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My Personal Spring Cleaning of the Mind

My life changed when I was a teenager. I was in the middle of 10th Grade when the school counselor gave me a letter telling me that since I had too many failures in my report card, I would not be able to stay for 11th Grade.

There was nothing special about it. I counted the days to the end of the year, so I would not have to go to school anymore. I hated school with every cell of my body. I was looking forward to the end of it.

The change happened when there was a contradiction between what I wanted and how it felt. You see, I wanted to leave school at the end of 10th Grade anyway, but it just did not feel right.

This inner conflict was a very big quantum moment in my life. It made me wonder, “How was it possible to get what you want and still be unhappy about it?” It is a big question. Have you ever asked yourself this? I suggest you do!

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Emotional Freedom: Let Go and Be FREE!

I do not know about you, but once, whenever I thought about freedom, I thought of a prison. I imagined someone trapped in a closed place against his will. It was always a physical place, with bars and darkness, and just thinking of it upset me.

When I started studying how the brain works, my perception changed. I learned that there is another prison – a very secure place that is the hardest to escape. Most of us live in the prison of our own mind, in which we are limited by our way of thinking.

I remember the time that I experienced the loss of my child. I could feel how quickly I was building my own prison and how each thought was adding one more bar and one more lock around me. The hardest realization was that only I could set myself free.

No one in their normal mind wants to be trapped inside their mind. Yet, in some way or another, we all are. This is because we are not in our normal mind. Yes, me too. Do not take this too hard, but Buddhists think we are all delusional, trapped in the prison of our own ego.

Think about it: imprisonment is the absence of freedom. We only desire freedom when we feel that we do not have it. If you feel free, why would you search for freedom? This comparison between what we have and what we lack, followed by the bad feeling we have about it, is a prison in itself.

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What Others Think about You Is … None of Your Business

When I was young, if someone asked me to complete the sentence “What others think about you is …” I would have said, “the most important thing in life”. I thought that, because of how I grew up. My mom, who is over 75 years old now, still thinks that we live to impress other people and navigate our life based on what they think about us.

When I studied Education, I realized that most parents in the world teach this to their kids. At first, they say, “Whatever your parents think about you is the most important thing in life”. Later on, they say, “What your teachers think about you is also important”.

They are all very surprised when their kids become teenagers and transfer this to their peers and add, “Whatever your friends think about you is the most important thing in the world”.

It is a natural progression. If you practice worrying and navigate your life based on what others think about you, you become good at … worrying and navigating your life based on what others think about you.

Simple!

When you follow this path, you never learn who you are and how to navigate life based on what you think of yourself.

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Tips for Teens: How to Make Good Career Choices

Teens have a bad reputation. Many people believe that they generally make bad choices, misbehave and lash out in ways that hurt them (and others) later. Among other things, they think that teens do not know how to make good career choices.

I have had the honor of working with many teens. This has given me a chance to prove to many of them, and to their families, that the bad reputation teens have is wrong. There are always teens who choose well, behave well and do well. And if they can do it, so can other teens!

Many of my clients share teen horror stories, like “You know teens. They never have any money”. I do not know what they are talking about. My own teens have always had money, and it was their own money.

Another common belief is “You know teens. They don’t want to work”. No, I do not know, because my own teens have always wanted to work. My kids also have friends who started working as soon as they could and are doing very well.

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Use Your Self-fulfilling Prophecy to Help Your Kids Succeed

What does “self-fulfilling prophecy” have to do with good education and helping your kids succeed? Everything!

To raise our children to be successful, happy, healthy and productive grownups, we need a holistic approach. Yet our society and education system take a different approach. Governments spend billions of dollars every year to establish and run educational institutes where kids learn literacy and numeracy. Children dedicate 13 to 15 years of their life to learning things that will play a small part of their adult life.

Do not get me wrong, I think it is important to learn to read. I am also a qualified math teacher and think math is important. But tell me, out of a week of your life, with 24 hours a day and 60 minutes every hour, how much time do you analyze poems or find square roots of numbers? Do your amazing English and math abilities determine how happy, successful, healthy, friendly and productive you are?

I wish!

