A PRIVATE CONVERSATION

Les

explains why he often holds conversations with himself!

Some people would suggest this should be cause for concern that I frequently find I talk to myself. My conversations seem to follow at times a certain pattern. For example, something may remind me of when years ago I spent some 15 years as Treasurer of our village Social Club. Well yes I know all about that so we don't want to dwell on it, the question I ask myself is, "Well were you any good, did our Club prosper, if not why not?" It wasn't just good enough for me to have kept my hands out of the till; neither was it good enough to say that if I hadn't have been the Treasurer maybe no one else would and the Club would have folded. Surely you don't just keep the ship afloat you progress.

You could come across someone who was, for example, a Parish Councilor for many years which some would say was very commendable. But I would ask myself and would like to ask that person, but would never dare, "Yes but were you any good, what did you achieve? "Just being there isn't good enough.

It is obvious in the conversations I have with myself that I have discovered I am a target person and I am at a loss to understand why some others are not. I can't see how you can go through life without targets. You certainly can't play any sport without them; there just isn't a single sport that hasn't got them. Imagine trying to play football if somebody had pinched the goal posts or playing cricket with no wickets. How could you play golf if the holes had been filled in, and so on?

If it is, therefore, essential to have targets in your sporting life then it must be equally essential to have them in every other aspect of your life. I just can't imagine life without targets but in order to hit your target the first thing you must do is to take aim. Does our local football club at the start of the season say to themselves, by the way we all talk to ourselves even if we don't like to admit it, "Well we might win some games, lose a few, but not to worry". Well that's a club I wouldn't want to belong to. It would to me be a funny old business; it could be in farming or a village shop, that didn't plan to be in a certain position at the end of the year. You don't plan to go bankrupt, but if you do it's because you didn't plan. It's not just what you did but more importantly what you didn't do.

And there I think is the point I am trying to make. We should spend more time talking to ourselves and, if we did, we would ask ourselves not why do we keep knocking our heads on a brick wall, why do we keep smoking, etc, etc, but why don't we stop? So let's set ourselves some targets to aim at. So sometime in the future we stop doing what we now do and start doing something what we should do, like throwing a brick at the telly! Life without the soaps, there is one, and a far more rewarding one.

Les Lawrence