Family Matters

Posts Tagged ‘creative / creativity’

I believe that all people have some creativity in them. It may not be the same form of creativity and it may not be the same level, but we all have the capacity to create.

Creativity is the art of making something new and original. We can expose our kids to making things from a very early stage and that will boost their self-confidence and their flexibility. The good thing about being creative is that it helps when you need to solve problems. Creative people are better problem solvers, because they are able to take a solution from one area of life and apply it in another area.

Children are in “learning mode” during most of their childhood. They try things, fail and learn and this grows their confidence. We all want to have creative children, so when they are not, before we start with the Genetics mantra (“He’s not a creative child. Some people are born with it and some aren’t”), we should examine our parenting style and how it locks or unlocks this creativity. Yes, there are people who are born with high creative potential, but I tend to think they need to be stimulated enough to actually reach a high level of creativity.

I think parents hold the keys to their children’s creativity. No matter how genetically creative your child is, you can help them be more creative. Your attitude will determine if your children keep trying or label themselves as “not good with those things”, which is worse than not being able to create.

Over the last 25 years, I have worked with thousands of children that talk about their ability to create in a bad way. You might think, “Well, maybe they discovered they were just not very creative”, and I say”

You cannot discover you are just not good at creating. You can only be blocked from discovering that you are.

Kids’ schooling is one of the biggest parts of every parent’s bible. Out of their life at home, about 70% is associated with school in some way – homework assignments, report cards, extracurricular activities, meetings with teachers and more.

My schooling was a nightmare for my parents. I was not a good student (to put it mildly) and my parents really suffered for it. I was not very good in my academic studies, I had social problems, I had behavior problems and the whole school experience was very painful for me.

However, after being kicked out of school after 10th grade for failing too many subjects, I became a good student and won a scholarship for excellence. I then realized that my parents could not have made life easier for me, because they had no rules about school to guide them. They wanted me (and my siblings) to go to school because this is what everyone did and because in their mind, not having education pre-destined you to a life of sweeping streets and collecting garbage.

My personal experience contributed much to my parenting bible. As I went through college, the rules and commandments about school and studies became much clearer.
I am particularly proud of my school commandments and of having kids whose schooling is one continuous ecstasy. Yes, their schooling was not a regular one, because they lived in different places around the world, learned in special programs (some of which I ran myself), skipped grades and did other extraordinary things. But this is what schooling is for me and I am happy and proud that my schooling commandments brought my kids to think of their schooling as the best thing that has ever happened to them.

I have over 1,000 rules related to school and studying. I will share 10 commandments with you today and I hope they will give you inspiration.

If you have followed the activity in the previous post, you probably understand that it is impossible to be totally free from needing approval. Again, do not blame yourself or others for this mindset, because you always do the best you can and your parents always did the best they could. But now that you know how dangerous approval can be to live with, you cannot afford to pass it on to your children, because doing what was done to you is not longer the best you can do.

To change, we need to make a conscious decision to change!

If you need some help in motivating yourself to change, think of how much pain you have endured over the years while seeking others’ approval and about how much more heartache and pain you will have to endure through in a year, 5 years and 10 years if you do nothing.

Think how cruel you will be to your kids by continuing this cycle. My mentor life coach did this trick to me when I faced a difficult change. He said to me, “Would you want Eden to be like this?” and I understood that I managed to live with the pain as a survival mechanism, but I could not live with the pain of being a role model to my daughter and making her suffer for it. I made the change immediately!

The good news is that you can minimize several approval-seeking behaviors at once by developing a single skill. For example, if many of your approval-seeking behaviors are due to lack of significance, working on your sense of uniqueness and learning to feel special will reduce or even eliminate about a third of the behaviors mentioned.

The first step of getting out of any emotional trap is recognizing that you are caged by a mindset that blocks you from being happy and fulfilled – that you are the one giving others power over your life.

People in the approval trap have some common character traits, all related to fear (is there anything besides love and fear?). They lack significance, have low self-esteem and use attention-seeking behavior to gain more significance, although that cannot remove the fear or raise their self-esteem.

Trapped individuals have the idea that to be highly thought of by some important others, they need to stick out, gain superiority by making others feel inferior, pretend to be someone they are not or, in other cases, never take risks to avoid conflict and judgment.

Everyone is trapped somehow, but it is the magnitude of the problem that matters. Use the list of approval-seeking behaviors below to discover if you are trapped or not and how deep are you in the trap of approval.

Give each item a rating from 0 to 10 (0 means you never do it and 10 means you do it all the time). My suggestion is to focus on those you gave high scores, indicating you have that behavior and the next post will give great tips to change that and get yourself out of the trap.

We define our identity through our communication with the people around us. We experience things and get feedback that directs us towards a desired, productive and agreeable behavior. Even the words we use require some form of agreement. For example, if I started writing here in another language, you would leave the website and even get a bit angry at me, because we do not have an agreement that I can write to you in a different language.

It is not easy to recognize when external approval becomes a kind of social trap. In fact, many people reject the idea by saying that we cannot really live without approval. If you feel you cannot live without approval, it must be right for you!

