Family Matters | Practical Parenting Blog

New Year Reflection Activity Continued

The year 2019 is approaching. If you’ve New Year Activity: Reflection on 2018, you know why it’s important to take stock of your life and prepare for the next year.

I honestly believe that holidays, and time off in general, can help charge our batteries and help us gain perspective. I think we all should write goals when we are on vacation, or right when we come back, because we are usually wiser then.

Not everyone can take a long vacation, so here is a list that will help you gain perspective even if you can’t get a lot of time off.

Ask yourself the questions on the list below for a detailed reflection on the ending year in preparation for the year to come and have a great 2019!

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New Year Activity: Reflection on 2018

We are approaching the end of 2018 and our Be Happy family is preparing for a vacation. Every year, around this time, we take a month off to recharge our batteries. I believe that recharging our batteries is very important. It’s like eating food. We eat so we can get through 3-4 hours without food, and the quality of our food is important. For me, holidays are food for the soul and they give us the energy to survive the next year.

I think we are a lucky family, because we can take that time off. I do not take it for granted, because I know many people can only take the week of Christmas and New Year off.

I often measure the quality of the year by how many vacations I’ve taken. This year was a great year for me, because I took several short and long breaks. I am very grateful for being able to do that.

Every holiday is a lesson in perspective that allows me to examine my life and make changes for the following days, months and years of my life. I want to help you do the same, even if you can’t take a long vacation.

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Contentment and Gratitude: How Green is Your Grass?

I’ve written a lot about happiness and realized that some people just don’t get that happiness is an idea, a thought, an action you choose. On the other hand, unhappiness is the absence of that idea. One of the things that make people miserable is always comparing themselves to others.

I guess the reason we compare is that we learn it from our parents. It is an essential part of life and an important factor in our evolution. We must have a definition of what is right and what is wrong to navigate through life. If green, vibrant, healthy grass is the definition of happiness, then yellow, dull, dying grass is the definition of misery.

So, it’s OK to look at other people’s grass to find better ways to treat ours. But it’s not so good to believe that “The grass is always greener on the other side”.

Do you know why it’s not good? Because it’s not true.

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Self-Regulation in Your Marriage

Marriage is a give-and-take relationship. It succeeds when two people balance their own desires with those of their partner. If you have been married for a while, you know that this balancing act is not easy. It’s not easy because it requires regulation of thoughts, feelings and behaviors, and when this self-regulation takes too much energy, the person collapses and so does the relationship.

Regulation is a science. To understand why people reach this point of “no more” and consider separation or divorce, you need to know how to prevent yourself and your partner from reaching break point and how to separate external and internal regulation (self-regulation).

Regulation is the ability to control thoughts, feelings and behavior, instead of doing things on impulse. The more we practice, the stronger it gets, like a muscle. Once it is strong enough, it’s much easier to resist temptation and function according to a plan, rather than going with whatever comes our way or whoever applies more pressure. Just think of a baby that needs to hold his pee until he gets to the toilet. He needs to regulate his impulse to pee in his pants (or diaper).

Here are three research conclusions about self-regulations.

This post is part of 32 in the series Save Your Marriage

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Best Family Quotes

Quotes have been part of my life and personal growth since I was 16 years old. For the first time, I had my own room. I took a sheet of think paper that looked like an old scroll, burned its edges with a candle, wrote some quotes on it (by hand) and put on to my wall with sticky tape.

Recently, my sister helped my parents’ house clean up and found the quotes I left there 38 years ago. One of them was a family quote from the book Illusions by Richard Bach, which I had received as a gift.

This book has made a huge impression on my life and the family quote I chose changed the way I looked at life. Before reading the book, the definition of family was very simple for me. Family was a group of people related by blood. It included Mom and Dad, the people who gave birth to you and raised you, and your siblings, the children born to the same parents. Back then, we hardly had blended families or adopted children, and I never questioned this definition.

Until I read Illusions. One quote in there changed my definition of Family.

“The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other’s life. Rarely, do members of one family, grow up under the same roof”

— Richard Bach

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Open Home: Guests Welcome

Good families don’t just happen. They are made with awareness and action. As a parent, I encourage you to write family goals, so you can lead your family to a happy, healthy and wealthy lifestyle. I didn’t grow up in an open home, and I decided to change that, so I set some goal.

