Family Matters

Archive for the ‘Emotional Intelligence’ Category

In the past month, I heard it a lot. I had client after client sitting on my “life coaching deck” and talking about being totally unhappy about some things in their life. They were unhappy about their relationship with their partner, their kids, their health, their job, their money or their social life, and they wanted it to stop.

When this happens, I tell them there is something good about being unhappy. They always look at me surprised, thinking I have fallen on my head, but gradually, they understand that being unhappy and going to see a life coach is a wonderful sign that your body is talking to you and you are listening and actually doing something about it.

Congratulations, you are unhappy!

If you are unhappy with something in your life, congratulations! You are aware of your best navigating compass – your feelings.

Some people think happiness is an airy-fairy thing that cannot be explained and understood, not to mention controlled. Many people say they want to control their feelings in fear that their feelings might take over and control them.

But feelings do not have a mind of their own. They are a compass that lets us know where we should or should not go, we just have to look at it from time to time and see the direction it is pointing to. It is very simple. If it says, “I am not happy”, change directions. If it says, “I am happy”, keep going the same way.

I think this realization has helped me lots in life. When some of my friends, who know I am a happiness coach, ask me, “Well, Ronit, What is your formula for happiness?” I answer, “Tune into your body and let your feelings guide you”.

Our world today is a stressful place, full of pressure from every direction. That much is obvious. In fact, there are many things designed specifically to put pressure on us and keep us feeling stressed, and they are getting stronger and stronger over time.

Being a parent and having to raise kids adds another dimension to the pressure, because we not only have to stay calm ourselves, we also have to help our children relax and teach them how to handle pressure or everyone will go nuts.

I was unlucky in that respect.

My dad was raised by a very strict father, who taught him there was a “right” way to do everything – eat, dress, shave, speak, study, work and behave. Every other way was “wrong”. This was not a matter of personal preference but of “general consensus” and he treated any deviation from propriety with the same high severity.

There were things my dad decided not to do to me, like using physical violence. I was not beaten as a child, although my dad was beaten when he was little. That was a good thing. However, I grew up with strict rules I was expected to follow and not many things were open for discussion.

But I have come a long way since then and you can too.

When I was about 15 years old, I learned the hard way that sometimes you want things and only when you get them, you realize they were not what you wanted. Addiction is like this too – you want something and shortly after you get what you want, you realize it was not what you wanted.

As a life coach, I talk a lot about wanting. I believe wanting is essential in life. It is the driving force of our existence. But today, I want to tell you about a session on my life coaching deck that reminded me again why the question “Why?” is as important as the question “What?” Chris, one of my wonderful clients, taught me a wonderful lesson about what happens when you do not know why.

All I knew about Chris was that he was a businessman in his early fifties, married, with no kids and a lack of motivation who was looking for a life coach. Nothing special. We all have those periods in our life when we just find it hard to get up in the morning.

This is what I told myself when I prepared for his session. The first time he came, when I opened the door, I saw from the corner of my eyes a classy Mercedes Benz parked outside. Well, the first thing I could think of was “Oh my god, what a beautiful car”. I have to say it made me more curious about the reason he came. I thought that car was the result of lots of motivation.

“Why are you here, Chris? What do you want?” I asked him.

He looked confused. “I really don’t know. I think something’s wrong with me”.

Modern people spend most of their time on “autopilot”. Too often, our responses are simply programmed by our past experiences, our education and the enormous pressures of our life. We travel along the same road to work and it just zooms past the car window, seemingly unchanged. We interact with the same people, repeat the same patterns and get the same feelings.

You could compare a modern person, at least in Western society, to a Jumbo Jet. Change starts for us by making a lot of noise, feeling heavy and hardly moving. Then, we start rolling forward and pick up speed for a long time until we finally take off. But as soon as we are in the air, we look for a nice “cruising altitude” and “switch to autopilot”.

When you are a parent, this matters a great deal, because you are “carrying passengers” and these passengers are very precious – your partner and your children. Where you take them is important and how comfortable they are during your “flight” is also important. So sometimes, you have to disengage your autopilot and pay attention.

