attitude Tag | Family Matters

From Sickness to Health: John the Wizard

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.

This post is part 6 of 11 in the series From Sickness to Health

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From Sickness to Health: The Pharmacist

My parents landed in Brisbane, Australia, on a Friday evening. Only a week before, we started discussing what we wanted to achieve during their visit. The incentive was the new addition to our family – their new great-granddaughter. Our oldest daughter Eden did not work, Tsoof was on a school break from teaching, Noff was on a break from studying and we had many plans for them.

My siblings said, “You can’t take them anywhere. She can’t walk for 5 minutes”. The meeting at the airport was very exciting. I had seen them a year before and Eden had seen them a year and a half before, but the rest of the family had not seen them for 9 years. For me, my mom looked 10 years older than she did the previous year, so I worried.

Much like in coaching, every journey has 2 main points – where we stand now and where we are going. I told myself that for couple of days, I must gather all the information I could to know where we stood.

My mom’s legs were swollen. One leg was worse than the other, so she had to wear different size shoes. She could not bend to tie her shoelaces. She took a long time putting on her underwear and she needed help putting on her bra.

This post is part 5 of 11 in the series From Sickness to Health

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From Sickness to Health: Doubt Before Healing

During the 4 months before my mom came to Australia on her healing trip, I was very busy. I travelled the world with my work and only thought about my mom’s visit during gaps in the busyness. When I did spend time thinking about it, I mostly had doubt.

I had seen her the year before on my solo visit to be with my youngest sister during the birth of her son, and my mom was “not all there”. I didn’t know if I could do what my siblings said I should. For 4 months, I even doubted my parents would come.

Every time I talked to my parents, my mom was sick and in pain. She was taking a strong painkiller in a patch that lasted for 2 days had to get the prescription signed every two days. I didn’t know if my healing plan could work within a five-week visit. I imagined her here spending all her days in hospitals and I felt scared.

This post is part 4 of 11 in the series From Sickness to Health

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From Sickness to Health: Doctors are Not Gods

In previous posts, I shared with you how my mom, who is 78 years old, was sick, depressed and in pain and how we, her children, tried to help her in different ways. One of my mom’s biggest challenges was her attitude towards doctors, especially her GP (General Practitioner or Family Doctor).

My mom was addicted to her GP. This man has been her doctor for over 20 years. When she went to see him, she did not leave his clinic until he prescribed something for her or sent her to a specialist. When she saw a new drug on TV, she went to him and asked for it. The problem was not that she asked. The problem was that he often gave it to her!

At one stage, we asked my dad to go with my mom to the doctor and read to us what was written on her medication labels. Half of them had side effects that included kidney, liver, heart, joint, muscle and/or brain damage, and even death. We asked my dad to read her the labels, but she said that if her doctor prescribed it, it was good for her.

This post is part 3 of 11 in the series From Sickness to Health

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From Sickness to Health: Working Together on a Shared Goal

Last week, I shared with you how the stories my mother told herself brought pain into their life. My mother was in constant pain and was on loads of medications and pain killers and nothing really helped. She was depressed and often talked about dying. Even the joy of having 5 new grandchildren in the last 8 years didn’t help her, and my mom loves babies very much.

Today, I would like to tell you how my siblings and I gathered and made choices to change my mom’s life and heal her.

It started a year before my parents came to visit. My dad seemed very frustrated. Even the doctors said my mother needed mental help. One day, my siblings and I created a WhatsApp group and considered different ways to approach the problem.

This post is part 2 of 11 in the series From Sickness to Health

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From Sickness to Health: The Story of Our Life

I am in the business of helping people find the joy in life and have been doing this for 33 years. Over the years, I have helped many people and saved many families from pain and heartache. I am very happy and proud to be a life coach and view my clients’ successes as also mine.

My greatest victory happened recently, when my mother, who is 78 years old, came to Australia to stay with us for five weeks. She came here to heal. My mom was unwell most of her life. Since I remember her, she was overweight, had swollen legs and could not stand on her feet for long. In the last 13 years, things got so bad that one of her therapists said that the only place she was going was the cemetery.

This post is part 1 of 11 in the series From Sickness to Health

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Pocket Money: Parents’ Dysfunctional Attitudes

Pocket money is a topic that concerns many parents. “When to start, if at all?” and “How much to give?” are questions that almost every parent struggles with. To answer these questions, most parents should first answer the following question:

Why do I want to give my child pocket money?

I grew up in a poor family and pocket money was never an option for me. Only when I was 14 and we moved to a new town (which was only slightly bigger than the small town I grew up in), I discovered there was such a thing as pocket money.

I was so surprised. My parents had so little that whenever we asked my dad to buy us something, he said, “We don’t have money”. Therefore, in my mind, pocket money was part of wealthy kids’ life.

But it does not have to be.

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When Your Teen’s Friends are Bad Influence

As parents, we put all our heart and energy into raising our children to be the best they can be. We want them to be as healthy, friendly, successful and happy as possible. In their teen years, most of us are afraid that their friends will become the most important people in our teenager’s life. So we want to make sure those friends do not have bad influence over them.

Our investment in our children, both material and emotional, is tested several times during their life. Their social connections are one big test of parenting, because as parents, we try to pass our philosophy and values to our children. If they spend their time with friends who tell them the opposite, this may weaken their belief in our philosophy and our values.

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How to Turn off Children’s Creativity

As an educator and a mother, I believe in the importance of developing children’s creativity. My first real job as an educator was in a very special project, called “Creative Thinking”. It was a very important part in my career and in forming my philosophy.

I think this is the reason creativity is such a high value for me. I have written a lot about creativity and how to “turn it on”. But today, I would like to give some negative examples of ways you can turn it off, just as easily as you can turn it on.

Please check if your relationships with your children or students include any of these things. If so, this may be limiting their creativity and future success.

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Mental Pain Shouldn’t Kill You. It Can Make You Stronger

I have written before about emotional pain as a reaction to a perceived threat and our body’s way of telling us that something is wrong. Mental pain is not the enemy. It is the messenger. And it is very important not to kill it.

Many people will tell you that when you come out of the other side of pain, you feel stronger. I have learned the hard way that the fear of pain takes more energy than the pain itself. Worry is an example of it. When we worry, we experience mental pain from something negative we have imagined in our head. Yes, all in our head.

There are many techniques to turn mental pain into psychological strength and the more you use them, the less you feel the pain. I have gathered some of them here to share with you. All of them are proven and practical. I use them with my clients.

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