Happy Affirmations: Happy Beliefs

Hope, faith, peace, love, believe - a good recipe for healing the soul's wounds

I have written a lot about affirmations in this blog, mainly because I believe they are very important for our health and wellbeing. You can sit down with a person for 10 minutes and tell if his/she is a happy, successful, healthy person by the sentences they repeatedly say.

Do you know why? Because those things they repeatedly say are part of their beliefs about themselves and the world around them. The way we experience the world depends a lot on how we tune our minds.

Let me give you a good metaphor. Think of the beliefs in your head as colored glasses. If you put pink glasses on, you will see the world in pink. If you put blue glasses on, you will see the world in blue. If you have black glass on, well, you won’t see anything because they block out the light.

Most people dedicate a lot of their energy to changing the world around them, when the greatest and easiest impact would come from just changing their glasses, or in our case, our beliefs about the world inside and outside of us. It is true that not everything can be changed by changing our glasses, but changing our beliefs have a tendency to snowball, for better and for worse. If we make small adjustments in our belief systems, it will lead to exponential change because our beliefs are highly interconnected.

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Peer Pressure: The Power of the Group

Teens are often criticized for not being able to stand up to peer pressure. In my parenting workshops I show parents and teachers how much they, as mature adults, grownups and parents, submit to group pressure. They are usually very shocked to discover how many things they do that do not match their own thoughts and beliefs, and how strong their desire is to be accepted, not judged and not criticized by the people around them.

Being social creatures makes us compromise our thoughts and beliefs to match those of the society we live in. It is in some way a survival mechanism that got out of control. In the beginning, we did it to survive in the group. Later on we have to obey the group if we want to be accepted in.

The power of peer pressure was examined many years ago in a famous study called “Asch’s conformity experiment”. This short video can explain how easy it is conform.

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Parenting 101: Top Parenting Essentials

After coaching so many parents, and raising my own kids, I have accumulated many essential parenting tips that I want to share with you. I hope you find them useful.

Take care of your happiness first. Just like they tell you on a plane, you should put the oxygen mask on your own face before helping your kids. If you want to raise happy kids, you must take care of your own happiness first. If you do not have oxygen, you are no good to your kids. Happy Parents Raise Happy Kids.

Be positive. It is very easy to notice what your kids are doing wrong but harder to pay attention to the great things they are doing. Parents tend to take the good things for granted. In life, you get what you focus on and parenting is exactly the same. If you focus on good thing, you will have more of them. If you focus on problems, conflicts, difficulties, bad manners, you will have more of them. If you notice your child doing something good, say it! Praise kids for being kind, congratulate them for making an effort, acknowledge their kindness and you will see more of it.

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Social Media Reality: Look Up! What Are You Missing?

Technology and social media have become a significant part of our life. Recently, I learned some valuable lessons about just how they affect us and the opportunities they make us miss.

My 13-year-old daughter, Noff, is the youngest in our family. Lately, she has been struggling with not having a mobile phone to take to school. To her, mobile phones are very cool. Some kids need them to coordinate pick-up times or for safety on the bus.

Unfortunately for her, she does not need it for any of those things. She so much wants to be part of the mobile phone in-crowd that she uses our old phones to play games. She struggles with not being like everyone else and I struggle with my parenting.

I have some beliefs and rules about social media and I know I need to adjust them to suit the times. I have three kids and I cannot apply the same parenting rules regarding media with Noff that I did with my first two.

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Discrimination: Speak Up!

Discrimination is an important issue that we as humans need to tackle. I even have my own discrimination story. When I was young, I was discriminated against a lot.

I was discriminated against for not being a good student, for my ethnicity, for my social status. I was discriminated against for things I had control over and things I had no control over (like my parents’ income, my height). I was also discriminated against by my own family. My mom discriminated against me for being a girl (and not a boy) and for being sick while everyone else was healthy. Even my siblings excluded me for not being able to sing like them.

