Stronger Together

I did not get my social skills from my agents, so I had to hold on to “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” and survive many “near death” experiences before the idea sank in: If I want to survive, I must have good relationships with my parents, siblings, friends and teachers and I had better learn the rules FAST!

The bad news is that grownups without social skills were once kids without social skills. The good news is that kids without social skills do not have to be grownups without social skills. They can change. In fact, you can improve your social skills greatly at any age.

I personally discovered the rules the hard way. At the age of 16, after being a total failure and being kicked out of school, without friends and having constant fights with my siblings and my parents, I figured there was something I needed to understand. By the time I finally got it, I had already had countless failed encounters with people around me that I had to get over. It made me vow that my kids would get good social skills from me from the second they were born.

So even if you are not the most social person in the world, your kids can be!

In his book “How to win friends and influence people”, Dale Carnegie wrote what I consider the bible of building relationships. Carnegie wrote his book in 1937 and it is amazing how relevant it is now. I copied the rules and used my explanation and suggestions for each of them. I hope you will find inspiration in those timeless rules.

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How to Help Bullying Victims (4)

This entry is part 15 of 35 in the series Bullying

The bullying game cannot be played without the victim. For bullies to gain power, they must find a victim to take it away from. If we help the victims not to be easy targets, it will make it a bit harder for the bullies to take anything away from them.

Many of the tips described in list series are useful both for kids and for adults. Much like any other list, some are easier to implement and others are less so, but I promise you that if you go over each of them and dedicate time each week to implementing at least one, the bullying will decrease and may eventually stop.

Again, if you are a parent concerned about your child being a victim of bullying, some of the tips here are mainly for you. You can arrange for your kids to get to school in a safe way, order food for them so they do not take money to school and even talk to their teachers and ask them to get involved. Do not expect your kids to figure this out all by themselves. It is hard to be bullied and harder to think clearly and come up with mature solutions, so take charge!

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Respect (spelled R.E.S.T.E.C.P)

R.E.S.T.E.C.P scene from Ali G Indahouse

In a family, the parents are like the government of a country. Not only do they make the decisions, but they also need to show the way through their actions, because everybody else (that is “the kids”) is watching them all the time.

In the movie Ali G Indahouse, Ali G is standing in his funny suit, red cap and heavy “bling” in the middle of the British Parliament and has this conversation that captures the essence of this in a funny but powerful way.

Ali G: R.E.S.T.E.C.P! Do ya even know wha’ it spellz?

Cabinet MP (hesitantly): Restecp?

Ali G: Yes, Restecp. ‘Owz anyone out there meant to restecp each uvva if you lot in ‘ere don’t even start restecp’ing one anuvva?

Beautifully said, no?

As you are probably aware, self-respect is the basis of confidence and respect for others is the basis of assertiveness.

When you respect yourself and others, they do not have to be exactly like you anymore. Being different is OK. Respect opens the way to understanding and then to cooperation and harmony (do I hear anyone saying “World peace”?).

The problem is that we live in a world where we do not get too enough respect. Jobs are cut to improve the bottom line of the company and even lives are sacrificed to make a bunch of people richer than they already are. Every day, we are being manipulated from every direction and we know it is not for our own good but for somebody else’s.

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How to Help Bullying Victims (3)

This entry is part 14 of 35 in the series Bullying

Bullying, as you may remember, is the 4th common reasons kids call helpline services. 13% of children aged 15-18 experience continual harassment and 14-48% of children say they have been cyber bullied.

85% of kids who have been bullied via their mobile phone know the bully and 87% of cyber bullies do it through text messaging (SMS), yet 58% of kids do not know how to report cyber bullying.

The results?

75% of victims have symptoms of post-traumatic stress and 65% of them still have those symptoms five years later. In the long term, bullied children are more likely to drop out of school, to use drugs and to use alcohol.

It is critical to our society that we stop this phenomenon.

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Risk, Success and Happiness

This entry is part 3 of 4 in the series Excellence

There is a beautiful story about 2 sales people of a shoe company sent to a deserted African country to examine business potential. The whiner calls his boss and says, “People here walk barefoot. They do not wear shoes at all. Our sales potential is zero”. The winner calls his boss and says, “People here walk barefoot. They do not wear shoes at all. We have no competition. The whole market is ours for the taking”.

Every success involves risk. It may sound funny, but the greater the risk, the greater the achievement. Poor people consider risk takers foolish, but those who excel will tell you that no achievement is ever accomplished by staying in your comfort zone.

The “comfort zone” is a very dangerous place, because it repels creativity and success. The comfort zone is the place where you welcome your fears with open arms and keep them company. There is nothing wrong with relaxing from time to time and resting before climbing the next mountain, but when we get too comfortable, out choices are eventually limited to getting up or drowning.

