I don't know what parenthood is like for you, but I used to need 48 hrs in the day to just keep my head above water! I was always chasing my own tail! I then came across a really simple principle that blew my mind AND IT WORKS!!! It is the 80/20 rule. For the people listening at home that may not be familiar, the 80/20 rule or Pareto Principle, is a concept by Vilfredo Pareto from the 1800s. In simple terms, 80% input, gives 20% output and vice verse, 20% input gives 80% output. He noticed this when looking at hundreds of things from daily life. So if you have 100 clients, 20% create 80% of your revenue, 80% of your household spending is on 20% of the bills, 20% of your to-do list will generate 80% of the benefit and so on. Now the ratio might not be exact and could be 75/20 or 85/15, especially if there are only a small amount of inputs available, but in the mean, it is around 80/20. Whatever dude, math sucks! Okay, okay, it sounds cool and all, but what does this mean in practical terms? Focusing on the 20% will give you 80% of your outcomes. Doing it that way means you are 16x more efficient! You can work one day and get 4 days of output! Pair this principle with a VA/EA..... 🔥 If you really want to go extreme, you can 80/20 the 80/20! That means 4% input gives 64% output. So 2 hrs input equates to 3 days output 🤯 If you do another round of 80/20. 0.8% input equates to 51% output. This works out at 20 mins input is 2.5 days output..... If you look at your list of stuff to do in a day, see what will give you the biggest gain for the least amount of input and do that first. Then the next, and the next and so on. This means some minor stuff won't always get done straight away, but more will get done overall. This is why people like Elon Musk can run 7 companies and is the richest man in the world. He has the same 24 hrs as everybody else, he just homes in on the 80/20 for EVERY process or problem. Hopefully this helps?

During a pretty exhausting deployment in 2007 I was looking for ways to calm my brain that was wired 24/7, Google said meditation was the answer. Easy.... 😎 It was IMPOSSIBLE!! I lay on my bed and tried to breathe and empty my mind. I could manage about 15 seconds before the monkey with cymbals was back making a ton of noise in my brain. I tried again, and again, and again. Not once could I manage, even after a few days of trying. So I filed meditation in my "dumb shit that doesn't work" section of my brain and left it for 15 yrs. I declared to my soon to be wife, "meditation is for hippies!" 😡 After 10 deployments, marriage, 2 children, several friends being killed and seeing a lot of battlefield trauma... I was close to breaking point. To speed the story up, I paid $5,000 to attend a veterans retreat in Mexico that used physician supervised psychedelic therapy. THE single most important part of my treatment post-retreat was meditation. It has been a game-changer! I have missed literally two or three days of meditation since then and can easily go for an hour. It turns out I was doing it wrong. In Mexico, I learned to meditate properly. I was doing the typical Dave thing and overthinking it. It is waaaay easier than I thought and helps to completely calm my body and the ADHD monkey with the cymbals in my head. 🐒 Try it! Here are the steps: 1. Breathe in through your nose whilst counting to 4, hold for 4, Breathe out through your mouth for 4, hold for 4. 2. Repeat #1 Thats it! If your mind wanders, THAT IS NORMAL! Just bring it back to counting.... rinse, repeat. Don't beat yourself up about it. The magic is the breathing as it regulates and calms your central nervous system. It's free. It's easy. You kind of have to breathe anyway. It has no side-effects. It can be done anywhere. It can be done with your children. It demonstrates to your child how to regulate emotions. Sitting cross-legged in a leotard while listening to whale farting music is entirely optional.... 😂

