It made me laugh so hard at all the things that I am actually afraid of that I have been afraid of since I was a kid, and have now trained myself to believe is normal. My irrational fears:

• Dangling my legs over my bed when sleeping. I’m now 99.9% sure there are no boogiemen under there, but NO WAY am I going to find out
• Sharks AND stingrays. Yup, even in the shallows.
• Popping corks on bottles of bubbly. I’m CONVINCED they’re going straight into my eyes.
• Automatic doors

And those are just the ones from the top of my head… It makes you wonder how we even get through the day with all the stupid irrational fears we have!

So… Our first 200 ‘likes’ on Facebook go into the draw to get a $100 top up on their Powershop account.

So simple, and this is just the beginning! We have big plans to make small differences to your cost of living, so if $100 isn’t enough of a temptation to like me, I promise, there will be plentry more incentives coming your way via our Flower Power Facebook page in the near future.

It’s amazing how much it grows, despite the fact that I was on the automatic ASB conservative fund.

And, once again proving that all you need to do to get customers thinking about you, is to contact them every now and then, I’ve launched into ‘adjustment of Kiwisaver’ mode.

Firstly, I’m switching to Gareth Morgans scheme. I have only heard good things about it and him, and I think his scheme is the only one that made any actual money last year (am I wrong?)

Secondly, I switched from Conservative to a mixture of growth and balanced (slightly favoring growth)… I enjoy immensely the different perspectives on ‘risky’ – when you own a business nothing quite cuts it in terms of ‘risk’

Thirdly, I am wondering if I am better of to withdraw it all and throw it on my mortgage? I keep hearing that you should get rid of debt asap, but I’m not sure if a couple of thousand dollars will do an awful lot?

I have a major fear that if I do anything the Government will find out and change the law so as we no longer get tax credits etc unless we left al our money in there.

It does get tough when you are doing your accounting though. I know some friends have questioned by ‘business entertainment’ at times… And now laugh that every time I go out, I either wind up drumming up a new lead or bumping into an old customer and start talking about work again. In my mind, life is different when you own the company. You NEVER stop working, and you survive off any networking you do.

But, am I the only one who often finds the line blurred between having a good time with friends and doing business with work colleagues?

I know a lot of people would say that if it’s fun, it’s not work, but I feel like that myth was dispelled the day I started working for myself and basically spend my life doing stuff I like (and get severely depressed when I go through a couple of months of NOT leaping out of bed to get cracking).

The I wonder if it’s the mix? Like if Im out with a group of people and one of them happens to be an accountant, and we spend 30 minutes going over the fine points of financial statements on my Friday night – I consider this valuable information, or is it just idle chit chat? If it’s 30 minutes out of 2 hours, does that change it? Is this a meeting or is it a drink?

Is it defined by the purpose? i.e if you INTEND to go get financial information, it’s a meeting, whereas if it happens by accident, it’s a drink.

Sometimes I think it’s funny that the things I get the MOST work out of or the best advice, are probably considered social situations, while the stuffy old ‘business’ events can often generate nothing, but probably look better in the accounts. Hmmm.

We’ve made it even more tempting, by putting the first $50.00 in your account when you sign up through the Flower Power Daisy promo.

And to sweeten the deal even more, the Power Kiwi AGM yesterday resulted in some cool plans to reward our loyal customers… We’re intend on being everything your current power company is not.

And remember, signing up to Powershop will probably be the easiest thing you do this week. Just enter a few details from an old power statement in their online form, and they do the rest.

So go on! Join the revolution!

But then I’ve always been relatively fit and totally healthy.

No one I know outside my Grandad (who often indicated that he was ready to leave this world in his last years when he was confided to a hospital bed) has actually faced dying slowly and painfully from an incurable condition.

But when I watched that NZ doctor the other night talking about the death he was facing, I found myself crying over my dinner at the thought of ANYONE having to not only come to terms with impending death before their time, but also to KNOW that it will be horrible. In a very emotional interview, he brought up several valid points, not only his brave acceptance of death (what guts does that take), but his terror at the manner in which he is going to have to die, and his fear that his family will be haunted by the circumstances of his death for the rest of their lives.

That’s a torture we do not even impose of murders and rapists.

So far the only argument I’ve heard against it is that elderly people may choose the option on the basis that they feel like they are a burden on their family. Is this actually a big issue? I genuinely don’t know.

The other argument, I think that goes hand in hand, is where do you draw the line? If you suffer severe depression, is it your right to choose to end it all? Is there any way (as with the death penalty) we can make the process long and complex enough to ensure most of these issues don’t come to light?

One thing that is 100%, absolutely, unbelievably wrong is that a man needs to choose to commit suicide BEFORE his time or his family need to choose to become murderers to ensure someone they love completely doesn’t have to suffer pain the rest of us can’t even imagine… Especially when the final outcome will always be death.

When I was watching this guy, I realised that I had found the one way I would in fact become a murderer. There is no way I could watch someone I love suffer like that, and I think many people share that opinion… And we’d all end up in jail.

The first was a 20/20 episode where they did those awesome psychological tests (in the US) whereby they placed a drunken girl and seedy guy in a bar (both were actors) and videoed the results of innocent bystanders watching a dirtbag try to lure a young, intoxicated girl back to his hotel room.

They had a HUGE hit rate of people speaking up, loudly and confrontationally (which either means people are better than I thought, or there are no Doves in the US). Several threatened to call the police (and in an absurd twist of events, the only person to laugh at the ensuing events was an off-duty cop).

