Family Matters

Archive for the ‘Personal Development’ Category

As you probably know by now, life does not always work the way you expect it to. As a parent, you also know that your kids do not always do what you expect them to. Sure, it is tough sometimes, but it is the same for everybody. No matter how hard we try, we sometimes face situations we do not like.

The main difference between people who succeed in life and those who do not is what they do next. This is also the difference between parents who raise happy and successful kids and those who do not.

While I was thinking about this topic, I remembered a quote by an American president about taking action. When I looked it up, it turned out to be by Theodore Roosevelt, who is also quoted as saying many other highly appropriate things. I will include these within this post for your enjoyment and your (kids’) benefit.

“Never throughout history has a man who lived a life of ease left a name worth remembering”
- Theodore Roosevelt

Stopping progress

The best way to keep yourself right where you are and place yourself at the mercy of your circumstances, or your kids’ behavior, is to keep finding reasons for not making any progress.

No matter what anyone says to you, what are the chances it will be perfect? None. So you can always respond with, “Oh, no, this doesn’t cover everything”, or words to that effect.

Happiness is a very important treasure that all humans seek. Gal and I have been researching and teaching happiness for a long time. As a happiness coach, I can tell you that one of the greatest difficulties of finding this treasure is that most people do not really know how it looks, feels or sounds. They spend most of their life searching for an idea that they do not understand very clearly.

I have read hundreds of books about happiness, motivation and success and written many articles, lesson plans and presentations about happiness and in all of them, I get to the same point: happiness is not absolute and does not follow the “one size fits all” rule. Therefore, I cannot teach happiness. All I can teach people is how to find it inside.

Most of my clients are very surprised when I tell them I do not have a happiness formula for them. Many people would like a formula or a pill that will fix their life and make them happy quickly and easily. When they come to coaching, they often think it is like going to the doctor and saying, “Ronit, I’m sick. Can you give me a pill to fix it?”

Well, I do not. You see, happiness pills are very special. Only those who make them can enjoy the magic of their cure. Every one of us is a chemist searching for the right ingredients in the right combination that defines their own happiness pill. Each pill is unique to its creator. I happened to be studying the chemistry of happiness, success and motivation and have had the honor of studying and working with lots of successful chemists, so I can share with my clients some tips about ingredients that do not work and others that were proven to be very successful. One of the reasons my clients are so successful is that they understand I cannot prescribe them a pill, but that with my help, they do not start from scratch.

The essence of parenting is preparing children for adulthood. Parents must therefore protect their kids, feed them, keep them healthy and teach them the skills they will need during their independent adult life. But which skills are those? What do we want our kids to achieve with the skills we teach them anyway?

Most parents, given enough time to ponder this question, agree that the answer is “Happiness”. When offered the choice from success, money, love, fame and other things people desire, parents overwhelmingly choose happiness.

The problem is that most of our daily parenting ends up being about other things, like academic success, winning competitions, behaving politely, earning money and so on. Children’s future happiness is only used as an assumption, as in “If you do well at school, you’ll have more options in life and be happier” or “If you learn how to keep a job and save money, you’ll be able to afford the things that will make you happy when you grow up” (excuse me while I catch my breath).

I believe that focusing directly on being happy changes what we choose to do for/to our kids, motivates them more and will ultimately make them (and us) happier. Rather than assuming that happiness will be the indirect result of doing homework every day, why not start with what makes (or will make) our kids happy and then tie that to things we can all do every day to accomplish that happiness?

Happiness is no doubt an art. If we think of all the happiness artists we know who are able to be happy, they all have something in common. They have some drive that others, who are depressed, do not have.

Our body is a sophisticated machine of chemicals that are working together in a very brilliant way. Even if some parts of the machine are not functioning well, the body can fix itself by sending help. The molecules and the cells function with a drive to go somewhere, to do something. If the parts of the machine stop moving for some reasons, we get sick and eventually die.

Emotionally, people are much the same – they are born with a drive that goes through inhibition. If you do not use some of your emotional functions, you lose them.

Think of babies, fascinated by life. Everything is new to them and they are in the best mindset they will ever be – they are born explorers. What we see on the outside as checking the world around them translates in their brain to many connections and the biggest physical growth of their life. They do it without understanding, without skills and without money – exploring happiness.

Babies find things that make them happy and do them over and over again. They can watch the same movie many times and laugh again and again when Mom makes the same silly sounds.

Charlie Chaplin was a very funny man. I remember seeing his movies as a kid and thinking he was hilarious. Only much later, I discovered that Charlie Chaplin’s movies were not comedy, but philosophical and very sharp in their social messages.

One of the greatest and most inspiring speeches he gave, in the movie “The Great Dictator”, was about the human spirit. The movie was done in 1940 and it is amazing to see just how relevant it is to what happens in our society today. Over 70 years later, we still have the same challenges.

I am the Queensland State Director of an organization called Together for Humanity that teaches kids about respect and acceptance and how working together can make a huge difference in the world around us. I have been doing this work for 4 years and feel like I am changing the world one school community at a time.

The only problem in this work is that there is a lot to be done and it requires more parents, more educators and more people who care to make an impact quickly and strongly enough. I believe that we all are all responsible for making this world a better place and that we can win by uniting.

Here is Charlie Chaplin’s video with a powerful modern spin. His speech is below the video.

I hope it will inspire you as much as it inspires me.

This week, I went for a ladies’ night out with some friends and we talked about plastic surgery. Most of them were very surprised when I said it was a great idea. They looked at me surprised and said, “Ronit, you?! You are the ‘be happy in life’ person. You believe we need to be happy with ourselves. How can you live with such a contradiction?”

