Everyday Resolution: How to Rub Your Genie the Right Way

The Genie of the Lamp can grant your everyday resolutions

As a life coach , I believe in new-year resolutions and having targets for the new year. People often create resolutions on their birthday or on New Year’s Eve. The difference between that and being a life coach is that I believe every day is an opportunity to set new year’s resolutions. Every day is a new opportunity to want more, to ask more, to be more, to have more, to love more and enjoy life more, to tune ourselves for more happiness and joy. Happiness is never ending. Every day, when we get up in the morning, we can start fresh. Every day can be the start of a new year. That’s why it’s better to create “everyday resolutions”.

Many of my clients ask me how come some people’s New Year resolutions seem to fall flat, while others seem to be very successful at making their resolutions come true. This question always makes me think of the genie who grants wishes. Some people know how to rub the lamp the right way and other don’t.

Golden lamp with vapour escaping from the spoutI didn’t always know how to rub the lamp right. I remember myself on my birthday, every year, making lists of what I wanted the next year to be like. For many years, nothing happened. At the age of 16, I learned that I had been rubbing the lamp the wrong way and that my genie wanted to be rubbed differently. From that point on, I suddenly felt kind of lucky. Things seemed to flow. I felt happy, successful and protected, as if my genie would take care of me, as long as I took care of him, the right way.

Everyone has a genie that sits in their subconscious and waits for instructions. If you speak his language, he will lead you to where you want go. If not, he will steer you in the opposite direction to your dreams.

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What to Say When You Hear that Teen Life Sucks

Sometimes, when I talk to teens, they tell me that teen life sucks.

It is sad to hear them say that at a time in their lives that is supposed to be wonderful, interesting and exciting. The teenage years are when they form their identity and it is sad to hear that they came to the conclusion that teen life sucks.

It is sad because if they believe it sucks, they are more likely to feel that it sucks. If they think teen life sucks, their subconscious will create a self-fulfilling prophecy, and their life will actually “suck”. It is not the thought that makes it true, it is that subconsciously, the thought will lead to action that will make it true. Whatever you believe, this is your reality.

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Helping Kids Build Healthy and Powerful Character Traits

Many parents talk to me about their kids’ character traits and behavior. “He is a stubborn kid. He was always stubborn” or “She is a nag. She nagged from the first day she came home”. I wonder how much of what these parents are describing is real character (permanent and unchangeable) and how much of it we can change.

All kids are born with their unique character, a personality. This becomes really obvious when you have your second child. You realize that some of how they behave is just something they are born with. You notice that they have a certain character from the very first day you spend with them.

Unfortunately, not all character traits are wonderful and great. How they develop later on in life depends mainly on how we view these traits and how we react to them. For example, many parents treat their kids’ behavior as a result of a character trait. Since character is solid and fixed, they thing this behavior cannot be changed.

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100 Tips for a Happy and Healthy Life

Everyone wants to have either a happy and healthy life or a healthy and happy life, in these orders. I think of happiness as a very inclusive concept: I want to be happy with my health, happy with my relationships, happy with my family, happy with my work, happy with money, happy with friends, happy with my art, happy with my friendships, happy with the direction I take in life and happy with an endless list of other things.

Here is one of my top tips for a happy and healthy life. Take the tips that resonate with you, feel free to change any of them to make them fit your style and your life, or add new ones if there are some that are not applicable to you.

If you have 100 tips and you follow one every day, your life will quickly become both happier and healthier.

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Does Valentine’s Day Promote Violence?

Valentine’s Day is coming soon. My junk mail is full of advertisements for gifts for the Valentine’s Day couple. Just like every year, I am a little disgusted. Valentine’s Day, which is supposedly a day to share and express love for each other, is in fact a day that promotes very specific gender stereotypes – aggressiveness and violence in men, and vanity in women. You might say I am over reacting but I dare you to look at Valentine’s Day ads and see how stereotypical they are. Women are perceived as obsessed with their looks and man are obsessed with anger, violence, sex, aggressiveness and technology.

