that? And maybe jump to www.myrise.co.uk/apply to get something set up for September, before all the places go?.
Much love,
‘Better’ Jon ‘than never’ Hall
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RISE in Macclesfield was established in 2012 and specialise in Group Personal Training weight loss programmes for those that don’t like the gym and find diets boring and restrictive!
