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Questions to Practice Mindfulness and Change Your Life for the Better

Questions are very important on our way to mindfulness. The Greek philosopher Socrates thought that questions could lead us to many discoveries. One of the most important discoveries is the way we think and function. When we ask the right questions, we get good answers that help us grow and evolve to a better version of ourselves.

As a life coach, I master questions. I know that some questions I ask (myself or others) will lead to pain and others will empower people, like press buttons for “let’s move on”, “let’s do something”, “let’s think positively”, “let’s plan”, “let’s change perspective” and “let’s appreciate”.

There are many “buttons” in the brain that trigger a thought or a feeling. For example, the “good memory” button will make us happy and the “bad memory” button will bring us pain and suffering. We may not have more bad memories than good memories, but we will have more suffering if we hit bad memory buttons more often.

Questions can trigger happiness, empowerment, hope, anger, frustration or anxiety. When we ask, “Why do they hate me?” we trigger all memories supporting it. If we ask, “How can I make them love me?” our brain searches for memories of things we’ve done that have led to others showing us love.

Think of questions as instructions we give the brain to go and search for something. Like a dog – you throw it a toy or a boomerang and whatever you throw comes back (only the brain doesn’t bring it back wet).

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Should My Child Repeat a Year at School?

Last week, I got another letter asking “Why and when should children repeat a year of school?” Here is the letter and my answer for you to read, because I get many similar questions and I am sure many parents will find the answer useful.

“My daughter is 8 years old and will go to year 5 this year. She is quite young for her class and is studying with much older children. She is academically an average child and it is quite stressful to keep her where she is. We work very hard at home. Many a times she has mentioned that she finds Math difficult, but the teacher feels she is ready for the next class.

My daughter has a couple of good friends in the class but finds it difficult to be make new friends. When she does not win in various competitive activities, she gets very disheartened as she feels she really worked hard for it. I can understand it’s not easy to compete with older children. Many times, she finds it difficult to complain the teacher about the girls who trouble her, so in a way I would say she is not mature. On the other hand, she is a confident girl. She does speech and drama, dance and other few activities. We feel she should repeat the year, we have been toying with this since last couple of years but now we feel it is high time.

I am concerned about two things: my daughter is quite tall and since she is in year 4, will she cope well emotionally?

I am quite stressed as the school starts next week and we need to talk to the school management. Please can you advise if this is the right way for her?”

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10 Life Philosophies for Peace of Mind

Life is full of stress and it can be hard to achieve peace of mind. Many people don’t even remember the last time they felt at peace.

Life coaching helps people understand that peace and stress are in our mind and we can control them by changing what we think. Once we understand that we are what we think, we can change our life by choosing to think other things.

Here are 10 quotes that can be adopted as life philosophies. With these philosophies, we can manage tough times, we can be happy and relaxed, avoid stress, be successful and take control over our life, rather than feel that life is happening to us and we are at the mercy of our circumstances.

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100 Tips for My Children

Over 26 years of being a parent, I have made a huge effort to give my kids the rules of life that, in my belief, will set them up for a better life. Every parent wants to raise happy, healthy, successful, kind, smart, courageous, creative, friendly and wealthy children that have lots of love and happiness in their life.

I say that parenting is a sales job. If you sell your life philosophy to your kids well, you have great relationships with them and you know they will do well. If you are not a good sales person (even if your philosophy works well for you), you will face lots of conflict and frustration.

Years ago, I started writing a series called Things I want my kids to know. I think I want my kids to know everything I have written in this blog, but this series is a good summary. In this post, I would like to give my kids 100 tips from my bag of tips for a happy, healthy, successful and loving life.

I encourage you to make your own list of 100 pieces of advice you want to share with your kids, so that one day, when they ask themselves what you wanted for them, they will have it in writing.

Remember that giving advice is something you give from your own free will, with the full intention of doing good. It is your child’s choice whether to take your advice or not. We give! They need to choose to take. If they don’t take our advice, it may be because they are not in a good relationship with us and there is a distrust. It may be because they are not ready, you haven’t presented it well, you are not a good role model for what you suggest, or their life circumstances are different from yours and they can’t see how they can apply your advice to their life.

This post is part 7 of 7 in the series Things I Want My Kids to Know

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New Book by Ronit Baras: Reflections

I am happy to announce that this week, on my birthday, I launched a new book (my fourth), Reflections. Over the weekend, I had a wonderful and emotional celebration with my family and friends and I am happy that Reflections is now available and taking its first steps into the hearts of many readers.

My quest for happiness started at the age of 14, when I was a very confused teenager, searching for direction and purpose, and asking the big questions of life. Who am I? What am I doing here? Where am I going?

Back then, all I wanted was a glimpse of the future, so I could draw hope to carry me through tough times. I played the “fortunetelling” game many times, imagining myself as a hero, strong beyond measure, successful, happy, content and with purpose.

During my teen years, reading and writing were my refuge. At the age of 15, I met David. He was 72 years old when I met him and for a teenager, that seemed a huge gap. David was a holocaust survivor with a very special view on life. He had lost everyone and everything that was dear to him and developed and inspiring attitude to life.

We both shared a love for poetry and often asked each other’s opinion about the poems we wrote. He was the one who taught me to ask and to question. I spent hours with him asking big questions about life. Most of the time, he would ask me questions and when I asked him about any topic, he would give me a wise perspective on it and asked me a question in return.

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Addictions: Are you Addicted to Your Beliefs?

When we hear the word “addiction”, we think of bad things. Most people think of drugs and alcohol, when in fact, we are all addicted to something even if we don’t drink alcohol or take illegal drugs. If every addiction were illegal, we would all be living outside the law.

