The Perfect Child: Is your kid a perfectionist?

As a life coach promoting happiness, I find myself talking a lot about perfectionism as an obstacle on the way to a happy life. After researching the science of happiness and seeing thousands of clients, including many parents and children, I can tell you that happiness and perfectionism cannot live in the same body. They are like the good and the bad wolves living in your body and when you feed one, the other one starves.

The problem with perfectionism is not only that perfectionists are not happy but also that those who are close to them are not happy either because of it.

Many grownup perfectionists started out as perfectionist kids. In my kids’ assessments, I can tell if a child has a tendency towards perfectionism from age 3. Most people believe this cannot be helped. Some kids are born perfectionists and that is that, but I think this attitude makes our life much harder, because repeating this mantra guarantees there is nothing we can do about it.

Much like any other “disease”, perfectionism can be cured and the best time to do it is during early childhood, before the child develops strong behavior patterns that are hard to change.

I also believe that the best people to cure child perfectionism are parents, because their love for their child will help them overcome the resistance.

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Happiness is in the Right Brain

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift. The rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift”
– Albert Einstein

Happiness depends a lot on which side of the brain we use. If you feel under pressure, your brain is telling you that you have been using your left brain to its maximum capacity.

85% of the time, we function using our left brain. We make sense of things, think of sequences, analyze language and meaning, interpret information and communication and absorb new facts from all around us. Although these functions are necessary to our life, the left side of our brain has its limits and uses pressure to signal that we need to let go and switch to using our right brain.

The left hemisphere of our brain functions like a sequential receiver and processor, while the right hemisphere is in charge of our imagination, sleep (dreams), memory, intuition and all of our creative functions. We absorb with the left side and create with our right side. The brain is like battery – the right side charges it and the left side uses the energy and empties it. Our goal is always keep our mental battery charged.

In our fast-moving world with way too much information, our brain reaches this point of pressure very often. This is when the brain pushes the “red alert” button and says “Enough! No more information. No more analyzing. No more thinking and no more talking!” If we ignore this signal, the sounds of the red alert and danger increase until we collapse or fall asleep from exhaustion.

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Nothing wrong with feeling bad

Everybody feels bad sometimes – sad, lonely, upset, worried, even angry. OK, except Tibetan monks, maybe, but only after 20 years of meditation and a strict diet of warm water. The rest of us sometimes feel bad.

The problem with feeling bad is not so much that we find something hard to deal with, but that we have been brought up not to feel bad, so we feel really bad about feeling bad. That, of course, makes everything worse, because now, we are feeling bad about ourselves and blocking ourselves from processing and letting go of the original bad feeling.

When I was growing up, I was often told that only girls cried. “Take it like a man”, people said to me and to all of my friends who were boys. The girls were not supposed to take it like men, but they were instructed not to bother others with their feelings and to “show their happy face” like “a good girl” should. So happiness was clearly good and resentment, anxiety, regret and sorrow were bad.

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Make a list (32): Fears

Some people say that fear is the opposite of love and others say it is the lack of it. Regardless of the exact relationship between fear and love, they are strongly connected. If we want to have lots of happiness and love in our life, we need to make sure fear will not be there to spoil the fun.

Fear is kind of the devil that casts a shadow on our life. I know many people who are in constant fear. If you ask them what they are afraid of, they are unable to explain. For some, it is just a pressure that they cannot identify and for others, it is more specific, but generally, you cannot fight anything you cannot define.

If we want to get rid of it, we must know what it is first.

Making a list of 100 fears can help you identify the blockages in your life. If you are unhappy with your achievements in some area and you dig deep enough, you will find there is fear associated with achieving more. If there is a destructive pattern in your behavior and you look at it closely, you will see it is rooted in some fear.

I tell my clients that this list is a big part of our action plan. If we want to achieve something, we must clear the way to it of all the things that are blocking us from making progress and fear is always at the source of those blockages.

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How to Make Troubled Teens Relax: Change Your Parenting

What are troubled teens? Could your teen be troubled? Can you do anything about it as a parent? What can you do? Get your answers right here.

In the past few weeks, I overheard talk about a teenager (let’s call him Jonathan). Besides being very talented, he used to be friendly and “normal”. But recently started to miss classes, show up late, fail various subjects and behave indifferently. One speculation was that he might have started using drugs.

I thought this was serious enough to report to his school through a friend of ours, who is his teacher. “Speculation or not, the school should look into it”, I said.

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The State Triangle

The State Triangle shows the relationships between our thoughts and feelings (mindset), our words (language) and our posture and actions (body language). Change on and the others will change.

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When Kids Worry

My mom used to say that kids have an easy life, but I wonder about this. Every time my kids (my own kids or kids I teach or coach) react to difficulties and challenges, I wonder about it again. I know my mom meant that not knowing too much and having no heavy responsibility is a bliss, but I say that not having enough life experiences, not having enough skills and not being able to express yourself properly can be the opposite of bliss sometimes.

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Happy Friday the 13th

Unlike what the title suggests, most people in the world believe that Friday the 13th is a scary combination. Most people believe that if the 13th falls on Friday, bad things will happen. Believe it or not, believing in it makes it true.

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How to Help Kids with Fear

Fears are very natural in every person’s life. From an early stage of our life, we are scared of various things. As we grow older and learn more about life, more of the world makes sense to us and many of our fears disappear.

Unfortunately, many kids are not treated seriously when they express their fears and this makes them even more afraid. Fear has many faces and symptoms and when it is not handled well, it can get out of proportion and lead to growing up with anxiety, panic attacks and depression.

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Be a Good Sport! (part 2)

This is the second part of yesterday’s Be a Good Sport!, which includes the last 5 things we need to do as parents to make sure our kids take the positive out of sports rather than the negative.

Excitement vs. Anxiety

When kids are excited about their sport, they are pumped up and ready to conquer the world. There is a positive outcome to this excitement and many coaches dedicate much energy to create this excitement in their players.

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