In this post, I want to share one of my family goals, which I wrote to replace a behavior form my parents’ home I didn’t like at all – closed doors.

My mom was always preoccupied with what other people thought about her. I never blamed her for it. Well, that’s not true. When I was very young, I even hated her for it. It was exhausting.

Anyway, when I was 16 years old, I realized that this was how she had grown up. What other people think about her was her reason for living. She dedicated much of her life to please people whose opinion mattered to her. This took over her life and, as her children, also ruled our lives.

One thing that bothered her greatly was having a clean house. The problem was not that she wanted the house to be clean, but that she panicked whenever we had guests.

This post is part 6 of 6 in the series Family Goals

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Family Wealth Fitness

Everybody wants their family to be happy, healthy and wealthy. Of course, if you are not born into wealth, you need to grow it with understanding, planning and lots of practice. In other words, increase your “family wealth fitness”.

Looking at how we build physical fitness is a great way to understand wealth creation. To be healthy, we need to be physically fit, and to be wealthy, we need to be financially fit.

Just like physical fitness sits on a scale, wealth fitness sits on a scale. The first stage in physical fitness is to have enough energy and strength to do your regular day-to-day activities and to enjoy your body. The second stage is to build enough stamina to handle sickness and unusual physical challenges well.

Financial fitness is the same. First, you build financial stability, so you can have what you want, manage the day-to-day financial needs easily and enjoy your life. Then, you can build a money buffer large enough to cover large purchases and unplanned expresses.

This post is part 10 of 10 in the series Happily Wealthy Family

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My Personal Tips for Important Family Goals

This post is personal, because I’ve been asked by people to share my view of the ideal family and how I reached that point in life when parenting was such bliss for me.

I have to say that I don’t think we are the ideal family. We have ups and down and challenges with our children. We just sort them out quickly and in a very efficient way.

Why do I say that? Because even if you are doing all the right things – give good instructions and coordinate things with your partner – you’ll face traffic jams. For more about this, read the Family Goals series from the start.

Why? Because that’s life. You take a deep breath, overtake the traffic jam and sometimes just need to meditate until the road is clear from glass scattered on the road from someone else’s accident but there is no life without it. I clarify this because some of my clients just collapse when they think they do everything well and still, there are parenting accidents.

So, here I’m sharing some of my goals (I’ve had thousands over the years). I hope it’ll give you some ideas of what you can aim for. Take only the goals that matches your philosophy in life. Remember, most of our decision making is done by the subconscious mind, if a goal that I chose to peruse is against something you have in your subconscious, you’ll go through lots of self-sabotage and experience lots of frustration.

This post is part 5 of 6 in the series Family Goals

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Choice Theory Can Save Your Marriage

Relationships are very sensitive. Bringing two people together creates lots of fun and joy, but at the same time, it creates conflict and pain. According to Choice Theory, we can develop habits that create more fun and joy and less conflict and pain.

Dr. William Glasser is an American psychiatrist I highly appreciate. He developed Reality Theory, which later became known as Choice Theory.

In the seventies, Glasser’s work was not widely accepted by his colleagues. While others thought that human behavior was affected by external sources, Glasser believed in personal choice, personal responsibility and personal transformation.

Other psychiatrists categorized certain behaviors as mental disorders and prescribed medication accordingly. Glasser believed he could teach his patients to make better choices to achieve better results.

He applied his theories to education, management and marriage. The examples I give in this post are relevant to marriage.

This post is part 31 of 32 in the series Save Your Marriage

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Turn Your Unhappiness into Personal Growth

I often discuss happiness with my clients. They find it very awkward when I tell them it is possible to find happiness everywhere, including times of unhappiness.

Most people try to avoid unhappiness like the plague. They divide life into happy and unhappy and think they should move towards happy and avoid unhappy. This is good if you think of it as a process and direction, but not if you think of it as something that shrinks you. You see, we can grow from happiness and we can grow from unhappiness.

Trent was a 28-year-old man who worked at a petrol station. He was healthy, made good money, could pick shifts if he wanted to do something in the evening, had time for computer games and had some good friends.

On the surface, you’d think Trent had a very good life, but he didn’t. His friends were all professionals with university degrees, and he still didn’t know what he wanted to do in his life. He told me he’d never known what he wanted to do in his life.

One day, Trent had a weekend away with his friends, and although the time spent together was fantastic, Trent came back very unhappy. This was when he looked for a life coach and found me.

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