Feed the Cows

As a career agriculture man, I live and breathe the importance of our ‘non negotiable’ jobs each day.

Every day when we wake up we know there is a list of jobs that simply must be completed; rain or hail, breakdowns or flood, sickness or injury, no matter the resistance the job must be done.

A way must be found.

It’s more than just a discipline that’s been earned, it’s a creativity in problem solving, a resilience in the face of adversity, it’s a mindset to keep showing up no matter what.

Honestly, the thought of not doing it doesn’t even cross my mind.

The difficult part is transferring this hard earned skill into all of my personal pursuits as well.

To be able to continue to develop a mindset where once I decide something is important for my life, once I make the commitment, that I stick to it. The goal is to make the important tasks in my life cows that need feeding. Non negotiable actions. A way must be found.

This past weekend I found myself at a weekend away with work, and the schedule of events wasn’t very conducive to fitting in a training session. I trained the day that we left and I knew that I would be able to train on the day we headed home so I wanted to fit one session in while I was away to keep momentum. I found myself with one chance, of about 35 minutes between engagements, so I headed to the little hotel gym and put together a quick session with the dumbbells they had.

This session made nearly no difference physically to my life and I would have been fine had I not got it in. The dumbbells weren’t heavy enough for a strength session and I didn’t get too much intensity knowing I had minimal warm up and cool down time.

This session was a mental one for me. It was ticking the box and building on that discipline to prioritise the things that are important to me. It was a mood changer knowing that I chose to stay disciplined. If I want to be a certain person then I need to have a certain set of actions, and this session built on those actions.

So in fact, I didn’t really have a choice.

I was always going to get the session in. I had to.

I fed my cows.

The question remains – what other areas of my life can I treat like cows?

Dice