JFDI

I found myself writing this when Julie Hodgins tagged me in a post about the story behind the book designed and lay out she did for me.

This brought back memories! It's me on draft 20-something of my book. It doesn't look like much for 10 years work, but a lot went into The Patient Parent.

Here's the back story. I had an anger and impatience problem with my parenting, but couldn't find anything to help. I was feeling pretty stuck for a while, then decided to work it out myself. Just Fucking Do It - JFDI - has become one of my mottos ever since. It's a hard one to follow, but a firm fixture for me.

JFDI has taken me on all sorts of fun adventures along the way. Over the years I've helped thousands of other parents, and worked with parenting and children's organisations in all sorts of places (all this is a side project, joint 3rd priority with health after 1st family and 2nd the day job 4.5 days a week).

The book works (if your kids are under 12, because teenage years are a different game). The hardest part is remembering, or choosing to actually do the stuff that works.

Especially as a parent because there's so much to do so something has to go. It's a lot easier to just not choose and go with the urgent. That way you've got an excuse, or there wasn't a commitment in the first place so there's no attachment to the choice being made.

Making a choice is really hard and, as this writing rolls out of me, pretty much stream of consciousness, I realise that's what also makes JFDI so hard to follow. It's about making a choice, a commitment about the kind of person we want to be. But doing that, at least when I've JFDIed life, has led to great things happening.

If you've got this far, thanks for staying with my flow, hopefully that's given you a good thought for whatever comes next for you.