They put it down to the men getting really upset at the thought no one would stand up for their daughters, and the women remembering a time they regret, when they were in the same boat. In my opinion, both those reasons took a little bit more empathy than I have come to expect from my fellow humans.

Then they extended the experiment to a poor, elderly woman at a chemist, who was told her insurance no longer covered to vital drug prescription… And this nice lady could no longer afford the drugs. As this woman (actor) became visibly upset, the NUMBER of people who stepped in and covered as much of her bill as they could (or in a lot of cases ALL of the bill), astounded me. Some even ran out to the ATM, which I thought would be a barrier to helping (i.e it becomes somewhat of an annoyance to the giver).

This situation, for many was probably so far removed from any of their experiences, that I genuinely believe they did it out of love for their fellow human beings and with a huge amount of empathy.

It struck me that the US has become a fundamentally different place that it was during the Bush era, I’m pretty sure even a couple of years ago, the results would be different. The US has been through a fair bit and it seems a result of that is that people have started to look out for each other.

I’m wondering if I am hugely wrong, or if the lack of those events in NZ means we might lag a little on empathy front.

So while I was recovering from my crisis of confidence, I started reading this week’s postcards on Postsecret.com, which I have always found to be a good place to go to remind yourself that we humans truly are more than the sum of our parts.

What I think we all anticipated to be a short foray into the world of dance class, has resulted in a weekly gathering of girls, to bust out moves to the likes of Britney Spears, Michael Jackson, and Lady Gaga.

Then, us being us, we decided it was about time to share our new-found interest with family and friends… After all, the bars were getting sick of us treating them as our private dance rehearsal venues.

So it’s concert time.

The troop has now grown into a group of 10 dedicated souls – and our repertoire has also increased as has our combined level of co-ordination. Don’t be fooled though, we still, by and large look like a combination of robots and over-enthusiastic puppies.

This is not an invitation. I will be hung, drawn and quartered if I invite anyone else… but if you do want to come watch us embarrass ourselves, you are, in my opinion more than welcome to join everyone else we’ve conned into coming – just pretend you found out in the Hutt newspaper instead of from my blog!

Aside from the 45 minutes of concert agony, it will be a cool way for the people we know to meet and greet and immediately have something in common (i.e laughing at us).

Where and when

Lower Hutt Little Theatre
Thursday July 22
Doors open at 7pm
Concert starts at 7.30pm
Concert ends roughly 8.15pm.
cost: $5.00 (literally this is to cover some of the cost of hiring a venue that’s way too cool for us)

Apparently personality tests are all the rage within larger corporates, and feedback from everyone I know, is that they are the best thing since sliced bread.

Because at the end of the day we ARE very different from each other, and fundamentally, we have different priorities, strengths and weaknesses… often, when navigating through life, you come across people whose actions you just don’t get. Our combined lack of understanding of this causes a whole raft of issues, from personal to work relationships and significantly hinders our ability to get things done in the most productive and enjoyable way… And winds up with me getting unreasonably upset by the behavior of others who clearly are just not like me.

After giggling our way through an extensive 60 question test – apparently Claire and I are very similar… suddenly I could see everyone I know in a new light.

For example, one thing that shines brightly from my personality is a desire to stand up for what I believe in. I fundamentally believe that all of us doing that is the ONLY way the world can keep turning.

Apparently there is a whole different type of person, who fundamentally believes that a peaceful existence is the most important thing. By this they mean getting through life without having conflict, which means they will not stand up for what they believe in on the basis that conflict is far worse than getting to the ‘right’ answer.

Ha! I said. WEAKLINGS! I KNEW it!

Claire, then took my Nazi Germany example and USED IT AGAINST ME!

I said it’s personality types like OURS that stop dictators from succeeding, from bad people getting away with causing havoc.

To which Claire pointed out that it is personality types like ours that CAUSE all the bad stuff. If it wasn’t for the extreme versions of us, people would actually be able to live peacefully without having to worry about some nutcase trying to take over the social group/work group/world.

Basically, both types of personality are equally flawed and equally right.

Also, what’s funny when taking the test, is it seems we are all born with a set of instinctual reactions and thoughts. As you grow up, you can learn how to overcome these (which leads to some hilarious analytical answers, where you know the RIGHT answer, you would act out the right answer, but fundamentally your instinct is to do the opposite).

i.e for me, my gut instinct is to get stuff done. I have very little time for inefficiencies and am very critical of what I see as incompetence.

But I have LEARNED to push those feeling aside and play nice in group situations.

I know it’s very easy to get stuck into these sorts of things and start putting people in little buckets. I know it doesn’t work like that, but am really starting to see the benefits in using this as a tool for getting a basic understanding of people and why them not always doing what you expect doesn’t automatically mean an awful lot.

No so!

Apparently hunger and nutrition are two separate things.

You could eat a chocolate bar and get all the calories you need for the day BUT you will have an awfully rumbly tummy…

Which makes you wonder if maybe we have it wrong with hunger being a trigger for eating. Maybe hunger ain’t so bad… And maybe we should learn to ignore it (especially those of us who never truly experience hunger).

So why do our bodies send clear ‘feed me now’ signals even when they actually don’t need the food?

Are we still un-evolved from cavemen times when chocolate bars and coke were not available on every street corner, and we actually did have to eat heaps of veges to get the energy and nutrition we needed… Hense hunger actually was somewhat associated with needing food?