Defining Moments

Once upon a time there was a little girl who used to love watching her Mother cook. Every time it was steak for lunch she watched in curiosity as her Mother would take the piece of steak and trim all the edges off until it was a circle. The little girl couldn’t understand why she would waste so much of the meat, so she asked her Mother why she did it, to which her Mother replied “Because that’s what my Mother always used to do.”

So the little girl went round to her Grandma’s house, who happened to live next door and Granny happened to be cooking steak. “Granny”, she said “Why do you always trim the steak until it is in the shape of a circle and waste so much of it?”, “Because that’s what my Mother always used to do” she replied.

And so off went the little girl to her Great Grandma’s house, who happened to live next door and who happened to be cooking steak. “Great Grandma, why do you always trim the steak until it is the shape of a circle and waste so much of it?” and she replied “Because that is the only way it will fit in my small frying pan!”

How many things do you do in your life that are learnt behaviours? Ways of being or ways of thinking that you have picked up from other people because it seemed to be a good thing to do or a good way to be? We learn whether to be pessimistic or optimistic, whether to worry or whether to be realistic, whether to plan or whether to be more free flowing and people may say “Oohh you are just like your Mother”- that’s because we learnt to be that way.

Do you ever hear yourself saying “I am not that type of person?”

We spend so much of our time doing habitual behaviours, based on values we may not have examined for a long time, that define who we are as a person. Ways of being that maybe worked for us once that then become a strategy for living and often these ways are outdated and don’t really match who we are any more and keep us in a narrow existence…..but we keep doing them because that is what we have always done, as did our Mother’s before us and their Mother’s before them.

When did you last check in with yourself and listened to your own inner wisdom rather than just do what you have always done?

I was half way through a glass of Prosecco recently when I suddenly looked at it and thought “Why am I drinking this, I’m not sure I even like it”, and I haven’t had any alcohol since.

Now that may sound pretty extreme to most, but I really would encourage you to begin by examining the small things that you habitually do, even the coffee that you habitually order and try something different. You may be surprised by what you find out.