My Personal Tips for Important Family Goals

This entry is part 5 of 7 in the series 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.

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Sharing Clothes in the Family

This entry is part 4 of 7 in the series Family Goals

Over the years, I’ve set thousands of goals, and still do. Not because I haven’t achieved my goals, but because my family grows and evolves, and I never stop adding wants and desires, with action, into my family journey. As an example, here is how I’ve achieved the goal of sharing clothes in the family.

The first time I asked the hard questions was the time I woke up. You need courage to do that and I had it when I was 16 years old. I asked myself “What do I not like about my family and how can I change my life without getting rid of any family members?” Obviously, getting rid of my family was not an option, and understanding this was enlightening by itself.

I asked and asked and asked for weeks without an answer. Then, it hit me that the answer was to change myself. That was a very hard understanding and I went through some resistance to it for a while.

I believed my family members “wronged” me and changing myself meant they could keep doing what they’d always done, which was unfair!

Fairness has always been my weakness (still is in some ways). I’ve always wanted things to be fair and had this internal sense of justice my family just didn’t get.

So, I asked myself “What does fairness mean?” It was amazing what came up, which was different from the dictionary definition of the word.

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Goals and Actions

This entry is part 3 of 7 in the series Family Goals

In the first post of the family goals series, I introduced “the taxi driver” – the part of our mind we need to work with to make changes. When we want to make changes, it’s like directing a taxi driver to take us to a desired destination. I shared a list of questions we must answer to give our “taxi driver” good directions.

In the post on family goal setting, I explained how to use the answers to those questions to write goals and how to write them in the way that will help us make the desired change.

In this post, I would like to talk about how focus helps the driver navigate the ride to suit your needs and get to the destination faster.

Many people say that they know what they want, but they don’t know how to get it. It is true that sometimes, the goal seems so far-fetched or hard-to-get that people feel overwhelmed and freeze. It is as if they know the destination, but don’t know which path to take to get there.

The thing is you don’t need to find the path. You just need to focus on what you want, and the “taxi driver” will do the rest. If you dedicate time to clarify your goals, that will help your taxi driver achieve them for you in a way that aligns the most with what you want.

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Choosing the Right Career Path for Your Kids

This entry is part 18 of 19 in the series From the Life Coaching Deck

Parents worry about their children choosing the right career path. Some people start these worries very early in their kids’ life. I know parents who have registered their babies to a special daycare center when the mother discovered she was pregnant.

Don’t get me wrong, I think education is important and planning children’s future is important too, but choosing a child’s career path before he or she is born?

I met Miguel when he contacted me about child coaching. He wanted me to work with his son, Luca. When I asked him and his wife to tell me about Luca, they only had negative things to say right from the start.

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I’m Disappointed in You!

Think of the last time anyone said to you, “I’m disappointed in you”. How did that make you feel?

Being disappointed is part of life. I guess it is one of the greatest challenges in life. Realizing that life is not happening the way you want and managing to push through despite it.

Although being disappointed is part of life, being disappointed in others should not be. When I work with my life coaching clients, we deal with a lot of disappointment. Sadly, what hurts them most is not self-disappointment – that things didn’t happen the way they “should have” – but being a disappointment to someone close.

When I think of all the times I have heard this, I can see two groups of people that express disappointment in my clients: teachers and parents, in this order. I dare say that they cause a lot of damage.

Disappointment is “sadness or displeasure caused by the non-fulfilment of one’s hopes or expectations”. Therefore, saying to someone, “I’m disappointed in you”, is telling that person he or she is not fulfilling your hopes and expectations.

Who are you to cause someone a bad feeling for not fulfilling your expectations?

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Family Goal Setting: Set Yourself Up for Success

This entry is part 2 of 7 in the series Family Goals

Family goal setting is very important. If you’ve had a chance to read the post about family goals, you know that for a family to be happy and successful, you need driven parents who give good instructions to their “taxi driver”.

The taxi driver is the “creature” we have in our mind that at any point in time, asks us “where would you like me to take you?” and to do a good job, he needs two sets of coordinates – pickup point and destination – and very clear and specific instructions.

If you’ve answered the tough questions in the previous post, you should now have a better perspective on what you want your family to be like. You are already in better shape than most of the parents in the world.

I can tell you that in my personal research of thousands of parents, most of them didn’t know what they wanted. They were the kind of passengers that tell their driver, “Drive”, without saying where. They say, “I don’t know what to expect. Just take me to where most people go”. This guarantees they will get lost and bump into lots of traffic jams.

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Parenting Autistic Children: Catch 22

This entry is part 4 of 4 in the series Autism

The previous post in this series told the story of my first encounter with autism at a special school where I did work experience for 6 months. Today, I would like to introduce the problems families face when they notice something wrong in their child’s development. As you will see, the way the system works puts them in a Catch 22 situation.

Bringing a child into the world is a very exciting event in every family’s history. Noticing that something is wrong with a child is not easy to experience. As I’ve said before, mothers of autistic children were blamed in the past for the situation by the claim they did not connect with their child during the first weeks after birth.

Most of those moms sighed in relief when the results of an experiment confirmed that autistic babies were different from “normal” babies.

In the first stage of the research, every mom was given recordings of her baby crying and asked to guess the reason for the crying. Most moms of “normal” babies guessed correctly, while moms of autistic babies didn’t. So, those who advocated for the “let’s blame the mothers” said, “OK, then. That’s our proof”.

But the experiment continued.

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Family Goals: Let’s Ask the Tough Questions

Red question mark on a pile of grey question marks

This entry is part 1 of 7 in the series Family Goals

Some people think it’s funny to talk about family goals, because they link goals with business and a family is not a business.

That’s true! They are not the same, but what drives them forward is exactly the same. Please note the word “drive”. Imagine that running a family is like driving a car. I can be a beaten car, no fuel, flat tires, squeaking wipers and no lights, or it can be in tip-top shape and race forward with air conditioning, a sound system, brand new tires and bright lights to show the way.

Which car are you driving your family in? What conditions are you creating for relationships to be strong and for the family members to succeed and be happy?

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Autistic School: First Encounter with Autism

This entry is part 3 of 4 in the series Autism

My first encounter with autism was when I was a Special Education student. From the very first year of studies, my classmates and I worked with children on the autistic spectrum and accompanied some children with severe autism at school. At the start of my second year, I had to choose a place for work experience.

I remember the day our head of department came to shows us the list of options. The autistic school was not on the list, so I asked about it – not because I wanted to work there, but because I was afraid of it.

You see, my philosophy was to choose all the things I was afraid of. I figured that it was the best time to challenge myself and get over my fears. This is why I chose to specialize in Math and this is why I asked about the autistic school.

The head of the department explained to all of us that they didn’t offer work experience at the autistic school because we were not ready for it. She said people did this type of work after they graduated.

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How to Make Learning Fun with 50 Great Activities

If your kids go to school, you must be wondering how to make learning fun. Some teachers are good at this, but many are not, so it’s up to parents to add spice to the learning process.

Learning takes a big part of our life. As babies, we learn all the time. I can look at my granddaughter after not seeing her for 3 days and see she’s learned new things. And she has a lot of fun learning.

Later in life, we go to school to learn in a structured, controlled environment that doesn’t take into consideration that the brain needs to be open to absorb new knowledge. Sadly, I think that in the format it is now, school destroys a big part of our ability to learn.

I work with many children and the system has failed to instill the love for learning in them. I also work with grownups that consider school a traumatic period of their life.

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