Best Mother’s Day Gift: Time for Self-Care

It’s Mother’s Day again this weekend and the quest for the best Mother’s Day gift is on. This time, I want to inspire mothers around the world to give something to themselves, and you can help.

As a mother, I find it very hard to take time for myself. I am so used to giving and giving and giving, maybe I forgot how to take. You see, I am self-employed and the balance between work and life is mine to control. Some say it is easier. I think it is harder.

I had my first business straight after I graduated from college and I was already a mother by then. It was tough, but it made me efficient. When my kids were young, I never protested. I accepted that giving was part of my role. Over time, I learned to take time for myself in the spaces between being with my kids, my husband, housework and my job, and gradually increased it.

Time for ourselves is short in our society and as hard as it is to admit, mothers have even less of it than anyone else.

Why mothers?

In our society, mothers are in charge of many aspects of family life. I do not really like the stereotypical jokes about what mothers do in the time it takes dads to say “Jack Robinson”, or what happens when mom is sick vs. when dad has the Man Flu, but there is a lot of truth in them.

One of my clients protested this for a long time. She was in charge of her household and family life for 4 years. When she was ready to get back to work and asked her husband to be with the kids for one evening a week, he did not manage.

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Living with Passion and Purpose is Within Your Reach!

SoundStruck playing Etna, a paint drumming piece by Tsoof Baras

Living with passion and purpose seems like a fluffy dream to many people who have settled on their job and career, but there are many others who are living proof that living with passion and purpose is possible, maybe with a little bit of guidance.

My son Tsoof, who is 20 years old, finished his four-year degree in music recently. 3 days a week, he teaches school students the joy of percussion playing and the rest of the time, he works on his show and his band SoundStruck.

This week, in one of his musical performances, I had a chance to talk to many of the young musicians there about their plans for the future. Some of them looked for a job that would bring them money. They worked in a retail shop, in the bakery, played a gig once every two months, and the rest of the time, they had to pay the rent somehow. Others, like Tsoof, worked in the music industry and lived with purpose and passion.

I was a proud mother. You see, Tsoof leaves home 3 days a week at 6:30am, works full days, never complains, never says it is too hard. When one of his students is away, he uses the time to practice and write music, and he loves his students, loves the work, loves music and gets excited about the compositions and the work he does for his show.

My son is not the only one in that group. Others are also passionate and dedicated, working hard and loving every minute of it. I was happy to discover this.

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Turn Your Dreams of the Dream Job into Reality

Coffee cup, laptop and a woman's hands writing on a notepad

Most people do not have their dream job. Many people around the world go to work because they have to, because it pays the bills, because this is what expected of them or because they have nothing else to do. The lucky ones get up in the morning with excitement, leave home (or not) and spend most of their days doing something they feel passionate about.

I have to say I am one of the lucky ones. I get up every day and get paid to do something I love. It does not feel like work, more like living my passion and my purpose, which is inspiring and motivating and helps a lot with getting up in the morning.

Research shows that doing the work we love improves many aspects of our life and makes us happier. Happiness, as you know, affects our health, our relationships, our finances, our mental wellbeing and our work. It is a never-ending cycle. We love our work, which makes us happy and improves our productivity and the enjoyment of our work, which bring us more happiness. This way, being happy about your work is like passive income that keeps on growing.

This upcoming event will give you a unique opportunity to turn your dreams of a dream job into reality too.

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Gratitude: The Happiness Attitude

When we focus on our gratitude, the tide of disappointment goes out and the tide of love rushes in - Kristin Armstrong

Over years of learning about happiness and success, emotional stamina and wellbeing, I realized that gratitude is the best antidote for frustration. Frustration is a feeling, a thought. If we change the thought to gratitude, we will no longer feel any pain.

Life is full of challenges as we grow and become more aware of our surrounding. We are born into total dependency and we learn from our parents and other adults around us how to be frustrated when our desires are not fulfilled. This brings us lots of heartache and suffering.

The way we react to frustrations in life as kids is the way we will react to frustrations in life as grownups. We also pass this way of reacting to our children and the cycle never ends. If our reaction to frustration is positive and empowered, we hope the cycle will continue, but if our reaction to frustration is painful, we must stop the cycle NOW!

This week, I had a chat to my 14-year-old daughter Noff. We talked about her being very frustrated about an upcoming school assembly, which she hated. I told her about Pollyanna, the girl who inspired me to be a positive person and change my life from frustration to success. I asked her, “What is good about the assembly tomorrow?” She answered straight away, “It’s the last assembly of the year and there are no classes during assembly”. This made her feel better.

You see, there is something good in everything, even if it seems all bad at first glance.

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Distorted Definition of Depression Increases Depression

Young man walking head down in a wide fied

Depression is a big problem in our society. People think that nowadays we have more depression, when in fact we do not. What we have is a distorted definition of happiness and depression.