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How to Help Bullying Victims (2)

This entry is part 13 of 35 in the series Bullying

Last week, I wrote the first 25 tips to help victims bullying cope with and avoid being bullied. As I have written before, I believe in a holistic approach to stopping this phenomenon of bullying, which is a cycle of violence and abuse.

Building the victims’ confidence to function as a “bully repellent” is a good start. In some cases, this will stop them feeling so weak they have to bully someone else to restore their personal power.

Here are the next 25 tips to help the bully victim.

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Fighting Poverty

This entry is part 2 of 4 in the series Excellence

Luck has nothing to do with success and all the successful people will tell you that most of their success did not fall from the sky but there was some opportunity they were able to recognize. Developing the attitude to recognize opportunities is mistaken for some mystical luck similar to winning the lottery.

When my son was preparing for a competition, I told him the lottery story. This story is a ticket out of poverty. Take every opportunity to use it.

Every Friday, the archangel Gabriel went down to the Wailing Wall to pick up the notes of requests people stuck on the wall during the week. Every week, he read all the notes and organized them before presenting them to God.

One day, Gabriel want to God and said, “Dear God, there is this old man who comes here every week, rain or shine, for 25 years. Every week, he begs you to let him win the lottery. He is a good, religious man and never asks for anything else. Please God, I have read his requests every week for 25 years and it breaks my heart. Can you please grant the poor man his wish?”

God said, “I would do it gladly, if only he bought a ticket”.

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The Good Life

The difficulty kids have with goal setting is their short life experience. Without knowing enough about cause and effect, kids focus on having fun right now. Spending any amount of effort on a reward they may or may not get in the future is just not something they do.

In the famous 1972 “Stanford marshmallow experiment”, psychologist Walter Mischel put kids in an empty room and put a treat next to them. He told them they could eat their treat, but if they waited 15 minutes, he would give them another. Of 600 children, a third waited long enough for their reward, some snatched the treat and ate it as soon as he left the room and most of the kids did their best to avoid eating the treat by distracting themselves (moving, playing with their hair, etc).

Mischel’s original conclusion was that older kids can wait longer and deferred gratification is related to age. However, years later, he followed up with some of the children in his experiment and discovered that those who waited longer were also more successful in life.

In 1988, Mischel found that “preschool children who delayed gratification longer in the self-imposed delay paradigm were described more than 10 years later by their parents as adolescents who were significantly more competent”. In 1990, he found a correlation between the ability to delay gratification and higher Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores.

This is where we (parents) come in. If we teach our kids to set goals and achieve them, their life will be so much better. So how do we do it?

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How to Help Bullying Victims

This entry is part 12 of 35 in the series Bullying

The bullying game is played by more than just the bully and the bullied victim. There are the bystanders, the home of the bully, the workplace, the schools and society in general. Each of them needs help in gaining power to make sure they do not try to steal it from someone weaker.

I believe that all players in the game need help. There is a dynamic that needs to be broken and each participant, whether directly or not, can break the bullying cycle. In the next chapters, I will write tips to help each of the players to break the bullying cycle. This post contains tips for the bullied victim.

Since I believe a holistic approach is best in creating social change, I will direct these tips at both kids and adults. Helping bullied kids and adults will make sure they do not continue the cycle by bullying others to gain some perceived power that was lost.

There are 100 tips on the list (25 in each post). Each of them separately can make a huge change in your life. Study them carefully and find those you think are easy enough for you to apply. If you are a parent and you want to help your bullied child or prevent your child from being bullied, find techniques that are easy enough to explain and to apply and focus on each of them separately. Most of the tips are about building your emotional and social intelligence, so anyone can use of them.

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The Art of Excellence: Success with High Standards

Quality and high standards lead to excellence

This entry is part 1 of 4 in the series Excellence

In the eyes of the average person, there’s something snobby in striving for excellence. For some people, possibly for most, excellence is pure luck, almost a luxurious state of living that you’re either born with or not. It is no coincidence that those who think this way don’t excel at many things in life.

There’s a paradox in the search for excellence, because it is the result of an attitude, a habit you need to have in the first place in order to achieve it. There’s something frustrating in understating what T. Alan Armstrong said, “Champions do not become champions when they win the event, but in the hours, weeks, months and years they spend preparing for it. The victorious performance itself is merely the demonstration of their championship act”. It’s frustrating, because it makes you think that excelling is hard work.

Excellence goes together with extraordinary success that is higher than all standards. It’s frustrating because you cannot reach excellence without succeeding big time.

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