Learning depends greatly on the self-fulfilling prophecy of the teacher. Yes, I know, it sounds harsh, but the quality of the learning is highly dependent on what goes on in the teacher’s mind (and in the holistic approach, parents are also teachers). Every time I finish a day of professional development for teachers, the teachers are surprised to discover that what they think of the students manifests itself in the students’ behavior, social interactions and academic achievements.

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Your Child’s Subconscious Mind Has No Sense of Humor

When people ask me to summarize my studies, I say they were all about how the brain works. The first four years focused on how to use this knowledge to stimulate learning. Later on, I learned how to work with the subconscious mind to avoid misery and have more success and more happiness.

Learning about the brain is a never-ending quest. There is much research in the world about the brain and its functions in health, in success, in relationships, in learning and in everyday life. Over the years, I have tried to share my learning about the brain and its functions through this blog, especially in relation to parenting and education.

Why parenting and education? Because these two areas are very close to my heart. Since you are reading this, you probably care about them too.

Today, I would like to share some insight that is very important in parenting and in education. I want to tell you how the conscious and the subconscious minds work. Specifically, I want to tell you about how the subconscious mind deals with humor.

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Life Coaching Tips: Quote Cards

Today, I would like to share with you, my coaches and mentoring clients (and even parents) a tool I have for working with my life-coaching clients. This tool is also useful for every form of therapy and even for teaching and parenting. This tool is quote cards.

Sometimes, it is hard to start a discussion with children, teens or adult clients, and we want the messages to appear as if they are coming from somewhere else and not from us. Quotes are a wonderful way to do that.

Generally, quotes are a wonderful tool in motivation, because they typically communicate an idea powerfully using a very short and concise format. Many times, when you read or hear a great quote, it reinforces a belief you already have, or already want to have, and you think, “I couldn’t have said it better”.

In coaching, our goal is to help our clients switch from one emotional or mental state to another. We need to be very careful about helping them get to where they want to go, not to where we think they should go. This is why getting to know them and their coaching targets is essential to our work.

This post is part 1 of 1 in the series Life Coaching Tips

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Stop Looking for Certainty and Have Faith

Certainty is a great asset in life. We all seek certainty. Some seek it inside themselves and others seek it externally. Some find it in faith, others in routine. Certainty gives us lots of confidence in the world around us. We use it to mourn the fact we were not born fortunetellers. We do not like the idea that we cannot control the future and this shakes our confidence. If we want confidence, we must lean on some things to will stay stable in our life.

I find certainty an overrated concept. In marriage, for example, people seek signs of certainty that they have chosen the right match.

One of my clients was very upset her boyfriend asked her to sign a prenuptial agreement and did not want to marry. I specifically say, “did not want to marry”, because she said that he did not want to marry her, but he did not want to marry anyone else either. He just did not believe in the institute of marriage.

When we examined this desire for certainty, we realized that if she married him in a flashy, white dress wedding, she had a greater chance of divorcing him. The more we discussed it, the more she realized that the intentions, the desire to work on the relationship and the commitment do not change if they have the same bank account, a white wedding or an expensive honeymoon. All couples start with the right intention and lucky us, they cannot see into the future.

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Money Can Buy Happiness If You Use It Wisely

I grew up in a poor family. We were five children, my mom left home early in the morning and my dad was the town postman and when he finished his first job, he worked a second job as a handyman. “Money cannot buy happiness” was my parents’ motto.

Only later on, when I started making a lot of money as student, I realized that poor people come up with these beliefs about money to justify their lack of money and they disconnect money and happiness to give their life a better meaning. What my parents really meant was that we could be happy in many ways and money was not a condition to happiness. I agree with that.

Money brings an enormous feeling of happiness if you use it to … give.

Researchers at the University of British Columbia and Harvard Business School checked the connection between spending money and happiness and they found out amazing things that are important for all happiness seekers to know.

In one experiment, they gave students $5 or $20 and asked half of them to spend it on themselves and the other half to spend it on others. One group was taking the money and enjoying it, while the other was giving it to someone else to enjoy.

What they found was that the “givers” were significantly happier at the end of the day. So money can buy you happiness if you use it to make someone else happy.

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Turn Your Dreams of the Dream Job into Reality

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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