Six and half years ago the kids wanted a dog for Christmas. “I’ll do EVERYTHING if you get me a dog,” I was constantly told. I was a lousy dog owner as a kid and I wanted to do better. I wanted a dog that could come into work with me. I wanted an antique store dog.
An antique store dog is the black Labrador you see walking through an antique store and are unsure if it is a statue or real. The dog has the run of the place and isn’t bothered by anybody coming or going.
A friend told me they got a rescue dog from Puppies For Parole. “You can get a certified and trained dog to come into the clinic,” she said. Puppies For Parole takes shelter dogs and maximum security prisoners train them to pass the Canine Good Citizen Test and some dogs progress to one of three levels of Certified Helper Dog.
I reached out to Puppies for Parole and started the process to get a rescue dog. I needed a hypoallergenic Certified Helper Dog to come into the clinic with me. The first dog available was Holly. She was an 18 months to two years-old Shih Tzu mix weighing about 16 pounds. My wife picked her up and was told “We have had a lot of dogs come through the program. None of them walk around like she owns the place like this one.”
She is named Holly for her halitosis. I guess you need a sense of humor working in a shelter. Her bad breath improved when five rotting teeth were pulled on her first veterinarian appointment. i know nothing about her history prior to the prison. I received a nine page handwritten letter from the prisoner preparing me for Holly’s quirks and personality.
Our Gotcha Day for Holly was six years ago. Holly started at work with me the next day. Two days later clients could not believe I had her for less than a week. She moved right in and took over the place.
Carol, my manager, said “If every dog was like Holly, everyone would have a dog.” Check out the Puppies For Parole program for an inexpensive, crate trained, potty trained, leash trained rescue dog.
I used to enter each weekend hoping to get thirty things done and reach Monday with disappointment. Then I decided if I got just one thing done I had a successful weekend. If I I finished two projects, I was doing great. If I finished three projects I had a world-class productive weekend.
I do not need to world-class every week. I just need to get one thing done to be productive.
This morning I cleaned the butler pantry countertop where things pile up. I fixed the front trim on my daughter’s desk that she managed to break off. Finally, I moved a light in the workout room that blinded me with the bench press and when I looked up to grab the chin up bar. I did not get a single thing done for work and that is okay.
That was my Saturday. I have all Sunday to achieve something for work and have a truly world- class productive weekend.
Lowering my expectations helped me get more done and feel better about it.
I read the Power Of Habit a few years ago and finally put what I learned into action in 2019.
The quick summary is I needed to break the Stimulus => Response relationship I had built over my career. For as long as I can remember, I am either working or eating. Treat patients or shove food down my throat and get back to treating patients. The Stimulus => Response that developed was when things slowed for a minute, I would eat something. I was not necessarily hungry. But the habit told me I to eat.
To lose weight, in each break in the action, I needed to stop, take a moment, and recognize that I was not hungry.
I had great success breaking the habit and steadily lost weight.
Then the pandemic started and I developed a new bad habit I have yet to conquer. I arrive home and eat a ton of nuts. My weight is slowly roller-coastering but is in a lower range on the scale and I am still in narrower waisted pants. I am trying to break this habit by finding a different one to put in its place. Mixed nuts are just so tasty.
I have seen the future and now know a revolutionary new cash flow enhancing business strategy practiced by leading companies.
Dealing with insurance companies is always challenging. I was once advised to celebrate when things work rather than fret when they did not. Dealing with two of them recently has been impossible. Two companies with 60 percent of my business have claim processing systems that have gone kaputt. Nine of ten claims are processing incorrectly if they process at all. Hours have been spent on the phone trying to get this corrected wihtout success.
I can guarantee that the cost for my staff to be on the phone is higher than the cost for the off-shored insurance company representative.
When they finally admit fault and move to correct a claim we are told it will be 30 to 45 business days to be paid. We have gone from being paid in two weeks to being paid in two and half months.
What is the revolutionary, new, cash-flow-enhancing business plan? Stop paying your vendors. Send them a note. “Your invoice was not processed correctly. We will reprocess it and pay you in six months.”
You might get evicted. You might get sued. But the business plan is working extremely well for some people.
I asked a client how much of her workday was reactive and how much was proactive? She said 95% of her day was reactive. Unfortunately, I feel 99% of that day was reactive. I try to plan ahead. I have a framework of what I hope to accomplish and where I might progress the client in their session before they walk in the door. Then they arrive for their appointment and the plan is immediately revised.
With my business, I try to work on structural elements and other parts to be in a different place in three or six months. In E-Myth terms, I am trying to work on my business more and in my business less. But the business is primarily me. If I accepted that fact 20 years ago the practice would be called Tom Nuzum Physical Therapy and not TheraPlus. My business is solving the problems of the person in front of me. It is a reactive business.
I realized on the drive home that day that I can be proactive with meal planning. Planning ahead for what entree and what sides would we eat each night would help provide structure for each evening and decrease stress.
Being more proactive with meal planning lead to deciding ahead of time when I would workout, when would my wife workout and what guidance does she need from me, and who is giving the dog her first walk of the night?
When I am more proactive and get a handle on those three things ahead of time, the entire evening opens up. Things are settled down and the kitchen is clean at six thirty or seven o’clock instead of eight. That opens up an extra hour or more each night for me to do something. I can do some woodworking, reading, play ping pong with the girls, etc. It doubles or triples the length of my night.
