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Posts tagged 'change'

Choice Theory Can Save Your Marriage

Relationships are very sensitive. Bringing two people together creates lots of fun and joy, but at the same time, it creates conflict and pain. According to Choice Theory, we can develop habits that create more fun and joy and less conflict and pain.

Dr. William Glasser is an American psychiatrist I highly appreciate. He developed Reality Theory, which later became known as Choice Theory.

In the seventies, Glasser’s work was not widely accepted by his colleagues. While others thought that human behavior was affected by external sources, Glasser believed in personal choice, personal responsibility and personal transformation.

Other psychiatrists categorized certain behaviors as mental disorders and prescribed medication accordingly. Glasser believed he could teach his patients to make better choices to achieve better results.

He applied his theories to education, management and marriage. The examples I give in this post are relevant to marriage.

This post is part 31 of 31 in the series Save Your Marriage

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Sharing Clothes in the Family

Over the years, I’ve set thousands of goals, and still do. Not because I haven’t achieved my goals, but because my family grows and evolves, and I never stop adding wants and desires, with action, into my family journey. As an example, here is how I’ve achieved the goal of sharing clothes in the family.

The first time I asked the hard questions was the time I woke up. You need courage to do that and I had it when I was 16 years old. I asked myself “What do I not like about my family and how can I change my life without getting rid of any family members?” Obviously, getting rid of my family was not an option, and understanding this was enlightening by itself.

I asked and asked and asked for weeks without an answer. Then, it hit me that the answer was to change myself. That was a very hard understanding and I went through some resistance to it for a while.

I believed my family members “wronged” me and changing myself meant they could keep doing what they’d always done, which was unfair!

Fairness has always been my weakness (still is in some ways). I’ve always wanted things to be fair and had this internal sense of justice my family just didn’t get.

So, I asked myself “What does fairness mean?” It was amazing what came up, which was different from the dictionary definition of the word.

This post is part 4 of 4 in the series Family Goals

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Make a List: 100 Things I Want People to Think of Me

Generally, I think we need to live our life based on our own judgment be developing a sense of self that functions as a moral GPS (or compass), and not by other’s judgment or external rules and beliefs. In life coaching, the task of finding who we are relies on our ability to strip away other’s expectations and what they think of us. Instead, we learn to listen to our inner voice and “redesign” ourselves.

This process of redesigning who we are happens in the context of being part of a society, because connections and relationships form a huge part of our experience. When we “bare ourselves” and take off the “clothes” of what others think of us, the “shoes” of where they think we should go, the “coat” of others’ compliments or criticism, we need to put on new “clothes” that we love and feel comfortable with to warm us through life’s challenges.

Sometimes, looking at ourselves from the outside, can help us see things with fresh eyes.

This post is part 42 of 44 in the series Make a List

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From Sickness to Health: Happy Ending

On the third week of my parents’ visit, after the withdrawal from her pain killer patches, my mom came back to life. When we played “3 things that made me happy today”, she cooperated.

We still avoided long trips, but she was willing to walk in the shopping center for 4 hours to buy some gifts she wanted to take home with her. She also walked with Eden and Ayla around the neighborhood.

When we asked her about sweating at night, it dropped to once a night or none at all and she cooked a lot more, because her arm was stronger. For her, cooking is part of her identity. Not being able to cook made her feel useless. The results of her blood sugar were excellent, and she was in pain, but rated it much lower.

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

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From Sickness to Health: Baby Ayla

When I was studying special education, we used to say that if you hang around kids, it keeps you young. I always believed it was true. Kids are born clean and pure and their energy is only corrupted by the presences of the anxious, angry, frustrated and sad people in their life.

Only later on, I discovered that this is actually done through mirroring. When we hang around other people, we sense what they are feeling and our mind “lights up” in the same way they do.

Babies laugh a lot and trust fully. They love physical touch, enjoy every second and, although they can’t do many things, it never stops them from trying again, and again, and again. There is a lot we can learn from babies.

My mom always loved babies. I first discovered this when my eldest daughter, Eden, was born. I was in the hospital for 10 days and my mom offered to come and stay with us for a week after I got out and help me.

This post is part 10 of 11 in the series From Sickness to Health

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From Sickness to Health: The Placebo Effect

I’m a strong believer in the power of the mind. Recently, I had a chat with a friend, who told me that her mom had died at a relatively young age. She’d had cancer for a while, and then, her doctors told her she had 3 months to live. She died exactly 3 months later. I think that what we believe manifests itself in our life.

For years, I have been using the placebo effect on some of my child coaching clients. I give them “special pills” that make them smart, happy, healthy and friendly (I can only use it on children, because I get consent from their parents, while they don’t know the real deal). The success rate of my placebo treatment is 100%.

Why?

Because when I install in those kids the belief that they are smart, happy, healthy and friendly, they can’t get it out of their system. Their subconscious mind makes it true.

The idea to use the placebo effect on my mother came up after we saw John the Wizard. He said it would take 6-12 months to get the painkillers out of her system and I read somewhere that we needed to go through all the seasons in order for the body to replace all its cells. At first, that freaked me out. My time was limited, and I knew that as soon as she went home, things would be out of my control.

This post is part 9 of 11 in the series From Sickness to Health

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From Sickness to Health: Miserable Discount

My mom was a very hard-working woman all her life. She started working when she was 12 years old. Since she was the oldest sister in a family where girls and women were “service providers”, she was convinced that it was her job to cook, clean and serve the men in her family.

She couldn’t afford to take time off or do things for fun. Everything she did was work. She either worked at home or worked somewhere else to bring money home. There were 9 people in her family. In our family, there we were 7. So, there was never an end to the work.

The only breaks she could ever get were when she was sick!

This post is part 8 of 11 in the series From Sickness to Health

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From Sickness to Health: New Diet and The Drug Dealer

This post is part of a series of blog posts about my mom’s journey from sickness to health. My mom is a 78-year-old woman who was sick and whose doctors could not help her. Everyone was just waiting for her to die. She came over for a visit in Australia for 5 weeks and healed. The posts I share here are the ways we helped her. I hope they will encourage you to never give up, so read the whole series.

It was the third week of my mom’s journey from sickness to health. This time, when I suggested we go to see “John the Wizard” again, my mom was very happy. John was extremely impressed by her choice to stop taking Lyrica “cold turkey”. He said to me in English, which she didn’t understand, it takes months to get people off this medication and the withdrawal symptoms are horrible.

My mom did it in one day!

This post is part 7 of 11 in the series From Sickness to Health

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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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