Family Matters

Posts Tagged ‘happiness’

If you ask people what success means, some will tell you it is a mindset and others will tell you it involves pure luck. When they lose in a battle, it is mainly because they believe life is all about luck. When they win in the battle of life, it is mainly because they believe they have control of their mindset. There are two kinds of people – those who win in life and those who whine about life. Which one are you?

Life is full of battles. From the first second we come into this world, we have challenges to conquer. Babies have the most challenges. Without the ability to speak, satisfy their own hunger, take care of a wet or smelly bum or change the temperature, they are fully dependent on others. Yet, although they lack the ability to satisfy their basic needs, they never consider quitting.

With crying as their only tool for communication, they win most of their battles by whining. Unfortunately, this is when they also develop the belief that whining is a good way to get things in life.

Whether this mindset will stay with them for life or change depends on the baby’s social agents, especially the parents. If they consider the crying baby to be a complainer (“What’s wrong? Why are you crying so much? It’s not the end of the world”), he or she will grow up to be a complainer. If they see crying as a form of communication (“Yes, Mommy is here. You’re right. You’re all wet and Mommy needs to change your diaper”), he or she will grow up to be a communicator. When those two babies grow, they will both have the desire to be successful, but one of them will go for it and the other one will complain about not having it.

Every parent wants well-connected kids. Many people invest a fortune to allow their kids to hang around others they may benefit from. The saying “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know”, is very tough but true.

I learned it the hard way that connections get you places and that there is no need to fight it. I remember the first time I realized it when I was about 24 years old and went to the bank to get with a credit application. As Gal and I sat down in the manager’s office, he looked at us like we were two young kids and said, “Never! I don’t know you and I can’t give you any credit”.

People like doing business with people they know. There is an assumed trust with someone you know. My dad had suggested he come with us to the bank, but I said, “No! It’s not supposed to be like that”. We both had salaries, we owned our home (and had a huge loan my dad had organized) and I was convinced the bank manager would look at the facts and understand we were a reliable couple, but he did not.

At one stage, I asked the bank manager, “Do you know my dad?”

He asked, “What’s your dad’s name?”

When I told him, he cried, “Why didn’t you say so? Sure, I’ll give you credit! Here, give me the form and I’ll sign it”

I was furious, but I realized my dad had built this connection for a long time and it was just wise for me to take advantage of it. I also realized I had to do the same for my children.

Much of our success in life depends on our ability to network and connect with other people. This is a very important skill that your kids will learn from you. It is almost a form of art.

In my leadership training, I tell the participants that good leaders have good networks and they build them like spiders. Every person they meet, they weave a web that connects them. This is true in life and in business. You connect with people and you both benefit from the relationship. Benefit does not have to be financial, it can be emotional, but as long as both sides benefit, the relationship will continue. This is a very important social skill to teach children – having a network of friends is important for their success and it based on “give and take”. In a good relationship, you cannot be a constant giver or a constant receiver.

Some people say that fear is the opposite of love and others say it is the lack of it. Regardless of the exact relationship between fear and love, they are strongly connected. If we want to have lots of happiness and love in our life, we need to make sure fear is not there to spoil the fun.

Fear is like the Devil that casts a shadow on our life. I know many people who are in constant fear. If you ask them what they are afraid of, they are unable to explain. For some, it is just a pressure they cannot identify. For others, it is more specific, but not enough.

Unfortunately, you cannot fight anything you cannot define. If we want to get rid of our fear, we must know what it is first.

As you know, I like the technique of making a list to recognize and change something we do not like. Making a list of 100 fears can help you identify the blockages in your life. If you are unhappy with your achievements in some area and you dig deeply enough, you will find there is some fear associated with achieving more. If there is a destructive pattern in your behavior and you look at it closely, you will see it is rooted in some fear.

I tell my clients that this list is a big part of our action plan. If we want to achieve something, we must clear the way to it of all the things that are blocking us from making progress and fear is always at the source of those blockages.

As you may know from making other lists, writing down is a way for you to recognize what happens in your mind instead of letting it consume you. This is a private list, just for you, so be honest and do not be afraid to face your thoughts and feelings. That is the idea of this list, after all.

In the “old days”, the elders had a special role in people’s life. Because knowledge back then was not the highest currency, what the elders could give their community was wisdom. Unlike knowledge, wisdom is applied knowledge, achieved after personal experience, experiments, trials and errors and often summed up as rules of living.

Much of our life today is dedicated to acquiring knowledge. School, where you spend about 13 years of your life, is a place that gives you knowledge. If you study a profession, you spend another 3 to 10 years of your life in a school of knowledge.

As an educator, I find most of this to be a total waste of energy. When I did my degree in Special Education, I took an amazing course named “Who needs school anyway?” You would think that the main idea is to teach us that school is the best thing and that everyone needs school, but our amazing lecturer allowed us to explore this topic from many angles. We all had to go and research what school is all about and in my research, I discovered that School was an institute that provided knowledge, but failed to give kids wisdom. School had forgotten its purpose.

It is amazing what we can learn from kids. Inexperienced and naïve, they have some truth they were born with and I wonder if we can borrow this naivety from them, until we also grow our happiness.

Do you not feel sometimes that “growing up” also means losing something?

I do!

For a long time, I held the belief that being around kids would remind me that I needed to unlearn some things in life and go back to the source, to the original state of trusting life, unexplained, to laugh at silly things and possess a strong belief that “everything is going to be all right”. Kids are great reminders of this state.

Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul
- Samuel Ullman

Please do not get me wrong. There are frustrations, tears and problems for children, but most of them can be fixed with simple things like a kiss, a balloon or just a suggestion of a better option to choose. The younger they are, they easier it is to make kids happy. My two new nephews who live on the other side of the world and I see in photos, in videos and on Skype, remind me of this purity, this innocence and joy. Every time I talk to them, I find out how much they have learned from the previous week and realize that their mothers, my two younger sisters, probably learn lots more every day.

This week, Ronit and I had a discussion on the difference between competition and perfection, or rather between being competitive and being a perfectionist. We were talking about how happy we were that our children we neither of those now, although they had been when they were younger.

This got me thinking that many parents raise their kids to be competitive or to strive for perfection, not realizing there was a third alternative, which helps the kids build their self-esteem and lead a relaxed and happy life. So I wanted to share with you my take on all 3 options and what you can do for your kids through your parenting and personal example.

Competitive people compare themselves with others all the time. Am I as pretty as Betty? Am I as strong as Josh? Am I as smart as Clarissa? Can I draw as well as Billy?

Perfectionists compare themselves against imaginary standards. While some rules are written clearly and are the same for everyone, perfection is a personal matter and a perfectionist’s rules of how things should be are typically not written anywhere or accepted by anyone else.

Do you do either of these? If so, what can you do instead?

OK, parents, hand on your heart, how often do you do something romantic with your partner? Come on, don’t be shy, it’s all right. How often do you have a romantic dinner, go out dancing together or take time off just the two of you?

I bet your mind just filled with thoughts of “the children”, “my work commitments”, “that project I have to finish”, “how hard it is to get a babysitter nowadays” and various other seemingly-appropriate reasons for your romantic situation being what it is and why you should not be feeling too horrible about it. Besides, is this not what everyone experiences when they turn from a couple into parents?

Yes, they do, and yes, they all feel just as horrible as you do about it, but does that make it better?

Nope.

The natural progression of our life seems to be that we get really excited about finding a partner that turns us on and can be out friend at the same time. We dedicate much of our time and nearly all of our brainpower to finding that person. We embark on a journey of mutual exploration, during which we are typically so fascinated with the other person, they need to do something truly awful to turn us off.

Once we have found our body-and-soul mate, we go through what is commonly known as “settling down” (is this an ugly expression or what?), which includes some or all of the following: moving in together, getting married, joining finances, buying a home, getting a very large debt together (the mortgage) and, of course, having children. These steps seem to extract the interest and variety out of our life and replace them with certainty to the point of routine and with responsibility to the point of stress.

One of my clients runs a drug and alcohol rehabilitation program. Personally, he has been through every drug and drink known to man and suffered emotionally before, during and after his addiction periods.

He describes a drug user’s life as the chase of highs that never ends. He says that highs last less and less time and the in-between periods become more and more difficult and stressful.

That made me think about the way life seems to be going for many people these days and about how we are being encouraged from every direction essentially to live the life of drug addicts or alcoholics. Our drugs are legal, but we are no less dependent on them and they do us a very similar amount of harm.

Our drugs are money, fame, gadgets, brand names, number of followers on Twitter, number of fans on Facebook, trophies and grades, our kids’ trophies and grades, rank or title at work, the size of our house, the model of our car, being up to date with the latest gossip, our highest level at some video game and so on. They may not be chemical, but they are all addictive. We chase them, they give us a short “high” and then we need to go after the next “hit”.

People who live like this are never happy. Not really. They are very happy occasionally for a little while, but most of the time, they feel frustrated, stressed and depressed.

But is the way to happiness not through reaching a comfortable life with all the trimmings?

It is not easy for people to understand that their thoughts, feelings and actions are forms of energy. I remember the first time I realized this. I was on the top of the snowy red mountains of Bryce Canyon in Utah, reading the book The Celestine Prophecy. For the first time, I found a visual explanation for feelings I had.

You see, as a child, I never learned to pay attention to my feelings. They seemed to be urges, strong impulses that repel me from doing something or being around others or attract me towards them. Considering emotions as a form of energy made a lot of sense to me and gave my feelings some credibility.

As I my emotional intelligence evolved, I learned that people with high EQ are very attractive, because they send good “vibes” to their environment and (surprise, surprise) the environment sends them good vibes right back, helping them live happy, healthy and successful lives.

Not everyone understands the connection between emotional ability, success and health, but it is necessary in order to control our destiny and our quality of life.

This week, I ran another Happy Parents Raise Happy Kids program at a local primary school. I had been in contact with that school for over three years now and had run various programs for students and teachers. For three years, ever since our first program, the principal, Cherie, had been trying to organize this workshop and looking for funds to make it happen. While most schools have a parent body that pushes for the workshop, Cherie had had to do it on her own.

As you can imagine, I started the day feeling frustrated with the time it took to arrange the workshop, but here is the story of what happened to the parents and me that got me to a completely different feeling in the end – gratitude.

8:30 am

I set up everything in the beautiful Resource Center next to the Junior Playground. Cherie said she was not sure how many parents would come. In some of the events she had organized for parents, only one or two of them had come. For this workshop, she had personally contacted each of the parents who had been struggling with their children.

“Ronit, we have many struggling parents”, she said to me several times. The school’s academic achievements had been low for many years and the last professional development with the teachers had shifted something in the dynamic of the school and in the academic achievements, so Cherie thought the parents were the next piece of the puzzle.