Changing your habits

Sometimes you have the tools to make things better and you don't know it or sometimes you just don't remember. A couple of times in the last few weeks people in our office have had body issues and their immediate reaction was to go back to old habits that either didn't work or worked marginally.

The first time was when my co-founder, Diann, and I were in a meeting at our offices and suddenly she asked me if we had any alcohol in the office. Well, this immediately confused me. My first reaction was to think she was referring to beer or wine.

I looked at her perplexed and asked her why she wanted alcohol. She explained that for some reason her thumb was pretty sore and it was her habit to soak a sore thumb in alcohol. I'm not sure where she learned that from.

It's not anything I've heard before, but I asked her why she just didn't use the Muscle & Joint Spray which we had plenty of in the office. A light went off for her head and she smiled and immediately got some M&J spray and applied it to her thumb. And of course she got immediately relief and she laughed because she was surrounded by the product that would help, but out of habit it didn't occur to her. The soreness didn't return.

Not too long after that our shipping manager, Carol, was limping around the office. I asked her what happened. She gave me some strange explanation about how she sprained her ankle and now it was all swollen and quite painful. (Something about sitting cross legged for too long and then getting up too quickly after her foot went to sleep.)

I asked her how she was treating it. Other than putting some ice on it, she really wasn't doing anything for it. Just staying off it until it got better.

She knows about the Muscle & Joint Kit and that many people use it on sprain ankles. But it didn't occur to her, even though she uses many of the other products. So after my prompting she tried the Muscle and Joint Kit that evening.

The next day the swelling had gone down and the pain was almost gone. She was pretty excited as she had been afraid that she might miss more than a week of running. But now she was sure that she was only going to miss a couple of days. Which turned out to be about right.

So the lesson here is that it takes some time or at least some effort to incorporate something new in your life, like these herbal formulas, so that you actually remember to use them when the time is right. (It also helps to have them around so they are there when you need them.)