Learning from Your Mistakes

In my last post I shared with you the mistake I made resulting from the head of steam I had going into making a batch of blueberry pancakes for myself the other morning. This "head-of-steam" got built up because of my excitement over finding a new whole-grain based pancake mix from a venerable brand like Quaker Oats, which I'm a big fan of because I eat their oatmeal at least three times a week. I do this mainly to soak up the cholesterol waiting in my digestive tract to be assimilated into my blood supply. However, I also have come to enjoy eating those oats very much, and they really fill you up and stick with you. They will hold you till it's time to eat lunch unlike cereals you add milk to that leave you wolfish after just an hour. A side benefit of eating oatmeal is the "morning constitutional" you have a short time later. There's something to be said about a good healthy evacuation in the morning! Enough about that here though because I digress.

The purpose of this post is to share with you how I learned from the previous day's mistake and resultant stuffing of myself to start out the day. I still had some batter left over and decided to have some pancakes again a couple of days later. There was enough to make a couple more cakes of about the same size when I first whipped-up the batch. Well I was about to repeat the same thing I did two days earlier just as a matter of routine. I got the first one cooking and had the second dollop ready to slap on the griddle when I pulled myself up short and asked "do I really want or need to do this again"? The answer was "no, I did not", because I was not that hungry to begin with, and even if I was, it would probably still have left me with that uncomfortable feeling of being stuffed again. Something I surely did not need to start the day off again. So I opted just to have the one I already had going on the griddle and be done with it. This left me a breakfast for another day and a good way to economize, which has become quite necessary in this do-with-less economy that we are in.

As it turned out that one pancake was plenty for me. It left me full but without that stuffed feeling. To think how close I came to repeating the same error I had made just a couple of days earlier gives me pause. Pause to think how many times we all just do things as a matter of rote, that mindless programming we all operate on a majority of the time. If we can just be more aware of what it is we are about to do, then that alone will go a long way to curtail our excesses. We just need to stop ourselves and ask "Do I really need to do this?". You have to be vigilant about whether or not what you are about to undertake squares with what your ultimate objective is. If it is contrary to that then I think you know what the right decision is. DON'T DO IT! 
Tip #1