One day, I took my daughter Eden, who was 16 years old at the time, to a workshop I ran with a group of women about life skills and relationships. When we reached the positive thinking and happiness part of the workshop, I asked everyone to go home and think of a 100 things that would make them happy.
Read Make a list: List Making »
When you present yourself to an unknown person, you need to examine your thoughts, beliefs and feelings towards yourself and this may not be easy. When people are asked to describe themselves, they sometimes question whether this is who they are or who they think they are. For the purpose of making this list, who you think you are is all there is, so just write that.
Read Make a list: About Myself »
Our definition of friendship evolves over the years. At first, our friends are the kids we play with, even when we envy them or hate them. As we grow up, our definition becomes deeper and more meaningful, but also more selective.
Dan, one of my personal life coaches, told me about this list on the first sessions I had with him. “When I was 18, my dad sent me to an evening with a motivational speaker”, Dan said, “He told us to write down 100 things we want to do in our lifetime. I write my list and put it somewhere. When I became a life coach, I found my list again and I was amazed at how many of the things in it I had already done “.
Read Make a list: My Lifetime »
Gratitude is an excellent cure for taking life for granted. On the quest for happiness, appreciating what we have is a great way to shift from feeling sad, bad or frustrated.
This series about list making revolves around the idea of using lists to examine our life and our perception and to highlight the good things in life. This lets us can enjoy them, appreciate them and be happy.
In this post, I want to explain the importance of remembering. I did write “good childhood memories” in the original list of lists, but I think that the mere act of remembering, even if we recall some bad memories, helps in our personal growth.
It is funny that when I mention memories, people go to the past and start digging. Some people find it hard to remember childhood experiences. For some, the past is more vivid, while for others, it is vague and unclear. Some remember what happened and others only remember what they felt about what happened.
Love, as you probably know, is one of the most wonderful feelings. Some people claim there are only two feelings – love and fear – and every good thing in life is a form of love and all the bad things are forms of fear. A stronger version of this only recognizes one feeling – love – and all the rest is lack of love.
Whether you define love as the ultimate feeling or just an important one, there is no doubt that being loved and loving can make us the happiest ever.
In our communication with people, it is important to remember we are emotional being doing everything we can, positive or negative, to get some desired emotion. Love is an important part of our communication and it is sad so many people in the world do not feel they are loved.
In one of my courses, during the session about love, a 60-year-old woman told the group that her parents had never loved her. Imagine this for second – living for 60 years and thinking your parents do not love you! Later on, after I introduced what you are about to read, she realized her definition of love had been limited and her parents loved her dearly and we all cried together (a lot – can you imagine her relief?).
If you want to have lots of love in your life, make sure you have a broad definition of love. Making a list of 100 ways to say “I love you” will have two effects – you will be able to express more love for the people you love and you will be able to recognize when someone else expresses their love for you. There is nothing worse than growing up feeling you are not loved only because you cannot see it.
One of my clients, who was very critical about herself, was very surprised when I asked her “What do you like about yourself?” She thought about it for a long time before she found something nice to say about herself and you know what, it is hard to blame her.
Birthdays should be wonderful events in everyone’s life. For some reason, however, grownups do not think of birthdays the same as kids. While kids see it as a happy moment with lots of gifts, grownups think of the birthday party as a checkpoint for their life and expenses, expenses, expenses.
Obviously, when you are happily wealthy, this is not a problem at all. I remember the stage in our life when we could spend money on everything we wanted and the dilemma was whether to travel to China for my daughter’s birthday for 3 or 4 weeks.
This may be fun, but most people do not have this luxury.
I often describe improvements and progress as the currency of personal development. We can only be highly developed by continually improving our thoughts, ideas, actions and outcome in life. To my kids I say that as long as they keep moving forward, they are developing.
Read Make a list: Improve My Life »
Motivating Kids From: $9.95 
Reflections From: $5.99 
In the Outback with Jasmine Banks From: $5.99 
Be Special, Be Yourself for Teenagers From: $5.99 
The Will From: $5.99 
Book your private life coaching with Ronit Baras and learn how to be happy in life
