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Know Your Partner: Beliefs & Attitudes

To continue our “Know Your Partner” series, I want to share questions about attitudes and beliefs with you this week. It is hard to admit, but many of our beliefs and attitudes are part of our identities and can be the cause of relationship breakup or relationship build up. They are extremely important and somehow a bit sensitive.

The important thing is to find out which of these beliefs or attitudes are “musts” – those things that you are not willing to compromise on. For example, Gal and I do not share the same political opinion or even religious beliefs but this has never been a conflict between us.

The idea behind these questions is to find out what we think we “must” have and what our partner thinks they “must” have. Agreements will be easier to keep once we know and make a conscious decision to accept our partner rather than ignore their musts.

The attitudes and belief we will discuss are about culture, race, ethnicity, difference, truth and law, politics and community, media and religion.

This post is part 6 of 8 in the series Know Your Partner

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Majority Rules

This post was inspired by Ronit’s diversity education, by our family’s life in several countries around the world, by Eden’s recent foray into academic research, by our many dealings with people of different communication styles, bust mostly by my occasional frustration of being a minority…

Having grown up in one place for 28 years and then moved to another country, Ronit and I had to change many basic assumptions about what everyone knows, how everyone thinks and what everyone expects. It is called Culture Shock. We already knew quite a bit about the United States (I had even been an exchange student there), so the change did not shock us, but boy was it different.

Now imagine going from that to Thailand! Hardly any English, driving on the left, completely different social norms and ethics, hot, humid, rainy, full of mosquitoes… What everyone did in Thailand was very different to what everyone did in Texas.

The thing is, in each one of these places, people who had grown up there and had never been anywhere else could not perceive anything other than what they had been accustomed to. To them, “everyone” was everyone they knew and that was good enough.

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My Name is My Identity

Recently, I ran a series of workshops with about 700 students in grades 6 and 8. The workshops were about diversity and acceptance and how to treat migrants coming from different cultural backgrounds. One of the questions that came up in every session was about names – what do you do with your name once you move to live in a different country?

I have been running these workshops over the last 4 years and have seen over 10,000 students from grade 4 to grade 12. In many places, the kids were convinced that changing a name is a must when you move to a new country and when I ask them if they know the meaning of their name, surprise, surprise (or maybe not), most of them do not know the meaning of their own name.

Out of 700 students, only about 30 raised their hands to share the meaning of their names with others, while the rest were nameless. They did not know what the meaning of their names was or why their parents had given them that name. They knew nothing about the story of their name.

I believe that explains why they people change their names once they move to another country and why the people in their new country expect them to “localize” their name.

To get the kids’ interest, I told them that in my tradition, the name you are given determines your destiny. You will have the character of the name or the character of the person you are named after. My name is a Hebrew name, which means “little happy song” (in a female form). I think I live up to my name, because I dedicate my life to “singing the happiness song” and teaching others to find their own happiness. It is no coincidence that my life coaching business is called “Be Happy in LIFE”.

I am also short…

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Karate Kidding

Of course we took the kids to The Karate Kid. We are not parents who deprive our kids from being exposed to popular culture. We had seen all the prequels, it had Jackie Chan, action, Will Smith’s son and a glimpse of China. What could be better? Besides, we thought it would make a good ending for their school break and something we could all enjoy together.

But for me, The Karate Kid was a total let down. Sure, I saw the old Mister Miyagi movies when I was younger, but that would not explain some of the things that bothered me. Maybe I will just start listing them and you will see why.

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The Motivational Speaker

After two years of blogging on parenting and many years of working with parents, after 6 years of coaching and many years of turning kids into super powers, Ronit Baras is going on stage!

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