Happy, Healthy, Successful Life Formula: Knowing vs. Doing

Person holding hands up at the top of a mountain

Everyone wants the formula for a happy, healthy, successful life. In fact, most of us spend enormous energy to find that formula, and we do it all our life. Recently, I had talks with many clients and friends and realized that the problem is not finding the formula but implementing it.

Most people say they know what to do but they just can’t do it. When I teach them something and they have an awakening or awareness or realization, most of the time, it is not because they don’t know what to do but because they found a way to implement something they already knew.

Did it happen to you that you read a book, went to a seminar, heard a podcast, and said, “I knew that”, but still you don’t do what you know?

Well, it happens to all of us.

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Increase Your Confidence Through Kindness

Woman looking at clouds spelling Believe in Yourself

We all want to be confident and raise confident children. In my workshops, when I ask parents to grant their kids four wishes, confidence is high on their list. Confidence is the faith we have that things will happen in a certain way or that we’ll manage whatever happens. It is a sense of satisfaction or happiness about things that happened or about to happen.

Most parents are very surprised when I tell them that kindness is a fantastic way to boost our confidence, so, let me show you what the connection is.

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I Didn’t Know I Was Already an Artist!

A very common question I ask all my clients is, “What would you do if you had no money constraints and didn’t have to work?” It is a good question because it allows the mind to free itself from the constraints of life and allows itself to want, simply want.

In life, instead of learning to want and go for our dreams, we learn to comply, to suppress our wants and do what is expected of us. We are born dreamers. Research says that this is at its peak when we are about 5 years old, starts to decline around 8 and reaches total devastation around 16 years old. By that stage, what seems hard is a “sign” we are not capable of achieving our dreams.

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Raising Gifted and Talented Kids with Music

Every parent wants their child to be gifted and talented. We want our kids to be able to manage themselves throughout the challenges of the education process, which takes between 13 and 18 years. My kids have done that, and people who know them often ask, “What have you done to raise such gifted and talented children?”

Recently, I was at an event, where my son Tsoof performed a piece he had written in front of hundreds of people. After the event, some people came to me to congratulate me for his successful performance, and I stood there like a peacock, as if I had played it myself. It felt great, but the real benefit of playing music was in the development of his brain.

I specialize in children with learning difficulties, as well as gifted and talented children. After studying and doing Special Education work for many years, I developed methods to make sure my kids wouldn’t develop learning difficulties, and if they did, to get rid of them quickly (I am a great believer in the plasticity of the brain). But beyond that, I used these methods to make them gifted and talented.

Why? Because life is easier that way.

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Make Your Bed to Make Your Day

Believe it or not, if you make your bed in the morning, it will make your day. You’ll be happier, clearer and more productive. There’s research showing it’s true.

I have been on a search for family tips from the moment I had children. Almost 30 years ago, becoming a mother made me realize that efficiency can help me a lot in managing work and home, and that being efficient gave me more time with my kids.

As parents, we need to choose how to balance our time across many important things. Slowly, we tend to let go of some things we care about for other things we find more important.

In my leadership training, I emphasize that life is not hard when we need to choose between things that are very important and things that are less important. That’s an easy choice! It is much harder to choose between things that are equally important to us. When children appear, we have to do that a lot, and that’s not easy.

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From Sickness to Health: John the Wizard

My parents and their great-granddaughter

In the first week of my parents’ visit, we played a game. Everyone around the table talked about a good memory they had. Martin Seligman, the founder of Positive Psychology, said that if we focus on 3 happy things that happened to us throughout the day, our happiness level will increase.

We decided to do it as a family, so that my mom would be able to focus on good things in her life and learn to appreciate them and be grateful for what she had.

In our family, we play this game a lot in different versions. I also use it with my clients when I notice that their mind is full of fear of the unknown future, or when they only talk about bad things, doom and gloom. It works very well, and it is easy to see how their body language changes from the change of focus.

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Make a List: 100 Ways to Be Kind to Myself

Last week, I wrote about self-kindness and how to write a list of “100 ways to be kind to myself”. Kindness spreads like a ripple, so it must start from within us. I hope that by now, you have a basic list, but if you do not, please stop reading, make your own list and only then continue to read my list below.

Why?

The process of making up the list sends a message to your subconscious that you are important. However, if you copy someone else’s list, this does not happen.

Here is a list of things you can do to be kind to yourself. Only take those that suit your personality and adjust them to your preferences and to what makes you happy.

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Make a List: Self-Kindness

I have written a lot about kindness. I think that it makes the world go around and I like to think about it as a ripple. One act of kindness ripples and touches the lives of those who are far away from us.

The movie Pay it Forward showed the power of kindness in making the world a better place. I remember at the age of 16, I was a school captain and we had a teacher, named Reuben, who helped us a lot to change the lives of the students in our school. One day, a girl in the group asked him why he was dedicating so much time to us. He said, “If I make a difference in the lives of six of you, and each of you makes a difference in the lives of six other people, eventually, this world will be a better place”. I was 16 years old and this gave me a perfect understanding of the ripple effect of kindness.

For the last 32 years, I have been teaching emotional intelligence and kindness. used to be the part in EQ that we relate to others. In the last 10 years, it has changed for me as I became the state director of a not-for-profit organization, called “Together for Humanity”, which delivers diversity education.

Why?

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Singing Family Full of Joy

Noff with a microphone and Tsoof on guitar

On my happy list, I wrote, “It makes me happy to listen to my kids singing”. This was true even when they were babies. I remember my youngest daughter Noff joining us in Alicia Keys’ song Fallin’ when she was one year old. She always joined on time and it made us all very happy.

Singing is a very sensitive thing for me. Well, it was very sensitive. Today, when I run workshops or stand in front of a big crowd during my presentations, no one can guess that years ago, when I was young, I sometimes had no voice. Speaking was difficult for me and singing was not even an option.

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Parenting Focus: Point Your Flashlight and Magnifier at Good Things

Parents want to raise happy children. In all of the many parenting workshops I run, regardless of their parenting style, cultural background or socioeconomic status, all the parents want their kids to be happy, healthy and successful. The problem is that parents whose kids are not happy, healthy and successful do not understand how they contribute to this. They just cannot see how their parenting focus and the attention they give to problematic things creates these problems.

When children do not behave like we want them to and when they do things we do not like, we tend to pay attention to their behavior more than when they behave like we want them to and when they do things we like. This attitude only makes them continue to behave “badly” and creates a never-ending cycle of attention to “bad” behavior.

When pay attention to the problems, the problems keep growing, and then we pay attention to them more and we trap ourselves and our kids in this dysfunctional parenting style. In life, we get what we focus on. Some call it “the law of attraction”, I call it “the flashlight model”.

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