The fact we consider encouragement as approval is not a real problem. There is no person on Earth that does not enjoy it and feel good about it. The problem appears when we are sucked into an approval power game, because it is addictive and turns approval into a need for us.

Wanting to be loved, accepted, part of a group, approved or a source of pride for someone are all natural feelings that help us succeed in life, but when we cannot succeed (or function) without them, we are trapped. It happens slowly, like putting a frog in hot water and heating the water slowly, so the frog cannot feel it is being cooked slowly up to its death.

It was a lovely day on my life coaching deck and Talia came over wearing her gorgeous bright-colored dress, but it did not help lighten up her spirit. She was very sad. I had known her for a while and admired her deeply. Talia was an example of perfection for me. She was beautiful, she was friendly, she was knowledgeable, she was in a relationship, she had a perfect job and she was amazingly smart. She played musical instruments (yes, more than one), already held several degrees. While other people struggled to manage their time, she had worked full time and completed 6 university courses with high scores. She had traveled the world. And she had done all that by the age of 25.

Still, Talia was a very sad and tormented woman, because nothing she did seemed to please her mother.

Talia was in what I call the approval trap.

Unfortunately, we are all born into that trap without a choice. The way things are structured when we are young, we seek our parents’ approval to learn about life and build our confidence. Living every day of our life around them makes them almighty gods for us and we do everything within our tiny power to get their approval.

This post is about school uniforms, but it is also about how parents make decisions in life, especially those related to their children.

I recently found out that the parent body (called Parents & Citizens in QLD or P&C, Parents & Friends or P&F in other places and Parent-Teacher Association or PTA in the US) at my daughter’s school has the authority to choose the school uniform. There was a group of parents sitting around our dining room table, having brought Noff’s classmates for a Whacky Hair party, and a few of them were involved in the P&C. When I mentioned my views on the school’s over-emphasis of dressing “properly”, give the fairly restrictive and grossly outdated uniform code, one of them said, “Then come to the P&C meeting and propose to change the uniform”.

“What?!”

“Yeah, the parents can change the uniform if they want to, so if you convince enough people at the meeting to change, go for it”.

So my first lesson was that we parents have a lot more authority and influence over what our kids go through than we realize. Having worked long hours away from home while Eden and Tsoof were in primary school, I had never been close enough to the way schools operated and just assumed…

Inspired by my newly-found power, I immediately started to lobby for a new dress code for the school, something more up-to-date the kids will like to wear. This is when I learned about the many ways in which some people defend their views and how irrational they can be.

As hard as it is to admit, computer games have made our kids quicker thinkers and given them great satisfaction for hours have not been a good substitute for face-to-face social interaction and physical make-believe games.

Social skills are a very important part of our personal development and from a very early stage, make-believe and dressing up are our ways of growing emotionally in a safe way. While computer games are limited by the availability of technology, the make-believe and dress-up games are only limited by the players’ imagination.

Last week, our 15-years-old son Tsoof went to a party. It was an 60′s party and just before he left, he went into the loft, took out the costume suitcase and looked for inspiration to dress up. Eventually, he found some hippie-looking clothes that made him happy.

Later that night, Gal and I went to bring him back from the party, which was in a beautiful garden at his friend’s house. It was just lovely to see a group of 15- and 16-year-old teens all dressed up in hippie clothes, singing with a guitar, couples hugging and kissing and you know what? We felt good! Really good!

In the last few years, I discovered that glass containers were cheaper than plastic or metal ones. If I buy tomato paste in a glass jar, it costs almost half the price of buying it in tubes, sachets or sealed plastic tubs, so I decided to start recycling glass the way I had recycled plastic. It is even easier to remove the labels from glass containers, because they can stand heat and I they are dishwasher safe.

So I wash them, take the label off and use them to store things in my cupboards. One clear advantage of glass containers is that you can easily see what is inside them.

If you buy the same product regularly, after a short time, you can have a whole set of glass jars. For example, we use one kind of mayonnaise, so now our cupboard jars look like a set.

Basically, everything I buy in a large quantity, I transfer to a glass jar, because it is easier to manage. When I buy a bag of something, as soon as I open it, I transfer it to a glass container – I like to see in the container and it saves me having to deal with many bags and clips.

Parents often see themselves as “raising children”.

Not true.

Parents are actually raising future grownups and this is an important distinction, because grownups are independent, hopefully self-sufficient humans, whereas children are rather dependent and undeveloped beings who need continuous care and attention.

So in essence, no matter what we do today, we should do it with the final creation in mind – our future son or daughter when they are ready to say goodbye and beyond.

Will they be healthy and able to care for themselves so they can stay healthy?

Will they have the knowledge they need to not only survive in the world but also succeed?

Will they have the strength of character to do well and be happy?

But daily life is quite different for most parents. In most homes, parents are busy people and when they interact with their kids, it is often to do with housekeeping, cleaning up their messy rooms, getting off the computer or getting ready to go somewhere in a hurry. Most of the communication between parents and their children is aimed at right now (“Come here”, “Stop making noise”, “Clean your room” or “Let’s go”) and sometimes at the recent past (“Why did you…”, “If only you had…” or “You should have…”).