Last night for dinner one of our sides was spinach and I loved it. My 5 year old son’s grimace and displeasure reminded me of how I too as a kid hated the taste of spinach. I literally despised the stuff and my skin would crawl. The sight of even a small serving of spinach on the side of my plate convinced me that my parents were truly mean and perhaps a touch evil.

Today that has all changed for the good. Steamed, boiled, mashed, blended, heck even raw. Give me spinach in a soup, under a burger, in a pasta (goes great with Feta), on a pizza, creamed with some olive oil or even in a fruit smoothee and I'll smile. I won't hate you.

But Jonathan, how could that be?

Well, firstly there is the simple fact that if you keep trying food you will eventually develop a taste for it. It is a surprisingly effective tactic and one based on science and lessons learned from countless generations of good parenting. In my case over the formative years my parents kept on urging, bribing & tricking me into trying the stuff, not out of spite but rather because they knew it was good for me.

Which skinny young lad wouldn't be enticed into trying a teaspoon of slimy green veg in return for promises of Popeye’s superhuman strength? My parents helped wage a gentle war of attrition against my childhood affliction towards eating anything healthy. It is a game my wife and I use this day with our similarly healthy-food-eating challenged children (aged 3 and 5), a war I'm pleased to say we are well on our way to winning. Did you know for example that eating carrots can help you see through walls?

The second reason is that eventually I chose to stop hating spinach. It happened at some point in my early twenties. Whilst I had been eating spinach during my teens I was still convinced that I didn't really like it. I can't remember the exact moment when the dislike changed to a gradual and then later a full blown appreciation, but change it did. I started to think of eating spinach in a good way. I repeated to myself all the good things I'd been told about how it is packed with Vitamin C, how it was a super-food loaded with veggie goodness and that actually it tasted pretty damn good! I reminded myself of how essential dark leafy greens are in a well balanced diet, particularly useful for combating the ill-effects of boozy party. I told myself this whilst resisting the usual gag-reflex I'd convinced myself I'd get.

The end result as this blog post has made painfully obvious is that I now like spinach. I am confident that one day so will my kids.

I think you know where I'm going with this right? What’s your spinach? What’s the thing that you've convinced yourself that you don't like or can't do?

We all do it. My wife (and apologies in advance darling for outing one of your foibles in a public medium called Medium) is convinced that she dislikes technology and is “not great at PCs or electronics”. I’m the de-facto techy in the house, a role I secretly enjoy, being asked to assist with such complex tasks as copying a file from one device to another, changing the AV setting with the TV remote to pick up the Tivo box or the DVD player, or freeing up storage space on an iPhone. I on the other hand “hate public speaking” because I can't think straight and I tend to get choked up, fumbling my words all leading to embarrassment. Both my wife and I did not like the taste of these pursuits the first few times we tried them and then we went on to convince ourselves of that perceived fact. I’m willing to bet at least 5 kilos of prime spinach leaf that if we each kept working at these tasks that we've convinced ourselves we dislike and cannot do, whilst simultaneously choosing to look at the act of doing in a more positive light that we would eventually get to enjoy and perhaps even excel — just like I’m able to do in eating spinach.

I guess the reason I'm interested in this at the moment is as a parent I want to pass on this simple life lesson to my kids. You may not like something and that is okay you don't have to like everything but just because you don't like it today it does not mean that you won't eventually like it. More importantly though is that if you convince yourself that you don’t like it through using negative affirmations and language, something which is very easy to do and a trap we all fall into, then you will never change that dislike. You will miss out on many of life’s pleasures and close the door to many challenges that could help you to grow.

For now this life lesson is a bit complex for my kids so I'm sticking to showing off a bicep muscle every time I have a mouthful of spinach but eventually I'll get there.