30-Day-Challenges

Day 5 of the Better Man in 30 days challenge – Cultivate Your Gratitude --- Quite a few things to be thankful for, in no particular order: Friends who consistently come through. Needing to make a significant wire transfer earlier this week, a quick call to a couple of old chums resulted in a speedy resolution. Top lads C and O. Family - warts and all. And mine, myself included, do have warts! J whose patience with my stuttering, complicated self is a refreshing breath of air; Work - and the opportunities it has presented over the last ten years and counting. A certain stint somewhere in my past still keeps opening doors. Grateful. The internet and how easily it provides solutions - stumbled on an excel tutorial on spark-lines which might have saved a side project I am working on. Not one of the things I miss about those heady Eket days it must be said. (Not so) Little children, particularly F, my friend O’s precocious daughter. Hanging with her gives me hope for the future. I am not too damaged to make a half decent dad. Success in one more exam, no lengthy post nominals to append to my name unfortunately but small steps in the right direction I think. Health - no new major scares (as far as I know). Great work conversations - currently talking an old work friend through a weighty decision. That she and I are still in contact nearly five years after we last worked together is so much more reassuring given my current work situation. And Nandos – ’nuff said.

Day 4 of the Better Man in 30 days challenge - Increase your testosterone --- The ‘symptoms’ pretty much describe me at the moment, even though I like to think the drivers are slightly different for me, given I am chasing a lot of things at the moment. In an ideal world, #9 would have been the perfect shoo, but real life dictates, and I went with actions 6, 7, 8. Lunch was a Boots salad bowl whilst dinner was grilled chicken topped up with almonds as a snack. ...

Day 3 of the Better Man in 30 days Challenge - Find a Mentor — In thinking through today’s challenge, I realised there is a shed load of historical mentors I had to acknowledge - the Artful dodger (so nicknamed by his own father no less) whose MO always seemed to be to stay just on the right side of the law at all times (he was the inspiration to go into engineering), OO, the social studies teacher who intervened when yours truly was nabbed trying to pilfer a book from the secondary school library, Dr K at the Steel plant where I interned in 2000 who sowed the seeds of an appreciation for materials in me and DEL and MMK who held my hand as I took my first shaky steps as a rust geek back between 2003 and 2008. All that is part of why mentoring and mentorship are core values I intend to hold on to dearly both as a giver and a recipient. ...

Day 2 - Shine Your Shoes Shining my shoes is usually not top of my to dos on any given day, given I consider them functional items of clothing rather than providing any aesthetic value. Notwithstanding, in the spirit of the challenge I decided to give my favourite, battle hardened Doc Martens some love.. From the looks of it, there’s still some life left in those beasts. Given my sense of pride and accomplishment upon completing today’s task, I suspect I’ll strut about a tad more than usual in the office tomorrow. :) Or maybe I’m just being overly enthused with my dodgy technique.. ...

These have gone through several iterations in the past, but having taken time again to consider this the five below stood out as my core values. It’s obvious I need to work on several of these to make them front and centre, given the reality of my life in certain areas doesn’t reflect these values. But don’t they say a problem identified is half solved? Faith: God, faith and how these interact in the real world and translate to personal and worldview integrity. Family : Nuclear and the future family :) Continuous Improvement: In three main areas - professionally, relationally and in delivering on the stated objective of contributing to life in the civic space. The intent is to actively seek out opportunities to learn both formally and informally for self improvement and a broadened knowledge base; challenging myself in the three main areas identified above. Mentoring: As someone who has benefitted greatly from the input of knowledgeable others both in my personal and professional life, taking an active interest in the lives of others with the aim of improving them is something I want to do more of. Health and Healthy Living: The ‘rigours’ of being a hands on rustgeek demand that I pass a medical exam every two years. The numbers from the last check in 2013 were a real wake up call - no thanks to shed loads of pizza and salt. That prompted a rethink and serious action to get the weight and junk food binges down to good effect. Getting healthy, staying healthy, leveraging technology to identify and eliminate risk factors and all the little decisions that feed into that has to be be more of a focus going forward.

Time and time again one finds himself back here, searching for what, one knows not. Between life, work and the issues inherent in them, my big resolve to do life in 30 day chunks limped along before dying in March. What little time to breathe I had was spent swotting for a couple of exams, critical components of the personal development plan for the year. Coming into June, I thought the Better Man in 30 days challenge from the Art of Manliness represented a good, meaty challenge to get my teeth into, a potential keystone habit if you like. For one, manliness and man-making represent a key strand that runs through and undergirds the Life Plan. In addition, blogging for an entire month was also one of the ideas for a thirty day challenge at the beginning of the year. Thanks to the two twitter BFFs - OluSimeon and SingleNigerian, any doubts I might have had about going through with the plan have been nuked thanks to public accountability. ...

Getting fit and lean is one of my key deliverables for 2014. The health effects being obvious, given my borderline LVH diagnosis from 2013, and an increasing desire to ditch my keg for a veritable six pack (hello ladies :). The general consensus seemed to be that the Paleo diet was a great way to achieve the calorie restrictions required to achieve that, whilst I work on defining the exercise component to that. Over the course of the 28 days of February, I managed 20 completions, slightly improved over the January numbers for challenge #1, but still far short of the full complement. ...

Challenge #1 was to develop a regular routine of prayer and bible study in the morning before heading out to work. The idea was to leverage the Hillsong Maximised Life Devotional - the plethora of social options by which it was delivered an incentive to complete this task. Overall though, I only managed 18 completions from 30, my longest streak being 4 days - terrible. Given the above, the plan for February is to continue with this challenge as well as add the Paleo diet to the list of habits for February 2014. The key expectations are to stay off sugar, grains and cereals, legumes, dairy and wheat, drink 2 litres of water daily, and Nandos (phew). ...

The prospect of poor health, a milestone birthday of sorts and all round malaise kicked off what was a great plan (in my opinion at least) to deliver change over the course of a year, which as I am wont to do, I tagged with the lofty title ‘ The Year of Living Dangerously’. It started off well – at least with regards to chasing up 52 small changes but the initial enthusiasm seeped out, prompting an attempt to gee myself up for a restart. ...