Addiction is actually an idea. It’s the thought that we cannot live without something. When we are addicted to something, it is because we think/feel/believe that the thing we are addicted to is essential to our survival and the fear of living without it is greater than the fear of the consequences of consuming it.

That was a full on concept, but please read it again:

When we are addicted to something, it does not mean we don’t understand the consequences of consuming it. It means that the fear of not consuming it is greater.

This is why it is hard to fight addiction. Our subconscious mind is stronger than our understanding of the consequences so let’s stop talking about the consequences, because they will never be the reason we stop believing anything.

Research on addictions has found that consuming something (like drugs, alcohol or sugar) is not enough to become addicted to it. We consume it when we have a void, because it allows us to manage better with that void. People who connect well with others, are in a happy relationship, are active and have a good social life are less likely to become addicted. Therefore, the way to help everybody overcome addictions is not punishing them for finding a solution that gives them (brief moments of) comfort, but helping them create the connections they need to replace their addiction.

It is important to understand that we are not only addicted to substances, but also to thoughts and ideas. Even substance addictions are based on strong beliefs. In a research on alcohol consumption, participates were given water to drink, but were told they were drinking alcohol. They behaved later on as if they were drunk, showing impaired coordination, giggling and even throwing up, just because they BELIEVED they were drinking alcohol.

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3 Strategies to Find Your Sources of Pressure

Many people are very stressed, because they are under lots of pressure. If you ask them about their sources of pressure, they are not very good at pinpointing it, which only makes their life more stressful and seem to have even more pressure. Catch 22…

Stress is very debilitating in our daily life. Much research connects our health and wellbeing directly to the level of stress and our ability (or inability) to manage it. Stressed people are sick more often, have more conflicts, more relationship breakdowns and are less effective at work. These things result in earning less money, so they live in this vicious cycle that each point of pressure only feeds more pressure on other areas of life. Like I said before: Catch 22!

Pressure is related to something specific. Stress is the result of accumulated pressures. When these pressures go over a threshold, it’s too much for us to handle. We go into stress and turn our focus from control to feeling helplessness and anxiety.

In life coaching, it is very important for people to recognize that they are under pressure and that when it accumulates, it creates stress and then they are anxious about the outcome or the future. The three feelings of pressure, stress and anxiety go hand in hand in people’s reaction to events in life. I call them brothers, because they come from the same family of fear and in that family, they appear in this order. First, we have pressure, which accumulates and turns to stress, which immediately creates anxiety about the future.

In this post, I will give you 3 strategies to find your sources of pressure and eliminate stress in your life. If you follow them, in the order they are presented, you will find relief. At first, it will be a small relief, which will accumulate. The same as pressure, accumulates and turns to stress, relief accumulates and turns into control.

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How to Eliminate the Top 7 Parenting Struggles

Last month, I wrote about the top 7 things parents struggle with: emotions, social pressure, information overload, money, relationship and physical body. I think that if parents knew how to manage these things in their life, it would be easier and more enjoyable for them to parent their children to be happy, healthy and successful. Here are 7 tips to improve your skills in each area and eliminate the respective parenting struggles.

How to manage your emotions

Whenever you have a strong feeling and feel you are about to burst, stop! Examine the feeling, ask yourself “what is that thing I am feeling now?” giving it a name will slow you down and move you from your primitive brain – the fight or flight mode to the “thinking” mode. It will make sure you are more composed in your relationship with your children.

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Top 7 Things Parents Struggle With

I recently did an interview for a radio station about parenting. They wanted to know what were the top things parents struggle with. I have seen hundreds of parents over the last 28 years. If I had to list every struggle, the list would never end – parenting is hard! So, I figured the best thing to do would be to group challenges by category.

Parents today struggle with seven main things. Not surprisingly, parents today struggle with roughly the same things their parents struggled with in the past. Today, they just give it a different name, maybe to feel a bit more modern or advanced. Same struggle, different shape.

Parents need to take on a management role as soon as they have kids. Unfortunately, not everyone is a good manager and parents often struggle with it. If they were lucky enough to learn if from their own parents, cool! If not, they may struggle with it as a parent. Unfortunately, people spend more than 16 years of their lives in educational institutions that are obsessed about teaching them to manage their homework but not any other part of their lives.

School does not teach us to manage our time, our emotions, our friends or relationships, our physical body, our money or a budget. So it is no surprise that people struggle with it in their teens and then they struggle with it as adults raising kids. They then can’t teach their children how to manage any off these things either, because no one can teach what they don’t know.

Here are the 7 main challenges parents experience.

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Teen Life Sucks (or Does it?)

Sometimes, when I talk to teens, they tell me that teen life sucks.

It is sad to hear them say that at a time in their lives that is supposed to be wonderful, interesting and exciting. The teenage years are when they form their identity and it is sad to hear that they came to the conclusion that teen life sucks.

It is sad because if they believe it sucks, they are more likely to feel that it sucks. If they think teen life sucks, their subconscious will create a self-fulfilling prophecy, and their life will actually “suck”. It is not the thought that makes it true, it is that subconsciously, the thought will lead to action that will make it true. Whatever you believe, this is your reality.

I love those Buddhist quotes and there is one in which the Buddha said it perfectly, “Wherever you go, there you are”

My motto is that in life, you get what you focus on. If you get up in the morning and you focus on what sucks, you will get exactly that, life that sucks!

Teen life is complicated and involves many aspects. Yes, there are components that do not work the way we want them to. Sometimes, they work to our advantage and sometimes they do not. It is still a far cry from considering teen life as sucking completely.

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