Family Matters

One day, I took my daughter Eden, who was 16 years old at the time, to a workshop I ran with a group of women about life skills and relationships. When we reached the positive thinking and happiness part of the workshop, I asked everyone to go home and think of a 100 things that would make them happy.

When you present yourself to an unknown person, you need to examine your thoughts, beliefs and feelings towards yourself and this may not be easy. When people are asked to describe themselves, they sometimes question whether this is who they are or who they think they are. For the purpose of making this list, who you think you are is all there is, so just write that.

Our definition of friendship evolves over the years. At first, our friends are the kids we play with, even when we envy them or hate them. As we grow up, our definition becomes deeper and more meaningful, but also more selective.

Dan, one of my personal life coaches, told me about this list on the first sessions I had with him. “When I was 18, my dad sent me to an evening with a motivational speaker”, Dan said, “He told us to write down 100 things we want to do in our lifetime. I write my list and put it somewhere. When I became a life coach, I found my list again and I was amazed at how many of the things in it I had already done “.

Gratitude is an excellent cure for taking life for granted. On the quest for happiness, appreciating what we have is a great way to shift from feeling sad, bad or frustrated.

What is special about childhood memories is that we had very limited life experience to interpret them within their whole context. For example, remembering an incident with our parents being upset with us usually misses what our parents had to deal with at work, in their relationships, their history with their own parents, their fears and so on.

Love, as you probably know, is one of the most wonderful feelings. Some people claim there are only two feelings – love and fear – and every good thing in life is a form of love and all the bad things are forms of fear. A stronger version of this only recognizes one feeling – love – and all the rest is lack of love.

One of my clients, who was very critical about herself, was very surprised when I asked her “What do you like about yourself?” She thought about it for a long time before she found something nice to say about herself and you know what, it is hard to blame her.

My sister always said she would like a magic ring that grants her all her wishes. I remember asking her if she knew what to wish for if the ring could give her all her birthday presents up to 100 years old at once.

I often describe improvements and progress as the currency of personal development. We can only be highly developed by continually improving our thoughts, ideas, actions and outcome in life. To my kids I say that as long as they keep moving forward, they are developing.