Family Matters

Posts Tagged ‘personality development’

Briana was a young woman in her late twenties. She came to life coaching to find purpose and reason. My discussions with her revealed a very mature young woman. She reminded me so much of my own daughter. Life smiled at her – she got along with everyone and you could not pick a fight with her even if you wanted to. Yet, she was so smart that every job became boring a couple of months after she started it and she felt lots of confusion about her career choices, because she did everything very well, but without passion.

Here is a self-test for purpose. Let’s say you have all the money in the world, you can do anything you want, you do not have to work for a living, you are in perfect health and until the day you die, you can live anywhere you like, any way you like and have any lifestyle you like. What will you do with your time?

If you have no answer for this question, start searching for it right now. You see, Briana failed the purpose test over and over again, because every time I asked her about it, she looked at me with an embarrassed smile and said, “I don’t know”.

I have decided to write this post and share with you not Briana’s success at finding purpose, but the process she had to go through, because I think there are many people who think and feel exactly like Briana did and that blocks them from finding their purpose. That leaves them feeling like something is wrong with them, when in fact, no one has ever taught them how to find their purpose.

This month was very hectic for me and therefore for our entire family. I had many big projects to complete and I could not do them without the help of my family. Gal and the kids helped me a lot and we ended up dedicating almost 3 weekends to this work (we are still recovering from work, work and more work). All this work involved doing things I love, so it made me excited and I was in total flow and winding down was not easy. That made me think about slowing down as the topic this time.

Slowing down is a challenge for many people. The more successful you are at what you do, the more you risk being unable to slow down and enjoy the simple things. Slowing down is a challenge for me, so I am taking the time to write what happened to me in the last month and how I got over it (still doing that).

This week was the first week of tutorials at my university and we got to meet our tutor. You will be glad to know that my tutor is a bright young man in his mid 20′s with quite a bit of knowledge. From his introductory spiel, I gathered he had finished his honors year and is now in the process of applying for a PhD. As you may have noticed, he seems to have skipped some years, which should have been dedicated to his Master’s degree, but it seems this young man is quite smart.

As the tutor went through his slides, he kept putting himself down. He was using these slides to let us know we should criticize him if we discovered he was wrong, because that would be “his fault” and we should call him up if we do not understand, because sometimes “he” is unclear, and other quite harsh comments about his lack of knowledge being due to his nature and his inabilities. This was a bit of a shock for me, because he seemed quite nice and knowledgeable and he really had not taught us anything which could possibly have been wrong.

If the tutor was simply being humble about being smart or being nice or knowledgeable, I think that would have been OK. But there is a point at which this self criticism becomes a little bit more internal and that is where problems start.

Last week, I had a session with a new client. She was very frustrated about things in her life. She had wanted to change them for so many years and nothing had happened.

“I feel like I have no control over my life”, she said to me, “It’s as if part of me says ‘go left’ and the other side says ‘go right’. For some reason, neither is the direction I want to go and I’m stuck! I can’t get the two sides of me to communicate with each other”.

I smiled. It sounded familiar.

“Sometimes, I wake up with energy and motivation that lasts for three days. There is a voice inside of me that keeps telling me it can be like this forever. I’ve tried shutting it out, but I don’t know how to”, she kept telling me about her frustration.

I listened to her and thought to myself, “She is ready for the sailing story”.

I hope you are ready too.

Last week, I met one of my clients from a few years ago and we had a great time together. She said to me, “Come on, Ronit, tell me what you’re doing now”, so I spent the next 15 minutes telling her about all the different things I was doing.

When I finished, she asked, “Really? When do you have the time to do all that?”

I smiled. Good question. I was not sure I had the answer.

“Ronit, you’re Wonder Woman!” she said, “You’re amazing. Everything you do is so perfect”.

Hmm…

Although I was flattered for a while, as I imagined myself being the perfect “Wonder Woman”, the compliment quickly faded. I do have my wonders, but perfect I am not. Everyone wants to be successful at what they do, but success and perfection are not really related.

One morning, as I was walking around the neighborhood, I saw a Magpie-lark (the bird on the left) fluttering next to a parked caravan. It flew away from the caravan and then sped towards one of the windows, flapping its wings aggressively.

“What a strange thing to do”, I thought, but then I moved closer and realized the bird was seeing its reflection in the window and, perceiving it as a threat, was probably defending its territory from the “other bird”.

This got me thinking (and not for the first time) about how we humans view our own world and how we become aggressive towards certain things, while being completely OK with others.

It reminded me of a friend of ours who complained about one of her kids. She said, “I get along just fine with my oldest boy, even though he likes different things to me, and the little one is just cute, no matter what she does, but my middle daughter Ruby drives me crazy sometimes. You know, Ruby reminds me a lot of how I used to be as a girl. She’s stubborn and strong willed just like I was. Oh, maybe that’s why we argue so much, because we’re the same…”

Our story takes place somewhere in China in 1999. Ronit is in our hotel room, taking a nap, and I am walking around the yard with Eden (10) and Tsoof (4). We explore the pool and the various entertainment areas and we talk about philosophy.

I thought I would share this story with you because while I was telling these things to Eden in China, I learned a lot myself too. It made me feel good about choices that had previously been unconscious. I was also happy to get Eden thinking about the way she wanted to live, because most of my life had been handed down to me and I had lived it by habit and not by choice.

“There’s a nice story about Buddha, Confucius and Lao Tzu (the founder of Taoism) sampling pickles out of a barrel”, I said.

Last week, I wrote about some things that make our world seem to be operating upside down, including relaxing to accomplish more, exercising to have more time, giving to receive, listening to be heard and praising your kids so they will do better.

But life is so weird and wonderful, there are other examples of its topsy turvy ways and I just have to share them with you, because they have helped me and will likely help you too.

Is the sun bad for you?

Should you eat lots of protein?

Should you lose weight?

Should you be perfect?

Maybe this will help you choose, be happy and be a great parent too.

Two years ago, I wrote about choosing to be miserable in the The Art of Misery. It is amazing how many people in the world qualify for the Certificate of Misery and have mastered this art. For some strange reason, it is easier to master misery than happiness. I do not know exactly why that is, but for most people, the definition of happiness is so hard to achieve they can never be happy. Even when they have a happy moment, it does not last long enough to get them to the next happy moment.

In The Art of Misery, I gave 10 lessons in misery with clear instructions on how to pass each test and gradually move on to the next level. Although I wrote that only those who completed the program would be entitled to the certificate, I have discovered it is enough for people to master some of the lessons to declare themselves eligible.

In the last two years, I have had many requests to extend the misery course and I believe the time has finally come. After two years of practicing and holding your misery certificate, you are ready for the next level. Today, in the second part of the Misery Mastery “training program”, I will improve, refine and help you upgrade your skills. I will add 10 more things you can do if being just miserable is not enough and you really, really want to be extremely miserable.

The expression “topsy turvy” literally means “toppled top” or “upside down” and is typically used to describe a situation that is the opposite of what it should be. Today, I am going to describe some situations in which the world seems to operate contrary to how it “should”, but if we adapt the way we think, we can actually use this to our advantage.

Most people believe that when things are tough, more pressure is the answer. So they spend more time “on the job”, worry when they are not making progress and drain their physical resources by not getting enough nutrition, water and sleep.

Unfortunately, this typically only aggravates the situation, because memory and creativity are blocked in the brain by stress. When we are stressed, it is like a car being stuck in first gear with the pedal to the metal. The noise is horrible, the amount of energy spent is enormous, we get the most power, but we move only forward and only slowly.