If you think about it, this unaware “flight mode” is a coping mechanism. It is a result of the overwhelming demands on our time, mental power and emotional intelligence placed by modern technology, lots of people, ever-changing world around us and massive barrage of information. We need to protect ourselves from all this noise, so we build a quiet cocoon by filtering out as much as we can.

But it does not have to be like this.

On Friday, the 30th of September, Gal and I were honored to participate in the funeral of Jaap De Nie, a friend of ours who died at the age of 68 in Holland. The wonders of technology (a digital camera connected to a mobile phone using mobile Internet and broadcasting on a web address) allowed us to sit in our house with his daughter, her husband and their two lovely kids, watch and hear the funeral and say our last goodbyes to this inspiring man, who lived as an example and died as an example.

We were honored to have met him and be inspired by his determination and courage to cheat death and live to see his daughter’s wedding, the birth of his nephews and his two grandchildren and to spend time with them against all odds.

We met Jaap about 7 years ago through his daughter. He was 61 and looked much older. He came from Holland to visit his daughter’s family in Australia. He and his gorgeous 37-year-old third wife, Ali, who was only one year younger than his daughter, were a fascinating couple. We talked for hours, gathering pieces of his life story and being inspired.

10 years earlier, the doctors discovered cancer that had spread throughout his body. They removed some of his organs, he went through chemotherapy and when the doctors could do nothing more, they told him to sort out his things and say his last goodbyes to his loved ones.

But Jaap decided to die skiing in Malaysia (yes, it is possible). Jaap called his two children and asked them to join him for the last weeks of his life. The two kids flew to be with their father, had a great time and nobody died.

Fear of people is a modern vehicle for many things, like product sales, communal loyalty, organizational compliance and patriotism, which is why we are surrounded by alarming messages about the people around us and the people in other places. Unfortunately, once we become afraid of people, we can no longer tell them apart, because we cannot see them through our defenses.

I walk around our neighborhood in the mornings and see different people. What surprises me often is how they respond when they notice me approaching. I am not too tall and quite thin, I wear normal clothes and a hat and there is nothing in my appearance that should cause anyone alarm. See for yourself on the left (not the best picture of me, but you get the idea).

Yet, some people cross to the other side of the street. They literally pick a spot well beyond contact distance and pretend they cannot see me. Other people, who might have to cross back to “my” side later to keep going, look down as they walk past me or give me a nervous forced smile, while picking up their pace.

I do not take it personally, but it makes me sad.

Now, I used to suffer from fear of people myself. Maybe this is why I interpret others’ behavior this way, but hopefully my suggestions today will be helpful either way.

If you ask people what success means, some will tell you it is a mindset and others will tell you it involves pure luck. When they lose in a battle, it is mainly because they believe life is all about luck. When they win in the battle of life, it is mainly because they believe they have control of their mindset. There are two kinds of people – those who win in life and those who whine about life. Which one are you?

Life is full of battles. From the first second we come into this world, we have challenges to conquer. Babies have the most challenges. Without the ability to speak, satisfy their own hunger, take care of a wet or smelly bum or change the temperature, they are fully dependent on others. Yet, although they lack the ability to satisfy their basic needs, they never consider quitting.

With crying as their only tool for communication, they win most of their battles by whining. Unfortunately, this is when they also develop the belief that whining is a good way to get things in life.

Whether this mindset will stay with them for life or change depends on the baby’s social agents, especially the parents. If they consider the crying baby to be a complainer (“What’s wrong? Why are you crying so much? It’s not the end of the world”), he or she will grow up to be a complainer. If they see crying as a form of communication (“Yes, Mommy is here. You’re right. You’re all wet and Mommy needs to change your diaper”), he or she will grow up to be a communicator. When those two babies grow, they will both have the desire to be successful, but one of them will go for it and the other one will complain about not having it.

