Challenge Yourself - You'll Feel Better For It

This blog post was nearly a rant about HBOS and why they are an incompetent bank but I didn't think it was fair to subject anyone to that on a Friday morning particularly when I could go on about it for at least 10 sides of A4 (front and back!! - picture Ross from friends and his angry face and you'll get where I am with them.)

So I'll save the ranting for my complaint letter later this morning and think about something a bit more positive here.  I've always wanted to write a book.  There it's out there in the public domain, there's no going back now.  Ever since I first read the first Harry Potter book - and realistically a long time before that, I've wanted to have that ability to capture people's imagination in the palm of my hand and take them on a journey with me.  What a talent to have!  I'm not sure then quite how I ended up down the blind-ended alley that dentistry is, but that's a blog post for another day.

Anyway, you come to a point in your life when you realise that all you do is get up in the morning, get the kids out to school, go to work, come home, taxi the kids around, do some more work, eat dinner and go to bed and it becomes an existence rather than life.  And you think to yourself there has to be more to life than this.  So one night when you've had a couple of glasses of wine you book yourself on a creative writing evening course thinking what a blast that will be.

I can't recall ever being more nervous sitting in a room than I was last night, particularly as we started introducing ourselves and over half the class were writing regularly and had box files of half written stories at home.   Half way through  we were asked to basically get down on paper the premise for the story we would write in the next 10 weeks - the genre, the characters, the setting, the plot - then the teacher came round and grilled us on our idea, pulling it apart to make sure it would stand up to writing.

It sounds terrifying and partly it was - but do you know what, it was invigorating!  It was like turning on a part of my brain that had been switched off for so long it was growing dusty in the corner.  I loved challenging myself.

It's so easy to get stuck in the mundaneness of the treadmill of life and not notice that its happened.  You've got to find time for yourself somewhere amongst that and take a chance at something new.  Enter a race, take up a new hobby, challenge yourself.  I promise you'll feel better for it.

                             

This week I've challenged our team to take part in Muddy Muckers to raise money for St Andrews Hospice.  Getting muddy, fresh air and exercise and raising money for a fantastic local charity - what a brilliant way to challenge ourselves!  We've already had some really generous sponsorship in the practice and we're also collecting at https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/gillian-preston

 At Coatbridge Family Dental Care we all look forward to hearing about your new challenges next time you're in the practice.  Keep us up-to-date with your lives by coming in to see us regularly for your dental health checks - I promise you'll feel better for that too.