These Influence Much of Who We Become

I finish EVERY morsel on my plate. I NEED to. It’s a habit. I blame a Marine Corps drill instructor from 1960.

Growing up, it was practically a cardinal sin to waste food. My awesome dad reinforced that principle with a humorous story from Marine Corps OCS.

So many of the habits, good or bad, that we carry through life were learned from our earliest family experiences.

One day, Pops finished chow and was returning his tray when he was confronted by a snarling DI. Pops had eaten everything he’d been served, except three cubes of butter. As he was scraping his dish into the garbage, the DI stopped him and growled…

“Take what you want but eat what you take, Marine!”

He made my dad stand there in front of the garbage cans and choke down all that butter.

From then on, the Reilly kids would hear those words at any meal in which we tried to be excused without finishing everything on our plate… “Take what you want but eat what you take.”

To this day, I can’t seem to leave any food on my plate, or even my daughters’. I’ll be well past feeling full, even overstuffed, but I’ll choke down every last scrap left on any plate on the family table.

Now, this doesn’t jive with the best of nutrition habits – eating well past full. But, it’s such an ingrained habit, and one that I associate with a virtuous behavior – never wasting food, that I wouldn’t even consider trying to change it.

Many of our most ingrained habits are those that we picked up from our early life experiences.

Next time that I reach out, we’ll dig deeper into how the groups we associate with, or hope to, shape our habits.

For now, take a moment and reflect for a bit on some of the habits, good or bad, that were imprinted on your young mind. It’s likely those habits that have shaped the person you’ve become.

Changing that person may require rethinking who we associate ourselves with.

Helping our MidStrongers form new associations and adopt new habits is part of how we guide them to becoming the person they’ve always imagined they could be.

You can do this. Don’t settle. Join us.

Stronger than our excuses.