This is NOT a film review. It is a post on love and romance and marriage and kids and family and parenting. But it is inspired by the fact that Ronit and I watched the movie “Crazy, Stupid, Love” this week and it has been running around in my mind to the point where I just had to write about it.

Steve Carell makes movies that are full of embarrassing moments and this usually turns me off. I see him as the American version of Mr. Bean. I also find his acting melodramatic and externalized and I generally prefer subtle and deep. In this film, he was not only the main character, he was also the producer, which should have had me running in the other direction, except I only found that out in the final credits, and by that time, I already had a lot of respect for him.

If you have not seen Crazy, Stupid, Love, it starts with a marriage breakdown and divorce, continues through the attempted recover of both partners and their children and at the same time, weaves in the generational difference between the old one-partner-from-a-young-age and the new ongoing-partying-and-casual-sex-until-thirty-something.

I came away from the movie with a lot of love in my heart. In the past few days, there is more love in everything I do, more softness, more attention and more respect. I checked the patterns of my life against scenes from the movie and compared myself with the characters in it.

I want to share with you what I discovered.

Kids’ mind is a puzzle. Working with kids for so many years (and with grownups who used to be kids), I am amazed by what demons they carry with them and how they use naive conclusions to navigate their life. The more I see clients, the more I am convinced there is never a way to predict how kids will interpret their young life and what they will make of it later in life. The kid’s mind puzzle becomes an adult’s mind puzzle that is even harder to solve. Trish’s story is a wonderful way to get some insight into how this happens.

Trish came to my life coaching deck with her partner. Ben, her partner and the father of their child, had said she needed help but he had no idea how to get it. Trish had not contacted me, had not completed the session preparations and had not even talked to me before coming, so this was an unusual session.

Trish was a beautiful young woman. Her hair was tied back and she looked tired, as if she had spent weeks crying. She was 27 years old and was preparing for her wedding. She had a one-year-old boy, a great job and … a demon.

“Hi, Trish. Thank you for coming. What brings you here?” I asked.

She looked at Ben and started crying. I gave her the tissue box and waited. She tried very hard to stop. Every time she started saying something, tears started again and she choked. Ben held her hand and whispered, “You can do it”. She looked at him and looked at me for a while before she finally started telling me her story.

After her son was born, memories of a childhood trauma had come to life. In-between sobs, she said, “At first, I thought it was a dream, but then I realized I see the same scene over and over again even when I’m awake”.

“Can you please tell me what you see?” I asked.

“It is very vague… I think it had something to do with my dad… I can see myself at the age of 6 or 7 playing with another girl… She was my neighbor and we played a lot together. I think someone did something to both of us… I can see my dad screaming and having a fight with her dad… I think my dad raped both of us”, she managed to say.

In the last chapter of the “Save your marriage” series, I wrote about one trap that married couple are in. It was the “right” trap, when one person or both are convinced they are “right” and do not accept that the other person has a story of their own that can explain their behavior and be just as “right”. Many marriages break down over this type of dispute.

In my relationship coaching, I have discovered there are two more traps that are signs the relationship is going nowhere and may be heading for a breakdown. One of them is the “intention” trap and the other one is the “blame” trap.

The intention trap
Everyone wants to feel good in their relationships. We give ourselves to the other person and we want a good feeling in return. Usually, we find a partner who makes us feel great. At the beginning of the relationship, we want to spend lots of time together, we constantly want to be with him or her and when we are not together, we imagine us being together.

Our marriage is good when we look forward to the time we will spend together, because it boosts our self-esteem and motivates us.

Over time, this excitement gives way to stress, work and kids, and many couples just wait for the moment things are quiet, so they can veg in front of the TV, hit the bed, sleep in on the weekends or go away on a holiday. Most of their time is not filled with fun and the fun bits are pushed to the side. When we push too much of our “fun time together” to the side, the arguments start.

I do not think I have ever learned how to argue and in marriage. Strange as it may seem, I believe it is very important to learn how to argue, because if we do not argue fairly, we increase the stress and the pressure and decrease the fun time together.