Family Matters

Last weekend, I had a chance to talk to a mother about my better parenting skills program. She told me about her son’s behavior problems and wanted to know what was so magical about my program that made kids perform so well. I said to her, “There is no magic in the program. It is just based on understanding of the human brain, as every one of my parent coaching clients and better parenting skills workshop participants discovers”.

Although I like the thought that I work magic in my programs, I truly believe this magic can be done by everyone who understands the importance of having fun in the learning process and focusing their energy in a positive direction.

The woman told me her son was “hyperactive”.

Unfortunately, most people wake up and start taking action only when it is a bit late. I guess it is the part of being human. We ignore the signs until we are hit really hard. The problem is that change is a lot more difficult then.

When we lose control over our kids’ education, health and wellbeing, we stop being able to help them develop the skills, habits, thoughts and beliefs that will make them happy and we wake up when they leave school, join a gang or worse, fall sick.

One day, we wake up sick and tired from feeling unhappy and say, “How did we get to this point?”

Very bad question. A much better question is “What can we do to make things better right now?”

Read more about how to overcome your kids’ TV habit…

Every one of my parent coaching clients needs one important component of parenting – an appreciation of his or her qualities as a parent. They know very well what does not work and where they fall short, but cannot see what they already have that makes them good parents already.

If you think about it, realizing what they have is a problem for most people, but these qualities are the ingredients kids are made of.

My mom was a chef. She was a simple woman with limited academic education but with a lot of wisdom from years of working in big kitchens and making food for thousands of people.

She taught me it is impossible to go to the market with a list. You never know what the weekly specials are. “You do the best with what you have”, she told me. My mom has made an art out of it. If she went to the market and found a fruit of vegetable for next to nothing, she would buy a whole box of it (there were 7 people in our house). She was very proud of herself for making many different dishes with it and freezing some for a season when that fruit or vegetable was not available.

Parenting is the same – you do the best you can with what you have and when I say “what you have”, I mean the mix of who you are, who your kids are and what your circumstances are. In the Be Happy in LIFE parent coaching program, the parents’ skills, abilities and character traits are the basic ingredients for raising wonderful, happy kids.

Traveling does not trigger the same thoughts and ideas in everyone’s mind. For some, traveling means carrying a heavy load, while for others, it means feeling calm and relaxed. Some are stressed by the planning and organizing, while others imagine the views and the pictures they will capture. Some fear the unknown, while others look forward to great surprises.

This list-making post is for the travelers among us. It is for those who love traveling and the thought of going out of their comfort zone to a new destination excites them.

This post is also for those who have never traveled (much), but wish they did (more).

It may even be for those who have had no desire to travel until now…

I can write about traveling because I am a world traveler and love every second of it.

But I was not a traveler all my life.

One day, I got a phone call from a mother, who was interested in our kids coaching. I talked to her for a while to get a good understanding of her situation. During this conversation, we talked about things that were application to many parent-child situations, which I have since repeated with many parents, so here it is for everyone’s benefit.

Parenting (especially teenage parenting) is undoubtedly the most challenging adventure in a person’s life. Remember the first hours of being a mother or a father? The unconditional love you had for this tiny new creature that did nothing but eat, sleep and cry, coupled with the enormous load of the new responsibility, from which there was no escape. A bit overwhelming, wasn’t it? For some parents, even a bit scary sometimes. Who can you turn to for parenting advice?

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