The 5 P’s
Blog 2 The 5 P’s
As promised from last week’s blog I am back to write another blog, The 5 P’s.
This week’s blog was inspired by a thought that came to me during meditation. It’s been 28 days since I started meditation. I can honestly say I haven’t had an amazing experience with meditation or an out of body experience but I will continue with my journey. During Meditation thoughts come and go uncontrollably but the main thing is you don’t engage in those thoughts. You bring your awareness back to the breath and or repeat a mantra.
So the thought that came to me during mediation was about patience. I’ve been mediating for 28 days and I think I’m waiting for something, I’m not sure what but at the moment I feel like something is missing. When I finished my meditation, I came back to my thought of patience and reminded myself that it’s ok for this not to be perfect, it’s ok for thoughts to come and go. I praise myself for sticking with it for so long and being able to be still for 20 minutes. And this is when I started to think about the other P’s…. Persistence, Practice, Positivity & Praise.
The 5 P’s is an approach that can be implemented into your training, diet, career, business or even walking your dog. This approach was expanded upon during my dog walk this morning.
Marlie is my daughters’ dog, a bull mastiff cross Rottweiler. She’s still a puppy at 9 months old and still learning. We also have a little dog named flower. She is 17 years old and is a chihuahua cross foxie. She is old and set in her ways and because Marlie is so big and still a puppy she stands over the top of flower and wants to play and can get a little rough at times. My daughter gets frustrated with Marlie when she doesn’t listen and you have to ask her 5 times to sit or to be gentle. During my walk this morning was when I began to dive deeper into the 5 P’s and how I can implement this into training a dog, my business and how my clients can implement this approach into their training.
These are in no particular order and I believe you can’t have one without the other.
- Patience
Something I haven’t been very good at but also something I am teaching myself every day. Things don’t change overnight. You don’t put on 5 kilos in a week so why expect to lose 5 kilos in a week. Things take time in your health, fitness, mindset, business, in your training and training your dog.
We all want instant gratification and want things without waiting. We expect packages delivered the same day. We expect immediate results in the gym. We have food delivered to us already pre-cut so that we can get a meal cooked 10 minutes faster. We can even have a book read to us or summarized for us so that we don’t have to read them. I think that has led us to a life where we have very little patience. Maybe it is time we slow down and practice a little patience.
To practice more patience, start by making yourself wait for something like a cup of coffee or a drink and the move onto something bigger.
Another way to practice patience is to be mindful of the things making you impatient. Most people have several tasks in their head, and they jump from thought to thought without taking the time to finish one task first. We live interrupted lives as we try to multitask and it is frustrating when we feel we aren’t making progress. It is better to be mindful of our thoughts and the best way to understand this is to write down what makes you impatient. This will help you slow down and focus on one task at a time and remove those things that stress you out.
2. Persistence
Are you persistent? To me, this means never giving up. Never give up on your dreams and your goals. Not letting anything or anyone stop you or get in your way from achieving your hopes and dreams.
No matter how many times you think you might fail, keep trying until you succeed.
Two areas of my life where I am learning and implementing persistence.
a) With my Meditation – I could have given up after a few days when I had thoughts of ‘not doing it right’ or feeling like something ‘special’ was supposed to happen but I didn’t. I’ve continued on my meditation journey and being patient with myself and allowing each session to be what it is, a practice. Each day I wake up and meditate without judgements.
b) Walking Marlie – there was a time I did give up walking Marlie. She flat out refused to walk for me. This went on for about 2 weeks. I’m not a huge fan of dogs, I’m more of a cat person. When I was younger, I was attacked by my neighbors’ dog and since then I’ve had a fear of dogs. We’ve always had dogs but little dogs. So, when I walk Marlie and I see owners walking their dogs off their leads it really freaks me out. The day I decided to give up walking Marlie was when she absolutely refused to walk for me. She stopped and sat down and refused to move.
So, we sat for a little bit and then headed back to the car. When we were heading back to the car there was a dog off the lead with no owner in sight. It freaked me out. We waited for the dog to leave and I ran with Marlie to the car. And I busted into tears. I was shaking and my heart was racing and that’s when I decided, I wasn’t going to walk her any more. I’ve never had anxiety or experienced an anxiety attack but I think this is what it was.
So, I stopped walking her. Only days later we found out she had kennel cough and that was the reason for her behaviour. She wasn’t allowed to go for walks because kennel cough is highly contagious and I was happy to go for my own walks.
Weeks later I decided to try again with a different strategy (read my blog from last week) and so far, I am enjoying walking her and training her.
3. Practice
You’ve heard of the saying “Practice makes Perfect”. I believe this to be true even though there’s no such thing as perfection. But persistent practice makes you better each and every time.
4. Positivity
Life is always better when you have a positive attitude and positive thoughts. We have over
70 000 thoughts a day and 70% of those thoughts are negative. What’s important here is we don’t dwell in those negative thoughts. When you find yourself with a negative thought counteract that thought with a positive thought. If we can practice doing this consistently our mind will only get stronger at becoming more positive.
5. Praise
From my learnings of the book ‘How to win friends and influence people’ I learned about how not only people but animals respond better and are more productive when praised. If your goal is to lose weight or run 5km you must reward and praise your efforts on your journey. Just like my journey with Marlie. She likes to be rewarded and praised. Today when we walked, I took treats and her behaviour improved. And this is where I started thinking about these 3 P’s which turned into the 5 P’s. Even though she is only a puppy, if I keep teaching her, praising her, rewarding her for good behaviour she will be a well-behaved dog with good habits and skills. But it’s perseverance, patience and practice.
Final Thoughts
I believe you can’t have one without the other. If you want to succeed in anything in life have to have Patience, be Persistent, have Positivity, Practice and Praise yourself.
Until next time my friends,
Sending you Light & Love
Tracy