How to Change Habits: Servants or Masters

This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series How to Change Habits

In a very chaotic lifestyle of high stress and too many changes, we depend a lot on our habits, because they give us certainty. Without the certainty of habits, our life would be full of fear.

Imagine getting up in the morning, not knowing if there is food in the refrigerator, or sending your kids to school, not knowing if they will come back, or leaving your home in the morning, not knowing if it will be there when you return.

Certainty is essential for our emotional survival. When we have the confidence that things will happen the way we expect them to, we can stop worrying and struggling. We are more relaxed and therefore think better and get better outcomes. To create certainty, we develop habits that allow us not to think and re-think everything we do. Habits are automatic rules of behavior that help us feel safe.

However, habits can heal us or kill us.

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International Parenting Survey

Parenting is very important to me. It is so important that I have been spending many hours of my time to write over 1,000 articles to help parents raise happy, successful, friendly, smart, talented, sensitive, adventurous, courageous, loving children. The number of readers in this blog indicates that these articles help many parents do the most important job in their life – being a successful parent and raising successful, happy children.

Recently, I received a request to promote an international parenting research, conducted by the University of QLD, which aims to discover parents’ thoughts about their kids, their ideal parenting philosophy, their actual parenting style, the services and support available to them and those they need to improve their parenting.

I am very happy to promote this research. I have gone in myself and completed the survey and I believe the results will highlight the importance of parenting programs and the need to help parents with a very important task.

If you are one of the thousands of parents who have participated in the Happy Parents Raise Happy Kids program, remember to add it to the list of programs you are familiar with when you do the survey.

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Are We There Yet?

Many parents, when they think of traveling with their kids, immediately hear this whine in their mind, coming from the back seat of the car, “Are we there yet?” I have seen similar scenes in way too many movies too. Being in the car with bored kids is possibly one of the most common fears parents have, which causes many of them to avoid traveling with their children.

How horrible.

Another thing that is now very common is the use of electronic gadgets to pacify kids and keep them occupied on the way to interesting places, because of the fear of what they might do if they get bored. Watching a DVD or listening to music, often each person separately listening with headphones, seem like good ways to “have some peace and quiet”.

Again, how horrible.

Because traveling is not just about the places we visit. Traveling is also about breaking the family routine, spending quality time together and bonding. Sharing a DVD player may keep your kids occupied and quiet, but it will prevent them from developing their imagination, their ability to keep themselves interested and their connection with other members of the family. In fact, it actually makes them bored more often and teaches them to fear boredom and to view their own children later on as a nuisance.

How… OK, you get it.

Ronit and I have just returned from a week away with our kids. It is now winter in Brisbane, with temperatures below our enjoyment threshold, so we decided to go to Port Douglas, which is in the tropical region of Australia. We were hoping for nice, warm weather. Instead, the sky was overcast, it rained lightly on most days and the temperatures we pretty mild. But we had a ball anyway.

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Best Anger Management Tips and Quotes

Hulk - the symbol of bad anger management

This entry is part 2 of 3 in the series Anger Management

If you kick a stone in anger, you’ll hurt your own foot
– Korean Proverb

Some people are angry. Most of them learn anger from their parents and are trapped in a vicious cycle. One of the saddest things is an angry family, in which the parents are angry at the kids, who are angry at their parents, who are angry at their kids…

Sounds familiar?

Anger always comes from frustrated expectations
– Elliott Larson

Some say anger peaks during the teen years. I am not sure this is true for everyone. I know many teens who are joyful and happy. I was angry until I became a teenager, so I believe anger has nothing to do with age and hormones and everything to do with awareness. I think anger is a mindset that clutters our thinking and we are angry because we have poisoned ourselves with thoughts of disappointment and frustration.

For every minute you are angry, you lose sixty seconds of happiness
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Let’s face it, we are all angry at times. We are angry when things do not happen the way we want them to. Anger is a form of extreme disappointment that we think we are directing towards what we believe to be the source of the disappointment, but in fact, we direct it only towards ourselves. When I think of anger, I immediately see a bottle of poison.

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What Did You Expect?

By definition, in order to be disappointed, your expectations must be higher than your perception of reality. I know many parents who are disappointed in their children, sometimes to the point of declaring their disappointment for the whole world to know, but as a parent looking from the outside, I think their expectations are just too high.

During life coach training, we discussed expectations and our instructor said that to be happier with our life, we should lower our expectations. I nearly exploded. I had grown up in a world that operated according to standards. I had been taught those standards, but never realized who had set them or where they had come from. They had just been there as facts of life, so lowering them was out of the question.

But when we broke for lunch, we kept talking about various situations that were causing us disappointment and robbing us of our happiness and it helped me to consider other people’s expectations without being emotionally involved. Since I had no attachment to their expectations, I could compare the options with a cool head just by looking at the outcomes.

For example, one of my course-mates (I will call her Fiona) lived in a blended family, in which she had two teenage children and her husband had two more. She spent most of our lunch break telling us how much better her own kids behaved and how rude her husband’s daughter was for leaving her clothes lying around and having a messy room, saying, “That’s no way to live. She leaves a mess all over the place and I have to pick up after her”.

I decided to be a bit of a pest and asked her, “Do you really have to pick up after her?”

“Of course I do”, she said quickly and confidently, “Somebody’s got to do it”.

“Really? What will happen if you leave her clothes lying around and wait?”

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School Horror: Untouchable

This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series School Horrors

School was not one of the best periods in my life. I have become a teacher in hope of making a different in the lives of the many children like I was who are not very good in their studies, have few or no friends and struggle.

