Family Matters

Events in our life shape our thinking, beliefs and overall attitude. When I ask people about the things that have shaped their life, they come up with big things, mainly traumatic events that were hard to ignore.

I can relate to this too, because when I worked on my own list, the first things that came up were the big things – moving house, changing city, changing country, the birth of my kids, loss and painful failures. I did have some positive, wonderful, exciting events too, like the birth of my kids and winning prizes and awards, but there were not as many of them as there were hits.

Focusing on the big things is natural. However, I believe that the small things, the ones we neglect to pay attention to, may contribute a lot to how we conduct ourselves in a way that we hardly recognize. The reason I am saying this is because very often, when my clients bring up their past and examine it, they talk about small incidents that were big for them at the time, even out of proportion.

For example, a woman put on tons of make up on her face, because “When I was 16, my father commented about me going out with my skin disease that creates different shades to the skin on my face”. A friend told me, “For years, I couldn’t speak out because when I was 13, I stood in front of many people and my voice sounded funny. It was the most embarrassing moment of my life”. One of my clients felt rejected by her mother, because “When I was 12 (30 years ago), my mom said to my aunt she had not wanted to have another child and that I had been ‘an accident’”.

The word “lesson” makes most people see themselves sitting in a class with a teacher talking at the front. Many times, it brings up extra homework and fear about being tested on subjects learned. What a shame, because life is a long lesson, with lots of work (at home and outside of home) and daily tests!

Throughout my childhood, I often heard my parents talking about “making the right decisions”. I remember wondering many times, “What are the right decisions?” I remember the strongest feeling I had from what my parents thought about the right decisions was that decisions were always a matter of life and death.

Sarcasm is the weapon of disempowered people, who use information to regain some of their missing feeling of control. To find out when you are using sarcasm in your life and overcome it, here are some things you can do…

Last week, in Self Esteem Mini-Course (part 1), I wrote about the definition of self-esteem. This week, let us explore how school promotes low self-esteem in children and shapes our society in the opposite way.

Since our self-esteem is based on our perception of ourselves and school is the place we spend most of our time between the ages of 6 and 12, every school experience either increases or decreases our self-esteem.

I believe that every parent wants their kids to have high self-esteem, so I have decided to publish a few posts over the coming weeks about self-esteem, what it is and how to increase it, so every parent reading this will be able to help their kids develop this very important emotional strength.

Possibly the greatest optimist in history was Thomas Edison. He went through 1,500 attempts to come up with the right wire to light his bulb. He never thought that each attempt will repeat because he was not the same person after that attempt. The Thomas Edison preparing for his 1,500th attempt knew something that the Thomas Edison preparing for his 1,499th attempt did not know.

We all like watching “Heroes” on TV and reading books about strong or creative people who have done things others did not expect them to do. Hearing, reading about or meeting such people is very motivating. Heroism is the courage to face fears, therefore fear and heroes go together.

Fear is a basic human emotion that works like a survival instinct. In a sense, fear helps protect us from danger, though it has reached a point where we see danger even in places where it does not exist.

I read a lot about success and attend personal development and wealth creation seminars. It is very inspiring. Unfortunately, the more I do this, the more I hear about people who are making it big time overnight.

The overnight success factor works very well on people who are not successful. It really helps sell stuff. Look at some of the best overnight success promotions:

- Lose 14 kilos in 14 days!

- How to make $250,000 from property without using your own money!

- Use this drink and be blond and beautiful in just 4 days! (OK, so I made this one up myself ;))

I bet overnight success was invented by unsuccessful people to help them feel better about their lack of success.

This happens to many people. They get up one day feeling sick and tired of trying so hard and determine to change. Some of us are lucky to be really sick and are forced to listen to our body.

Sickness is our body’s way of talking to us. When we are sick, the level of poison in our body has reached a warning level. Having been very sick during childhood, I was shocked to discover when I was just 16 that my thoughts were pure poison. I had bad thoughts about myself, my abilities and my talents. I had bad thoughts about others around me and, of course, I never took any responsibility over my life. Not that I didn’t want to, but I do not think I knew what it meant.