Since when do women only care about their beauty? It is a sad state of our a society if everyone believes the Valentine’s Day ads that think women are so shallow and dumb that they only care about their looks.

Since when do men only want to be perceived as strong and aggressive? It is a sad state of our a society if everyone believes the Valentine’s Day ads that think men are so shallow, angry, aggressive and childish that they will do anything to make themselves feel “manly”.

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Moving House Made Easy: The New Place

Moving to a new place is very exciting and a great opportunity to start fresh. A helpful tip to make the move smoother for everyone is to prepare them for what it is going to be like ahead of time.

How to prepare

When we move, we are usually concerned with the change in our basic needs and services. Being used to the old place, it can be hard to imagine what life in the new place is going to be like.

If you can, check out the new place. Checking out the new place ahead of time makes it easier to prepare yourself and your family for the new environment. If you get a chance to do that, take note of the surrounding area as well. This will make it easier for the entire family to prepare emotionally.

Visit those places physically with your kids, if possible, to make sure they have something to look forward to.

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Discrimination: Speak Up!

Discrimination is an important issue that we as humans need to tackle. I even have my own discrimination story. When I was young, I was discriminated against a lot.

I was discriminated against for not being a good student, for my ethnicity, for my social status. I was discriminated against for things I had control over and things I had no control over (like my parents’ income, my height). I was also discriminated against by my own family. My mom discriminated against me for being a girl (and not a boy) and for being sick while everyone else was healthy. Even my siblings excluded me for not being able to sing like them.

Back then, I felt very sad and miserable about it. I think I was very confused. It was hard for me to comprehend people’s discrimination towards things I had no control over. Now, over 35 years later, I am glad I experienced that discrimination.

Do you know why?

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Workplace Stress is Expensive

How to manage workplace stress infographic

I started looking into workplace stress recently, after attending a networking breakfast. It was after some talk by the Australian Government about efficiency at work. They seem to have invested a lot of money in technology to improve efficiency. Unfortunately, they do not seem to feel there is a need to invest in people more than machines.

Let me tell you, this breakfast meeting made me stressed. Unemployment is stressful for people and creating machines to do the jobs of human beings is going to have some negative consequences. I realized that the hope that less and less people will need help managing their feelings though therapy and coaching is disappearing.

I do not know if you know this but in Australia, the number of people who take “sick leave” (or as they call it, a “sicky”) is quite extreme. I have to admit that this really surprised me because as yet, I have never in my life missed work because of sickness.

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Depression: Not Good for Parenting

Black dog of depression holding a man back

In over 1,100 posts on this blog, I have covered a lot of topics that lead to happiness. Today, I want to talk a little bit about the flipside of happiness – depression, because depression is a big issue for many families these days.

There are many depressed couples, depressed parents and more and more depressed kids. The most concerning of these are parents who suffer from depression, because they often raise kids that cannot handle life very well.

Some say depression runs in families. That is not surprising because I think if you take a perfectly normal and healthy child and raise them in a house where one or both parents are depressed, they will definitely grow up to be troubled.

Depression is something people do not like talking about. I know many families in which the depressed parent is dragging the whole family down but no one says anything. It is very much like having a parent who is alcoholic or terminally ill. Everyone walks around on eggshells but tries not to say anything. Not always because they are afraid, but often because they have given up trying to speak up.

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Precious Jellybeans

There are some things I wish I knew when I was younger. For example, that life is short and we had better make the best of it. Luckily for me, I realized this when I was 16. It was painful and scary at first but eventually very liberating. Life is what we have. There are no rehearsals, no practice tests, no rewinds or regrets. We can work with it but not against. And time is our most precious gift. It is the only real currency that exists. Some people make a good use of it and others spend it or waste it.

Since that time of realization, I have been searching for ways to get this message across others: life is short, live it!

Recently, my daughter Eden sent me this clip that demonstrate time as our most precious asset using jellybeans as a metaphor. It was beautiful and the message is clear and simple. Here it is. I hope you like it too.

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