My wife ran over our dog. 😔

Hello and welcome to today's episode.

My name is Tom Rolley of systemio.dev.

Well, we've had a tragic event happen yesterday, I was driving and I received a phone call from my wife and she said, we've run over the dog and my first instinct was issued alive if she did, and said she's life, ran over the back leg.

And this is a pretty big event.

You know, like a dog is about nine months old her name's Causey and she's been awesome.

She's a cattle dog and a blue healer.

And she has been addicted to hunting wheels.

Now, I don't know why this is like they meant to be counting cows.

We don't live on two acres and we have some cows on the next-door neighbor's farm.

But outside of that, there are not many cows, we don't have any cows on our property.

But for some reason, she's been obsessed with tires.

So she'll go off to the wheelie bins as I drag them up, she hangs on and chews on the wheels of those.

We're trying to learn how to get rid of this behavior.

But apparently, it's a deeply inbuilt behavior.

It's certainly not unique to her that most of the Kelpies and the cattle dogs, blue Heelas actually have this behavior.

So in that she's chasing after our, our, our car yesterday, my wife goes over her back leg, and suddenly we've got this injured dog.

She took it to the vet.

They said, look, it's gone through the growth plate, you're looking at three and a half to four and a half $1,000 worth of operations to get this sorted out.

Is it this is not great.

This is not really something that I wanted, she was quite sick yesterday like she's just lying there, she hasn't been able to go to the toilet, she hasn't been able to urinate or go to the store.

And right now she is heading into surgery.

So we made the decision, this was not an easy decision.

Because I was like, Look, the behavior is likely to continue.

And then what happens if we deal with it again, and 346 months down the track and she gets run over again.

So that's one issue.

But the sadness and the grief of my wife, like my wife, I think felt really bad about this.

And so I was like, Look, how would you feel? If in four weeks, six weeks, eight weeks, we don't operate and you're filled with regret.

And I was like, Look, just she was wondering, yes, no, yes, no, she called a bunch of us, like, just get it done, spend the money invest the money.

Our dog really is a very big part of our family and to have her lame to have her not grow to have to maybe amputate that leg later.

As I don't, I don't want to deal with that.

Look, the money can come back the money can regrow the money.

It's not something that is as big a deal as the regret of not having fixed these legs.

So hopefully it's going to be okay, we've still got 468 weeks of looking after the start of the leg like dogs has to be created.

There's a lot of work to be done.

I'm like, Whoa, okay, this isn't just a financial decision.

But the lesson out of all of it to me was that what I don't know can hurt me what I don't do can hurt me because gee, it would have been a great idea to have pet insurance.

And whether we didn't hear it, or we didn't get told, I don't know.

We just don't have pet insurance.

And they said, Well if you had pet insurance would have been covering 80%.

And I was like, Oh man, that's like three grand, that's quite a lot of money.

What was more concerning to me was that this behavior would have been already there.

Like she's been hunting these wheels for months now.

And I didn't recognize it.

And that is really the mindset that I need to look at and go hang on.

Why didn't I see that this behavior is putting her at risk and do something about it?

That from a systems perspective, this behavior is ongoing and something needed to be done.

I didn't take action and now I pay the price that I could have paid the pet insurance or I could have got an electric fence where they won't cross some wine hunt after these wheels.

So either of those actions could have been taken and they were not and now I have this vet bill, three and a half to four and a half 1000 And I have four to six weeks, eight weeks of looking after a sick dog as well as the emotional difficulty of my wife having run over our dog.

So this all could have been seen there were clear signs my son Hamish was like Be careful.

She chases the cars Be careful, don't run over the dog and I missed it not only the behavior, the warnings, but it was also all there.

And when I see it from a systems perspective, it's like, hang on, this is obvious.

But I missed it.

So there's one thing and having to deal with all of this, there's a second thing in recognizing when this similar thing happens, again, where there's a recurrent behavior, and actually taking the action to get that sorted out.

This means thinking from a systems perspective, and it is easy to neglect this, this is not how we are built naturally, it seems as humans to go, oh, hang on, there's a recurrent warning sign going off here, I should do something about it, the easy thing to do is just put it off.

But one day, which was yesterday for me, something happens.

And suddenly, I'm like, Oh, that was so obvious in retrospect.

But having the capacity to go, No, I'm going to take some action here, I can see that there is a risk.

And I'm going to look at it from a systems perspective and deal with it.

This helps to have preparation and reps in terms of thinking systematically and thinking, Hey, what is the downside risk, if I do not manage this? Alright, if this is a conversation that you can recognize that you need to handle, that you're like, Hang on, I've got something like this in my life, whether it is in your business life, or whether it's in your personal life, that this is a way of thinking.

And if this is something that is valuable to you, then head over to systemio.dev, there's training there around systems thinking that I want you to go through and at the end of that is an opportunity for consultation together to look at what's going on in your business, and how you can take strategic action to ensure that an event like this doesn't happen.

Take the lesson from me.

If there are warning signs in your life that there is a problem, then don't wait for it to be the four and a half $1,000 vet bill, it's far cheaper to either put in the electric fence or get the pet insurance or both.

And recognize that this is a risk managing risk is far better than dealing with the consequences.

I thanks so much for tuning in today.

I look forward to seeing you on tomorrow's episode as we continue to explore the usefulness of a systems mindset in living a great life.

I'll see you then.