Family Matters

This weekend, we had some friends over for a barbeque with their kids. The place was full of lively conversation, food and games and time went by quickly.

Since the men had not seen one another for a few weeks, we did a round of updates and Wayne told us he was planning to change his line of work and become a financial planner. As soon as he mentioned the words “financial planner”, the rest of us changed facial expressions and posture and it was clear we all had strong feelings about this profession.

This was by no means personal, because we like Wayne a lot, but we had all been visited by a financial planner or two and had all chosen not to use them. From that starting point, we felt Wayne was starting “on the back foot” and was headed into difficult, unpleasant territory.

As we talked, some interesting points emerged, which I would like to share with you, because they can help you become your very own financial planner and stop looking for one, if you are.

In many areas of life, we relive the same pattern over and over again, but we do not notice it. Just like riding a bike (the ultimate cliché about automatic habits), we pedal on, completely oblivious to each up and down movement.

Sometimes, circumstances make us take note of our patterns and we start thinking about them. Rarely, we change those ingrained ways of behavior and our life changes as a result, hopefully for the better.

Anthony Robbins compares human beings to thermostats. He says every person has a sense of where they feel comfortable and does many things subconsciously to stay in that place. Sure, everyone knows what would be better, but too good is also uncomfortable, because it does not fit our sense of identity and self worth.

So each of us lives within a certain range of “temperatures”. When it gets to “cold”, we take some action to “warm up”. When it gets to “hot”, we procrastinate for a while and even sabotage our previous efforts, until it is “nice and cozy” again.

One particular area in which this happens to us is our finances.

Money is a big part of every success in life. Money is an enabler – the more money you have, the more successful you can be. For example, my son is very successful as a musician, no doubt due to his special talent, but without the money we spend to support his musical journey, he could have never reached this level of success.

She paced back and forth and stormed, “I never see myself not having money for food or sleeping in my car because I have no home to sleep in. I never see myself without a family to support me. All I got from these presenters was that I must get very low if I want to be successful, which means I’ll never be successful. What kind of motivation technique is this?”

After two years of blogging on parenting and many years of working with parents, after 6 years of coaching and many years of turning kids into super powers, Ronit Baras is going on stage!

Unfortunately, there are a lot of things we should have learned at school, because as a society, we cannot rely on parents to be able to do it by themselves. For example, we cannot expect all parents to teach their kids literacy and numeracy because not all of them know enough and out of those who do, not many are also good at teaching.

Last week, my son went to a small pool party and one of the kids who were invited did not show up. Somebody said Nick could not come because he was working. Nick, you should know, is a 14-year-old kid and had just started working at a donut shop that had opened next to his house. Obviously, a whole conversation started about working kids and whether or not it is good for kids to go to work.

Ronit and I love movies about relationships. We prefer movies showing “real” people (as opposed to flashy, overly unique characters) going through “real” challenges and hopefully completing a positive personal journey by the end of the film. This way, we can take something home with us, discuss it, learn from it and share the growth.

My mom always says, “You will eat tomorrow what you cook today” (my mom was a chef, so many of her proverbs come from the cooking world). I think she heard it from her mother, who heard it from her mother, but I am sure that if I trace it long enough back, I will discover this proverb is very ancient, but I doubt most people understand it.

Some time ago, my teen daughter went to a teen motivation seminar (that shall remain anonymous at this stage). Gal and I were very happy she was going to participate. As you can imagine, us two life coaching parents are happy with every opportunity for our kids to hear some of our “preaching” from someone else. However, she came back so disappointed, our heart dropped.