It is hard for people to imagine this, but for some kids, school is a big struggle for survival. This struggle is carried with them for years to come, even when those kids become parents themselves. When I talk to my clients about the negative beliefs they have about themselves, I discover that many of them were formed in school, when other kids said nasty things that they had no way of overcoming. I understand this very well, because I was the same. It took me a long time get over it and what really helped me was moving from primary school to middle school.

In 1st Grade, I was not a very popular girl. If there was a hierarchy in class, I was at the bottom of it, with 2 other kids that had their own problems. I loved going to school, because my teacher was the angel for me. She was soft and understanding and always treated me nicely, but the other kids never wanted to play with me.

When I did not come to school, it was very hard for my teacher to get one of the kids to come over and give me the homework (although some kids lived in my neighborhood). In the morning, when we had to stand in pairs in front of the classroom door, I was always left at the end and the child that had to give me his hand did this it in disgust. Although my teacher was very kind to me, I was always alone. Every year, until the end of primary school, when the end of year came and my class gave a performance, I stood at the back, holding a sign or something, by myself.

Was I maybe just not a friendly girl?

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Not Fair!

If you have ever spent more than 5 minutes around a group of children, you have heard at least one of them cry, “Not fair!” If you have more than one child of your own, or worse yet, you live in a “blended family” and have some kids who are yours and some who are not, it is very likely you have also heard this cry many times at home. “Not fair!”

In sober grown-up moments, we all know life is not fair, but when things get out of hand and we feel down, that innocent cry rises up inside us too. “It’s not fair! I’m a good boy/girl. Why is this happening to me? I don’t deserve this”.

Young human beings can only experience the world through their own senses. When they are unhappy, they cry and someone makes everything all right again. Later on, they learn to identify that someone as “Mommy” or “Daddy”, but the world still revolves around them and Mommy and Daddy still do whatever it takes to make the child happy again.

As the grow up, kids begin to notice other people, but they only perceive these other people’s effect on them and do not understand that the other people have their own (different) thoughts and feelings. The most they can imagine is that other people feel exactly the way they feel themselves, that they are as cold, as happy or as sad at the same time.

Experimenters asked children what they believed to be the contents of a box that looked like a particular brand of sweets. After they guessed that the box contained sweets, they were shown that the box in fact contained pencils. The experimenters then closed the box again and asked the children what they thought someone else, who has not seen the contents of the box, would think was inside. Children up to age 4 or even 5 said the other person would say, “Pencils”, because they already knew.

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Complaint-free Life: How to Stop Complaining

This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series Complaint-free Life

There are simple rules to know if you complain and could benefit from doing something about it:

1. If you behave aggressively, rudely, sarcastically or critically towards yourself or others, these are forms of complaint

2. If you want someone else to change something and you tell them so, that is a form of complaint

3. If your feedback is focused on what does not work, that is a form of complaint

4. If you stress about things not happening the way you want them to and you say it, that is a form of complaint

5. If you tell others that they need to appreciate you for not complaining about something, that is … a form of complaint

Before and After

The first thing you need to do is measure your starting point. Rate your level of complaining from 1 to 100. If you complain a lot or are frustrated a lot, give yourself a higher number. If you do not complain much, give yourself a lower number.

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Parenting Research

Ever since I started studying for my degree in Education, the science of parenting has appealed to me. I remember that for my third year of studies, I registered for a special course to become a facilitator of parenting workshops, but I was not accepted. I was so upset. I told the girl in the office, “What do you mean ‘not accepted’? I’m the best student in my class. You can’t get anyone better than me around here”, and she said, “Only parents can be facilitators of a parenting course”.

As soon as Eden was born, I understood what she had meant.

The search for what makes a good parent and teacher did not stop when I was told I could not do the parenting course. I went on a personal journey to try to find the pieces of my most valuable puzzle in life – the makings of a great parent.

I think this constant search has brought me to where I am today. Working with the “education triangle” of parents, teachers and students to understand what makes great kids. At one stage, I remember, it hit me that although some pieces of the puzzle would reveal themselves as time went on, I could already see the picture of a great parent clearly. I had found the most important pieces and I started sharing them with as many parents as I could through my parenting workshops and this parenting blog.

My daughter, Eden, who is now 23 years old, was one of the participants in my lifelong research. In some ways, she still is. She has even shared some of her feelings and thoughts as a participant on this blog (see Eden’s posts).

I am not sure if this was the reason she decided to study psychology, but she did.

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Complaint-free Life: What are you complaining for?

This entry is part 2 of 3 in the series Complaint-free Life

Complaining for sympathy

Complainers find at a very early stage of their childhood that crying, originally a form of communication, is in fact a wonderful way to get attention. Crying was OK and normal when they were young, but in a way, complainers that use their complaints to get sympathy and attention are like children who have not evolved. They are a lot like 3-year-olds throwing a tantrum because things are not happening the way they wanted them to. Complainers often complain about themselves and draw attention to their bad heath, lack of skills, abilities and looks and include self-pity.

To overcome this tendency, think of good ways to get attention, use Pride Therapy and draw attention to your successes. You will get much more attention that way.

“The usual fortune of complaint is to excite contempt more than pity”
– Samuel Johnson

Complaints as justification

Many complainers use this strategy to avoid changing. When they are in conflict, they complain about others to force them to change and direct the responsibility away from themselves.

Another reason is to justify being rude or aggressive. If they complain, it means the other person must have done something that deserved their rudeness and aggressiveness. This is a very dangerous belief to have and the associated behavior is a form of abuse.

The third reason is to complain to justify avoidance. If I complain, it means I can postpone making decisions or doing something that I am afraid of doing.

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