Well, the truth is that I do not see any contradiction at all between having plastic surgery and being happy. But I have to say I did not always think like that.

When I was 16, my best friend wanted to have plastic surgery. When I heard that, I used the same old techniques (those my parents always used) to tell her that “people who are happy with themselves just accept themselves the way they are” and this is when I had a great opportunity to be challenged.

Rene and I became friends about a year after her dad died. She was the youngest in her family and did not cope very well with his death. She asked to go to a boarding school, but that did not work, so she came back to our school in 10th Grade. Rene had the most beautiful skin and lips, but her nose was huge. When I say “huge”, I mean it was so wide, big and lumpy, you could think she had a tumor in it and she hated it.

At one stage, she asked her family to take her to see a plastic surgeon. He told her she was too young to have plastic surgery, so she had to wait, but the more she waited, the worse she felt. Do not get me wrong, she was smart, a good student and had good friends. She just hated her nose.

We talked about it for months and Rene helped me realize I was pumped with thoughts and ideas without really questioning them. We talked about happiness and wanting to change things in your life and in your body. She helped me realize that our life is dedicated to searching for things that will make us happy, yet some things are considered good and others are not, although they serve the same purpose.

What do you think?

I love summer. I could bathe in the sun the whole day. When it is very hot and people wish for a breeze or seek the comfort of the air conditioner, I still prefer the heat. It makes me happy.

When Gal and I lived in Thailand and the humidity was extremely high, I never complained. I take a shower with such hot water that it is too hot for Gal. I have lived in Texas and loved it. I have lived in California (that was OK), Thailand and Singapore (loved it), and now I live in Brisbane, Australia, doing my best to forget the 3 miserable years in Melbourne, Australia, because I was so cold there.

There is a joke that says Melbourne has 4 seasons in one day, because the temperature changes dramatically every couple of hours. I found that to be true, but the only 4 temperatures I recognized were “cold”, “very cold”, “extremely cold” and “freezing cold”. Maybe I have different temperature receptors. I just love the warmth and the heat, and it boosts my health and wellbeing.

Our emotional state is very much like our body temperature. Everyone has different receptors and a different optimal temperature. It is important to understand that we have different ways of reaching our optimal temperature.

In the same way we adjust our water temperature and volume in the shower, Gal and I use different ways of coping with situations in our lives. Gal prefers to talk about the situation and analyzing reasons and options, while I prefer doing things that will make me happy and distract me, at least for a while, until I calm down and consider the situation from a distance and come up with solutions. It is very important to note that both of us, although we use different methods, are trying to reach happiness within.

Personal integrity and honesty are very important to me. One of the strongest values my dad managed to pass on to me is the truth. Numerous times during my childhood, I saw him sacrifice acceptance and even money in order to follow what he believed to be true and real. He also repeated that lesson to me often.

While growing up, however, I found out this was not the case with everyone. There were many situations in which I knew the truth and witnessed people denying it or acting as if the opposite was the case.

When I talked to my mom about it, she told me, “Sometimes, people don’t exactly lie, but they tell a ‘white lie’ to avoid complications or embarrassment”. The world, it turned out, was not a courtroom drama, where it was “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth”.

In fact, it seems that lies have been institutionalized and you cannot get very far without them anymore.

Some time ago, I attended what I thought would be a series of presentations on building great websites, but turned out to be a series of presentations on various topics, including personal philosophy, business, training and other things. One particular presentation was called “Do not lie” and it made me revisit the issue of living honestly from an adult and even a parent perspective.

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift. The rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift”
- Albert Einstein

Happiness depends a lot on which side of the brain we use. If you feel under pressure, your brain is telling you that you have been using your left brain to its maximum capacity.

85% of the time, we function using our left brain. We make sense of things, think of sequences, analyze language and meaning, interpret information and communication and absorb new facts from all around us. Although these functions are necessary to our life, the left side of our brain has its limits and uses pressure to signal that we need to let go and switch to using our right brain.

The left hemisphere of our brain functions like a sequential receiver and processor, while the right hemisphere is in charge of our imagination, sleep (dreams), memory, intuition and all of our creative functions. We absorb with the left side and create with our right side. The brain is like battery – the right side charges it and the left side uses the energy and empties it. Our goal is always keep our mental battery charged.

In our fast-moving world with way too much information, our brain reaches this point of pressure very often. This is when the brain pushes the “red alert” button and says “Enough! No more information. No more analyzing. No more thinking and no more talking!” If we ignore this signal, the sounds of the red alert and danger increase until we collapse or fall asleep from exhaustion.

Recently, I ran a series of workshops with about 700 students in grades 6 and 8. The workshops were about diversity and acceptance and how to treat migrants coming from different cultural backgrounds. One of the questions that came up in every session was about names – what do you do with your name once you move to live in a different country?

I have been running these workshops over the last 4 years and have seen over 10,000 students from grade 4 to grade 12. In many places, the kids were convinced that changing a name is a must when you move to a new country and when I ask them if they know the meaning of their name, surprise, surprise (or maybe not), most of them do not know the meaning of their own name.

Out of 700 students, only about 30 raised their hands to share the meaning of their names with others, while the rest were nameless. They did not know what the meaning of their names was or why their parents had given them that name. They knew nothing about the story of their name.

I believe that explains why they people change their names once they move to another country and why the people in their new country expect them to “localize” their name.

To get the kids’ interest, I told them that in my tradition, the name you are given determines your destiny. You will have the character of the name or the character of the person you are named after. My name is a Hebrew name, which means “little happy song” (in a female form). I think I live up to my name, because I dedicate my life to “singing the happiness song” and teaching others to find their own happiness. It is no coincidence that my life coaching business is called “Be Happy in LIFE”.

I am also short…