I have a number of places to get more proactive and less reactive at work. Hopefully, having an extra 6 hours or more a week will help me make improvements there also.
I made an attempt at the 10,000 Kettlebell Swing Challenge last year. I failed. I made a mistake and mixed in a max deadlift workout when I was 80% done. The workout crushed me. It took me three weeks to bounce back.
The rules to the challenge are simple but flexible. Do 10,000 swings in a month. Do them every day or five days a week. Use a single kettlebell or work your way through your kettlebell collection. Or try something different every workout. It doesn’t matter. Just get your swings done.
My plan this time is to strip my workout down to the bare essentials five days a week. I will do five hundred swings a day for twenty days from February 15th to March 15th. This will get my workout volume back up, burn some calories, and I might drop a few pounds if I keep my intake under control.
Why do I want to do this? I don’t want to think. I have decision fatigue. My only decisions for the next month are when to start the workout and when the workout is done.
When you hit the wall with decision fatigue, try the 10,000 swing challenge.
I bought my wife a second generation Bed Jet six years ago.
A Bed Jet is a heater and cooler that blows air into a two-ply sheet on your bed. We have the bed sheet below the Cloud sheet the air heats or cools. We have a two compartment sheet because my wife and I have different temperature preferences. I would like the bedroom to be at 68 degrees. She would like it to be 73 degrees. During the summer I run it cold. My wife runs it hot. She runs it hot all year long.
The Bed Jet will run between 66 degrees and 104 degrees. The hot temperature is below the burning temperature of dust. When you run the heater, you will not get the burning smell you have when you kick on your furnace during the first cold snap in the fall.
When I wake up in the middle of the night to answer the call of nature, I hit the Turbo Heat button for a few minutes of warm to fall back asleep.
The Bed Jet is selling for $369. For my setup you need need two units and a Cloud Sheet which is $111 for the king size sheet. I spent $619 on mine. Alternatives to the Bed Jet are devices pumping water into a fitted sheet on the bed and run two to three thousand dollars.
The annual cost of the Bed Jet so far is $102 a year and declining. Thirty cents a day has been worth it for me. What would you spend for a good night’s sleep?
My wife has said she failed as a parent. Her daughters are not Nebraska Husker Football fans. They don’t understand the rules of football. I have failed as a father because they do not know the rules to wrestling. They don’t know what a torx, phillips head, or flat screwdriver are. They don’t understand the difference between and impact driver and a drill. But last night one of them spoke geek.
<Warning: WandaVision Spoiler Alert>
We were watching WandaVision and the episode ended with everyone confused except my middle daughter and me. We explained how the X-Men and mutants were intellectual property licensed by Fox, just like Spider Man. And when Disney bought Fox, they brought Spider Man back into the Marvel Universe but did not bring the X-Men or mutants into the Marvel Universe. Then last night, they did.
I have often hesitated to hire help for small tasks.
As a business owner I try to manage expenses. I pulled my own phone lines and set up the sound system in my clinic when I opened. It was going to cost $2000 to have somebody else do it. I thought that was a bit expensive for some time on a ladder with a fishtape pulling speaker wire and phone line. So I did it myself.
I have learned during my business education from Seth Godin that I am the cheapest person to do a job and the last person that should be doing it. Many small business owners do not place enough value on their time and will do the job rather than hiring someone to help. His warning was not to be one of them.
I was tweaking website layout and trying to knock the dust off my WordPress, CSS, and HTML skills. After some struggle and delay I hired a classmate of my daughter. He had it fixed in a few minutes.
Thomas Plummer tells gym owners in his books and seminar that they do not have enough employees to run a profitable gym. There should be one employee in charge of each of five profit centers. Attending his seminar and seeing gym owners wrestle with that message is eye opening. They want to keep costs down and payroll low. They are told the profit center should cover the employees salary and add to their net income. That is easy for me to say because I am not running a gym with five or more profit centers but I understand the message.
Value your time. Hire some help. Get the job done better and sooner. Spend the time you save doing higher value activities.
I haven’t been a runner in at least forty pounds. I have been immersed in strength sports for the past twenty years with some intervals and low intensity cardio for balance. I equated going on a hike with getting lost in the woods. Then I was invited to try an Orienteering race.
Orienteering is roughly running or hiking to find flags and punch your ticket, move onto the next point, return to the start as quickly as possible. The course length depends on difficulty of the course, which path you choose, and if you find the mark. You might pass it on the other side of a tree and add a mile to your course.
My first Orienteering race was in 13 degrees of freezing weather after a mix of snow and sleet. I dressed for the temperature and had a great time. I learned to read a topographical map and became more familiar with what the symbols in the legend meant. Cliff, depressions, gully’s, paths, streams, and elevation contours began to make sense as I navigated each point. My course was one eight the size of the advanced course.
The race was populated by adventure racers and people who find 100-mile runs enjoyable. I walked with an occasional jog. These men and women were flying through the woods from point to point wearing a thumb compass. They would find a point, punch their card, and be off with only a moment to orient themselves to what direction to go next.
The Saint Louis Orienteering Club organizes a race each month. Look online and see if there is a race near you and give it a try. Some races even have extra compasses to borrow. Check online and ask the organizers.
II have done six races now. We can call them events instead of races because I am not racing. I am just on a hike with a purpose.
