Becoming A Dad (Twice) & Building Through Chaos
I started to set myself deadlines. “By THIS DATE you are gonna have this module and this rehab plan completed.” I’d start in earnest with the planning and writing and I might even get as far as starting to build the slideshow or read a few studies... and then something would show up in life and that deadline would slip by. And I'd do the same again and see another one sail freely by me.I cannot tell you how many times I opened my laptop and the course folder just sat there on the screen looking at me… and I’d end up avoiding it like it was judging me!
Like every naive new father - you tend to underestimate the change that having a child brings to your life. I certainly did. Absolutely everything got bumped a few notches down the list of priorities (and rightfully so). My little daughter meant lots of time carrying, winding, cleaning up poop, shopping for baby stuff… That left less time for building my course. I did manage to make decent progress over the first year of her life in short fits and bursts, but i still had SO MUCH to do.
Toward the end of 2021 we got an opportunity to buy a house back up home in Monaghan and we took it. Little did we know that what we thought was going to be a straightforward sale took us into a complex legal stalemate (that was none of our doing or responsibility to resolve) that lasted almost 2 years.
I’ll be the first to admit looking back at that time that the whole process left my mood majorly affected and I felt like doing absolutely nothing to build my online course at times. I had this open loop in my head about my course that I never seemed any closer to closing. At times, I was that consumed by the goings on in life that I didn’t have the brain space to think about course work.
In the middle of all of this we had another baby, a little boy this time, who had awful reflux for the first 6 months of his life. A lot more work around the home and navigating the challenge of two kids in 20 months meant that life was getting significantly busier and opportunities to work on the course were less and less.
I started to set myself deadlines. “By THIS DATE you are gonna have this module and this rehab plan completed.” I’d start in earnest with the planning and writing and I might even get as far as starting to build the slideshow or read a few studies... and then something would show up in life and that deadline would slip by. And I'd do the same again and see another one sail freely by me.I cannot tell you how many times I opened my laptop and the course folder just sat there on the screen looking at me… and I’d end up avoiding it like it was judging me! And my wife, she’d tell you herself that she was sick to the teeth of hearing me talk about how good this course would be…. And then a few weeks later - hearing me be so hard on myself for not doing any work on my course “in ages”.
I read in a book somewhere that “work expands to fill the time you allow for it”. It’s always stuck with me. And I genuinely tried to impose deadlines on myself. It didn’t work. It became clear to me that it had to mean something. It can’t just be an arbitrary deadline without any consequence because if it was, I simply wouldn’t take any notice of it because my “deadlines” were in fact more like timid “suggestions”....
Frustration. I kept saying to myself, “this shouldn’t be this hard”. But it was. And I can easily draw parallels between how I felt and how clients describe feeling when they come back for a follow up appointment and for one reason or another, they haven’t managed to do their exercises.
Consistency - even when the reason for doing something is obvious and meaningful - is fucking hard.
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