I am not sure if this is just me, or this is every parent but I HATE prepping meals. I also hate feeding my children crappy food. So onward marches the eternal dilemma, convenience vs health. I have found that if I can have fun making food then I actually (almost) begin to enjoy it. To do that I try to make their dinner interesting and fun. The added side-effect is that they are more likely to eat it as well. This is what I do: 1. See what food is available in the fridge, freezer and pantry. 2. See what food I can prep in a different way that makes it more interesting 3. What scene can I create that will make the children smile 4. Get creating The key step is #2, so to help you here are some ideas: - Cucumber cut length-ways or into triangles - Hollow-out tomatoes and use them as a bowl or make an eye out of them by putting half a hard-boiled egg inside - Broccoli 'planted' in mashed potato to make a forest, add food coloring to make the mash different colors - Fruit or veg kabobs, bonus points for it being rainbow in color - Cut bread into shapes like fish, monsters, cars etc. Toast them or make mini-french toast. Add food coloring to the egg to make several colors - Dinosaur eggs - hard boiled eggs that you crack the shell once boiled and soak in food coloring water for 30 mins, then remove the shell. Make a nest out of spaghetti, cucumber sticks, kale etc. - Octopus spaghetti - Carefully push hard spaghetti through meatballs or hot dog chunks and then boil in red food dye or beet juice water. You then have a ton of little octopus or jelly fish. - Find cookie cutters and use them to make waffles, eggs, pancakes etc into random shapes The list goes on and on.... Just get creative and experiment. Enjoy it! Have fun and post some of your creations below.

I was a Top Gun instructor in the Royal Air Force, if you have seen the film Top Gun you will know that all military aircrew are steely-eyed ice-cold killers who have no emotions, because "up there if you think, you are dead!!" As you can imagine, everybody thought they were the best of the best and did everything perfect. So, when we had the next Maverick, who turned out to be more MiddleRoad, we had to bring them down to earth gently as taxpayers had spent $millions just to get them to that stage. Now to let you understand, military flying training is a SAVAGE environment to an outsider, where all students are basically 5 flights away from being permanently cut from training with debriefs being very direct and hyper-focused on what seems like minutiae. To that end, we had to debrief in a way that never crushed a students spirit but allowed them to learn from their mistakes and come back stronger next time. To do that we used the RCP framework, which officially stands for: - Recognize - Cause - Prevention or unofficially: Ridicule, Criticize, Patronize 😆 So we break it down like this: - Recognize the problem - Find the root cause - Explain how to prevent it That might look something like this... "Your missile wouldn't launch as you could not get a lock on the other aircraft (Recognize), this was because you were too close for missiles (Cause). Next time you need to monitor your distance and when too close for missiles, switch to guns (Prevention)" 😎 "Yeah, yeah... cool story Dave... whatever!" Well.... this works sooooo well with children (and spouses 🫣). Here's a real world example from my house this morning. Emily was trying to sweep the floor and not doing a great job. "Hey sweetheart, great effort but there are a few little bits that escaped in the corners, can you see it? (Recognize). This is normally because the broom is not really great for corners so you never managed to get it right into the corner (Cause). Let me show you how to get fully into the corner by turning the broom on it's side like this. (Prevention).

When Emily was 3 she LOOOOOVED the film Trolls. We must have watched it literally 50 times in a few months. She always loved lying with me or Linzi and snuggling. Her favorite part of the movie was "hug time", which for those non-aficionado's regarding Trolls, is when the Trolls set an alarm to have a huge group hug. It is really quite wholesome. Well, Emily was going through one of her development stages and being particularly clingy and needed a lot of reassurance. For those that know what I am talking about, you will understand how stifling it can be having a child constantly needing reassurance and contact. I was still in the military and was working crazy hours and weird shifts, so she REALLY clung to me. The next time she was playing, I sat with her and steered the conversation around to what was going on with her. And like any normal self-respecting 3 year old, she had no idea. 🤦‍♂️ I asked, did she just want to be made to feel special and loved, to which she replied "yes". So, I stored this new info in my, 'things to try and figure out' file in my brain so that I could ruminate over it in the next few days. Later that day of course, we had a date with Trolls (aaaaagain?!).... That is when I had the idea hit me square in the face, "Hug Time"! We set an alarm for every 30 minutes and when the alarm went off, we all got together as a family and had a group hug for 30 seconds. It. Was. A. Game-changer! Within an hour Emily was less clingy and more content. The added bonus was that Max became less high-energy and calm. After a week I stretched it to 40 mins. Next week 50 mins, then eventually an hour. Simple, yet super effective! Who knew Princess Poppy could teach me something about connection, despite watching it 429 times beforehand... 🥴