Back then, I felt very sad and miserable about it. I think I was very confused. It was hard for me to comprehend people’s discrimination towards things I had no control over. Now, over 35 years later, I am glad I experienced that discrimination.

Do you know why?

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Kids: The Best Anti-Smoking Incentive

Smoking is bad. Everyone knows that. Unfortunately not everyone understands it. Countless campaigns have tried and failed to encourage people to quit smoking but I think kids have the power to make a difference.

When I was growing up, my dad was a smoker. He was not one of those people who smoked a cigarette every once in a while. He smoked more than a packet a day. For my dad, smoking was a manly thing. While my mom never smoked, and my older sister fought with him about for years, he kept on smoking. Even at home, next to us. He had no intention of stopping. His excuse was, “I have been smoking for years. I can’t stop now”.

One day, he found out that my brother, who was about 16 years old, had smoked his cigarettes. He freaked out. I remember that day. He was furious. He ran around screaming like a crazy man. My sister, who was 17 years old at the time, said something to him that changed his perspective completely. She said, “How can you tell him smoking is bad for him if you smoke yourself?”.

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14 Ways of Developing Empathy in Kids

Elephant and young woman touching foreheads

Empathy plays a very important role in the interaction between human beings. I have been working with children for over 28 years and have found that although some kids are naturally empathic and others are not, empathy can be learned.

Empathy is just one of the elements of Emotional Intelligence (EQ). As teachers, we focus on 4 major components of EQ:

– Recognizing my feelings.
– Managing my feelings.
– Recognizing the feelings of others.
– Helping and supporting others to manage their feelings.

Empathy falls under component 3 (recognizing the feelings of others). Despite it being an element all on its own, we believe that it can contribute greatly to the development of the first two components. We believe that anyone who can understand the feelings of others is better at communicating, managing conflicts and generally has more successful relationships.

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Positive Beliefs about Money

Being wealthy is more than counting the money you have in your bank account. It is a mindset. In the last chapter of Happily Wealthy Family, I shared many of the negative beliefs we often have about money. By identifying these beliefs, you can do your best to replace them with positive beliefs about money.

Here is a list of 100 positive beliefs about money, wealth, investing and rich people. Reading them does not mean you automatically adopt them. Find the ones you do believe in and make sure to hang them up in a place you can read every day. If you find others you want to adopt, find a story, a situation, or a person you know that is proof that this belief is valid.

For example, I had a belief that you have to be born rich to be rich. I wanted to believe that everyone could be rich. I knew a guy (who was my dad’s boss) who was very wealthy but was born to a very very poor family. With the help of this story, I could adopt the belief “Everyone can be rich!”

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The Beauty Inside

It is a fact that we cannot see ourselves the same way others can see us. Firstly because we usually see ourselves in the mirror which is not the same position others see us in. Secondly, because we see ourselves from the inside and the inside is cluttered by thoughts and feelings we have towards ourselves.

The beauty inside is developed by what others, who are very close or important to us, say about us. I have met many grownups who carry negative beliefs from childhood. For example, people who are critical of a facial feature like a long nose or big eyes that mom or dad mocked at the age of 6. They simply cannot shake this feeling in adulthood.

I myself grew up in a culture that thought straight hair was an advantage and curly hair was not. As kids, we spent year looking for ways to straighten our hair. It was only when I grew up and met others who spent a fortune on curling their hair that I learned to appreciate what I have. This is a natural process.

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Negative Beliefs About Money

Empty wallet comes from negative thoughts about money

I was born in a poor family and I think the people in my family had poor beliefs about money. I made it my goal to raise my kids with rich and wealthy beliefs about money.

I think I did. You see, poor people adopt beliefs to justify the fact that they do not have money. Because of their beliefs, they do not take certain opportunities to gain money and their situation remains the same.

My job as a mother is to keep my kids away from those thoughts.

Most people think that in order to have money, you need to make, earn or win it. I think that in order to have money, we have to have good thoughts and beliefs about money, about making money, about finances and wealthy people.

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