I LOVE birthdays! To me, birthdays are even bigger than Christmas as they are all about you. It is a time when you get to celebrate the passing of another year, ideally with your family and loved ones. It is a time to reminisce on all of the good times and lessons that you have learnt over the past year. This week it is Transitions Chiropractic’s 3rd birthday and we could not have done any of it without you! Merissa and I are so proud of how our little business is growing up. There have been 3 major things that we have learnt that I think can apply to a lot of other life situations and I believe that you could apply them too.
3 key lessons:
Change is Necessary
It is quite crazy to think just how much as a business and personally we have changed over three years. Transitions Chiropractic started as Merissa’s & my 1st baby, yet before we had even been open for twelve months Cain came along and well we all know lil Miss Peyton popped into the world less than two years after that…. That caused us to change and hire our amazing team of reception staff which is beautifully taken care of by Lana and Leisa. Around that same time I was brutally sick, I had to massively change my diet & exercise and well it worked! Not only do I feel better, but I was able to stave off the blood transfusion the doctor wanted to give me and I was able to get back into racing with even faster and better results. Recently we had to completely change our office location. This was a huge shift and definitely something I did not expect to do in our first 9 years, definitely not in 3… The end result is our beautiful new King St, Newcastle location which I believe really brings Chiropractic care to the Newcastle City.
I know I was scared to lose Merissa from the office, I was very reluctant to change my diet and I was almost jumping off the ledge at the thought of moving our office, but all of those things are completed and for the better. Sometimes we have to be pushed into a corner before we are willing to adapt, but it is here where the magic lies. Merissa is integral in running Transitions Chiropractic while taking care of our beautiful kids, I am getting older but I am getting stronger & faster and our King St office already feels like a better fit! My old favourite quote from The House of Cards “to grow is to change, to perfect is to change often”. You and I might not be perfect and although we might not like change, it does make us better. In what area of your life do you think you could benefit from changing? It is hard, it does take time and deliberate practice, but change is worth it.
Adapt
I fell in love with the concept of adaptation when I first learnt about Charles Darwin and his famous studies on the Galapogos Islands during high school biology. As he quoted “it is not necessarily the fittest or the strongest that survive, but those with the most willingness to adapt.” Similar to the points above, we have had to adapt a lot over the past three years. As every parent knows, kids forget to read the instruction manual and decide when they choose to have a rough night sleep, not eat their food, get sick or injured. Likewise, cars always seem to break down or tax bills are due at the most inopportune time.
I love having a plan and I love sticking to a routine, but being able to adapt the routine or schedule is critical. By all means try to stick to the schedule as much as possible, but do not beat yourself up if you have to change. The basic tenants of health and happiness are always there and sometimes all we can do is come back to the basic foundational principles because at the end of the day, as long as there are met, life is good.
Grateful
For as long as Merissa and I have been together we have celebrated Thanksgiving. Not in a sense of being grateful to the pilgrims, but in a sense of sitting together with good friends and family and saying what we are thankful for. However, this celebration only happened once a year in November. So a few years ago we started our weekly “Grateful dinners.” Literally once a week we would say what we are grateful for at that given day. It is amazing just how much we would forget just how many good things are going on around us and it was blindly obvious just how easy it was to mope around in life only focussing on the negative. We have so much to be grateful for whether it is this amazing City of Newcastle we live in or our beautiful friends and family.
Personally I am grateful for the ability to help people through chiropractic each and every day and for the support that you have shown us over the past three years. Without each of your contributions, there is no way we would exist today. I am grateful for my amazing staff and my ever loving family supporting my every move. When was the last time you actually verbalised what you are grateful for? Sometimes this simple practice makes us realise that the grass isn’t always greener on the other side and the grass on our side is pretty damn lush and delicious already…..
So in keeping with the lessons, we are always here to help you transition and adapt your way through 2016. It has been a crazy and wild ride, one which I absolutely thank you for being a part of. As a gift, we will continue to reward anyone that wishes to refer their family or friends with a complementary chiropractic adjustment. We are eternally grateful for your help and we look forward to helping you throughout the next three years….