How to Inspire Your Kids’ Natural Kindness

Toddles showing natural kindness to baby

Humans are kind in nature. Just watch young children. They are born with natural kindness. This is the main reason it’s so wonderful to be around children. They constantly give and engage in a way that makes you want to give in return.

Research has found that kindness is contagious. If you want to see it in action, try smiling at people as you pass them on the street. Smiling is an act of kindness! And when you smile, people smile back.

When babies see a puppet show with kind and affectionate characters, followed by rude and mean ones, they prefer the kind puppets. Yes, they were just babies. But they have an innate ability to mirror their surroundings. They can notice the tone of the voice and actions.

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Amazing Awakened Spirit in a Beautiful Teenager

Teen boy's face and hand appearing out of darkness

Teens have a bad reputation. People often label them as rebellious, difficult and even troubled. Over the years, I’ve worked with many teens, and some of them have an awakened spirit that blew me away.

Jordan was a 17-year-old boy who came to see me because he had some difficulties with his parents. When I read his parents’ description of him, and the description he had written about himself, I knew he was different. No doubt about it. I just didn’t know how much.

His parents wrote he had been clingy as a child, had no friends, didn’t listen to them and had no direction in life. But when I read his own description, I was very confused. The way he described himself – his desires, challenges and what he wanted from his coaching – was in total contradiction to what his parents wrote about him. This was an issue for sure.

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Practice Fearless Parenting Under Pressure: Do It Your Way

Parenting is one of the most important and difficult things we’ll ever do in life. And it becomes even harder when we doubt ourselves and stop trusting our own judgment. When others try to impose their methods of parenting on us, and we let it affect us, we have an even greater challenge.

I was lucky to start my parenting journey when our close friends didn’t have children and our family was too far away. Until our daughter Eden was 14 months old, Gal and I relied solely on our own judgment. We had no Internet and no people telling us what to do.

Eden was born after I finished most of my education studies. Although my course didn’t cover things like the best time to feed babies, or when to start giving solid food, it did help me build the confidence to raise her.

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We Are What We Think: My Rice Experiment

33 years ago, when I studied special education, I learned that our thoughts manifest themselves into our life. I had amazing teachers and mentors. One of them, who was a psychologist, taught me the importance of our emotional hygiene as teachers. He said that what we think of ourselves reflects on the children and the people that work with us.

Scientists have examined the power of what we think for years. Many philosophers and spiritual leaders have covered it extensively. Our life is a reflection of what we think. In most spiritual beliefs, there is much focus on thoughts and intention. As a life coach, I work with my clients on the power of thought and I share with them how powerful thoughts are.

About 20 years ago, Gal and I traveled with the kids to France and went to a train station. On the walls was an exhibition of Dr Masaru Emoto’s water experiments. Emoto exposed water to music, spoken words, written words, videos and pictures. He then froze the water until it crystalized, sliced it and took photos of the ice. What he found was amazing!

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Speak Your Truth for a Strong Relationship

I’ve been in a relationship for 38 years, and I know it’s not always easy to speak your truth. When you bring two people together, they both need to compromise a lot and can’t easily balance the ratio between “give” and “take”.

Just recently, I had the chance to be on my own for 6 weeks when my husband went to drum in Africa. I realized that as partners and parents, we compromise many times, to the point where we might forget who we truly are.

When I say “compromise”, I don’t mean that anyone has any bad intentions. It happens naturally. When you live with other people, you can’t just do what you feel like doing. My son was also in Africa and my youngest daughter, who is 17, spent her time studying and having get-togethers with her friends, so she was not home either most of the time.

During those weeks, I examined 3 of my habits: sleep, eating and fun time. I realized I didn’t follow my natural cycles of sleeping, eating or doing fun things when my family members were around, because, first and foremost, I think of their timetable and their needs, and I juggle everyone else into a plan that would work. Me and my cycles are normally not part of the picture.

Don’t get me wrong. It was my choice. I just realized I had neglected part of myself.

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Best Family Quotes by the Amazing Virginia Satir

The family quotes in this post were written by Virginia Satir, the mother of Family Therapy. I appreciate her and have learned a lot from her over the years, and some of her best quotes hang where I can read them again and again.

Virginia Satir’s quotes about family and her philosophy about family relationships have become a great compass for me. I would like to share them with you and inspire you to consider and adopt her ideas about family.

One of the reasons I enjoyed Virginia Satir’s work was that she started as an educator, and so did I. I have a soft spot for people who are educators as, because I think their spin on their work is different and more effective.

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How to Have a Hot Relationship

Couple in a hot relationship lying on the grass

Having a relationship is like playing a game of “hot-cold”. We used to play it when we were kids. In this game, someone searched for a hidden object and we gave them clues by saying “hot” when they got close to it and “cold” when they moved away. I remember we used to say “steaming” when the person was very close and “freezing” when they were really far.

Relationships are exactly the same. If both partners are closer to fulfilling each other’s need, they have a hot relationship. If they are far from fulfilling each other’s needs, the relationship is cold.

When two people come together, each one is different from the other. They have a different history, different needs, different expectations, different styles of communication, different skills and talents. Yet, they find something in the other person that makes them attractive to them.

Think of attractive as “hot”, very attractive as “steaming”, unattractive as “cold”, and very unattractive as “freezing”. The scale from “freezing” to “steaming” can predict the quality of the relationship depending on where people sit on the scale.

I work with many couples who come for coaching to save their marriage or long-term relationship. Too many of them say that there is no warmth in their relationship. They have a freezing feeling which makes it hard for them to sustain the relationship.

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Self-Regulation in Your Marriage

Bride and groom holding their hands in heart shape

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.

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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.

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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.

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