Here are some myths about happiness and depression that make people feel even more depressed.

Myth 1: Happy people are happy at all the time

When I go over the happiness scale with my clients, many of them think that they are supposed to be happy all the time. I can understand how people with this distorted definition of happiness can feel depressed. Some of them say that on a scale of 1-100, a happy person feels 95 happy or even 100. Since 100 is a state of total excitement and bliss, we cannot experience the excitement if we are high all the time.

Human beings’ nervous system notices differences. Feeling just a little bit happier than before works just as well when you go from 32 to 35 as when you go from 62 to 65. So every day, focus on being just a little happier than you were yesterday.

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3 Emotional Painkillers

Man holding his face in his hands in pain

In Holistic Approach to Emotional Pain, I explained why pain is not a punishment and we do not need to fight it. I also explained how the use of physical or emotional “substances” only makes us feel the pain longer and disrupts the function of the natural pharmacy we have in our body, which is in charge of flooding our system with “painkillers”.

In this post, I will share 3 “emotional painkillers” that will make pain go away faster.

1. The Rating Technique

The first emotional painkiller is used frequently by nurses and doctors. When you are in a hospital, before giving you your painkillers, the nurse will ask you to rate your pain from 1 to 10 and use this as a guide to determine your dosage.

This makes you develop an awareness of your feeling. If you say that the pain is a 9, the nurse will give you more painkillers and you will feel a bigger relief from them. If you say the pain is 3, the nurse may ask if you can wait a little longer and give you nothing for an hour.

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There Are No Hopeless Teens

As a teen, I faced many challenges with how the system viewed my abilities. Since then, I got a degree in Special Education and promised myself that no teen that crossed my path would ever be hopeless. Over the last 30 years, I have had the honor of working with many teens who were given up by the system and have done my best to act on my promise.

A young boy (let’s call him Aaron) came to see me 3 years ago. He was a tall and handsome young teen in a big body. He was in 10th grade and his mom was very worried about him. She raised him by herself, together with his youngest brother after a very challenging breakup.

Aaron attended one of the most prestigious private high schools, located over an hour and half’s drive from his home and his academic scores were low. He was failing in most of the subjects. He also got in trouble with every teacher possible and had no friends.

Every day was a challenge. In the morning, Aaron refused to go to school. In the afternoon, he refused to do his homework. The school told his mom that Aaron was hopeless. But he was just was a smart kid that was lost in the system.

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Holistic Approach to Emotional Pain

Unfortunately, I have had a lot of pain in my life. Sometimes, it was physical pain and others times it was emotional pain. I know how pain feels, sounds, looks and what it does to my ability to think.

I think every person in the world experiences pain. In fact, everything that doesn’t happen the way we expect, causes us pain, and we can separate the pain by intensity or level of importance.

Many people separate physical and emotional pain. I strongly believe they work the same way in our mind.

I am not a medical doctor, more of a “heart” or “mind” doctor, and I mainly work with my clients on emotional pain. In my work as a happiness coach, I take clients through a process that uses their happiness as a tool to overcome their emotional pain. I tell all of them that it does not mean they will have no pain in their lives, but we will make sure that in the competition between pain and pleasure, pleasure will win.

First, it is important to remember that pain is an emotion that is important for us. Together with happiness and satisfaction, pain functions as guide, like a compass or GPS. When we feel great, this tells us, “Keep moving in the direction you are now”. And when we feel pain, this tells us, “Recalculating … please make a u-turn at the nearest available point”.

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Make a List: Ronit’s Gratitude Examples List

So now you know about why it’s important to be grateful and how you can get yourself into a state of gratitude with not much effort and in a very short time. You just need to make a list of 100 things you are grateful for.

Many of my clients say this is not an easy exercise. They can think of 10 or 20 things, but not a 100. So I give them examples of my own gratitude. Usually, when I start sharing my gratitude list with my clients, they say, “Oh, yeah, I’m grateful for this too”.

I truly believe that all people have lots of things to be grateful for and if they struggle to find these things, it is only because they haven’t practiced doing it and maybe they need ideas.

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Excuses, Excuses

We all have excuses for many things in life. If we examine our excuses, we will find that we only use them for the things that aren’t working in our life. We never make excuses for what works, do we?

Excuses are stories we tell ourselves to justify things that didn’t go according to the expectations of others and even our own. We have excuses for why we didn’t succeed, why we forgot, why we couldn’t and even why we missed opportunities. The list is endless.

Usually, we bounce between blame and justifications to overcome disappointment. It’s important to understand that it is not necessary to be hard on yourself whenever you come up with an excuse, and you should practice acceptance as another coping mechanism. Excuses are essential for our survival. Without them, we would not be able to overcome failure, but if we use them too often, we do more damage than good to our emotional state.

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