Be Yourself: Everyone Else is Taken

We all go through a journey to define ourselves and develop our self-identity. Be the person you want to be instead of the person others want you to be.

During a very tough time in my life, I started a search to find out who I was and define my “self”. Much like everyone else, I grew up in a society in which the “self” was a very vague concept that kids never considered. I was 16. I went through a bit of crisis when I discovered that I did not know who “I” was. I needed to find and define “me”, to make the choice to be myself.

The second step of my journey was during the first year of my degree. I was studying psychology with one of the most incredible teachers I have ever met when I realized that self-concept, regardless of when you start defining, is something we all have to figure out. In our very first lesson, the teacher walked into a room full of students and asked, “Who are you?”. It sounded like such a simple questions, but we struggled, big time!

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How to Raise Gifted Children: With Art

For most of us, gifted children and creativity go hand in hand. Not all gifted children are creative. A child can be very gifted at memorizing things which requires no creativity. Yet all creative kids are gifted because creativity opens the kids’ minds to lots of opportunities.

I think parenting requires creativity. Not all parents master parenting. Some parents are not very creative in their philosophy and actions. But that does not mean they cannot develop that creativity, that drive and flexibility to search for, and find that switch in their kid’s brain.

In my last “Gifted Children” post, I shared an assignment our 11 year old daughter, Noff, had to do for school. Mr. Martin was very impressed with her work and showed it to all the teachers and even the principal. In a way, he turned on Noff’s switch. She was so “switched on” that she would get up early in the morning to work on her assignment.

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The Art of Letting Go: Resistance to Change

As I wrote before in the letting go series, attachments bring us comfort and stability, but once we make an attachment part of our identity, change becomes an enemy. Do not get me wrong, attachment is important. It is when we panic, see change as a threat and go into “fight or flight” mode (subconsciously) that things get out of control.

Some people are very terrified of change. They can manage the devil they know and although they complain about it, they do not have the skills, courage and strength to do anything different.

Fear of change creates many conflicts in relationships, even when we talk about our relationship with ourselves. It is always a conflict between one side’s attachment and the other side’s comfort zone. Whether you are on the side that wants the other to change or you are the one being asked to change, you have an attachment. The person who wants the other to change is attached to an outcome in their mind and the person who is being asked to change is attached to what they are currently doing, thinking or feeling. The desire to change someone else in this format creates a lose-lose situation. Fear of change limits movement and the desire to change limits peace of mind.

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The Art of Letting Go: Negative Self-Talk

People think in words. Every thought, feeling and idea we have, we give it a name. Naming (or labeling) is a very easy way to experience the world. Think of the color pallet. If you work with computers, you know that when choosing a color, it is not good enough to say “red”, because there are many shades of red, but in our life as humans and not computers, whenever we talk about scarlet, burgundy, ruby, magenta, maroon, coral or rose, we simply say “red”. Life is so much easier that way.

Words can be empowering or limiting. They can be our protectors, our guardian angels, or our demons, our tormentors. People who value words very much and find their power may wonder, “How can words be limiting?”

I think they are limiting for two reasons: they cannot describe the whole range of human experiences they make it difficult to recognize change.

When making a choice about letting go of some of our habits, letting go of the power we give words is highly important and can provide a lot of comfort and peace of mind. Think about it this way: using words to describe an experience is like trying to fit a giant into a space large enough for a grain of sand.

One of the ways in which words can limit us is negative self-talk.

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How to Make Happy Choices

Every person wants to have a crystal ball to predict the future. I know I do. You have to be a complete Buddhist with a different definition of time in order to see life as a single point in time that the only guarantee is that it exists in experiencing the “now”.

Although everyone would like to see a piece of the future in order to give them strength in the present, the difference between people is how much energy they spend in order to be able to predict the future. Most people would like to be able to tell the future, at least a bit, but some people are tortured by the desire to control the future by analyzing the past in order to improve the prediction of the future. I call them “the fortunetellers”.

In coaching, I meet some fortunetellers. I meet amazing people who are tortured by anxiety and are very unhappy. These people struggle with their decision making and find it hard to make decisions. If the average person takes an hour to make a decision, they need 5-10 hours to make the same decision. So they are pretty much time wasters and, being very smart people, they know time is precious, but they constantly feel they do not have enough time. In worse cases, when making a decision, they repeatedly second-guess themselves with “Was this the right/best choice? What if I checked another school/product? Did I check the back label?” Or they keep searching for the product they already bought, just to make sure they have made a good choice.

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The Art of Letting Go: Painful Past

From the moment we are born, time is a great challenge for us. We learn to read the clock around the age of 6 or 7 and we build our life around the time, but we do never have a good understanding of time. Although we all have the same amount of time, we treat it differently.

The movie In Time is a wonderful masterpiece about our relationship with time. The movie Tuck Everlasting is another wonderful attempt, examining life without the limitation of time. The concept of time is so interesting for me that I have dedicated a whole book to our existence in this puzzle of past, present and future. In this book, I do not claim to understand time, just to explore it. I think that time can be a servant or a master and that we can be trapped in time or freed by it.

One of the biggest miseries of life is to be trapped in a time we no longer have control over – the past. Many of my clients come to coaching to understand this and to free themselves from the pain of the past. If you have had a chance to read the previous chapter about blame and justification, you probably understand the limitations of living in the past and allowing the past to limit. Whenever we have a bad experience and we use the past to justify it, we keep ourselves stuck.

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Powerful Suggestions

If you have ever seen a hypnosis show, you already know how this works, but if you have not, this should be very interesting for you. Either way, after watching a hypnosis performance recently, I think there are important lessons we can all learn from it.

On Ronit’s birthday, we went to a local comedy club. There is nothing happier than laughter and good comedy can really brighten up a birthday night, so there we were. The first act was a very good, but normal, stand up routine. We ate, we laughed and we had a good time.

The second act was called a “Comedy Hypnosis Show”. It started during the break with a multimedia presentation showing swinging watches, spinning spirals and other “street” symbols of hypnosis, along with boasting words about the performer himself and his abilities to deal with the subconscious mind.

“This is going to be cheesy”, I thought, “Maybe the hypnosis is just a gimmick”.

But I was partly wrong. It was only cheesy. The hypnosis was real. And impressive. And quite educational, actually.

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The Art of Letting Go: Blame and Excuses

One of the things that can really set us free is letting go of blame and excuses. To understand how blaming and making excuses (justifying) hold us back and keep us away from a happy, successful, fulfilling and healthy life, we need to go into the science and psychology behind them.

Blame and excuses are born from a subconscious desire to manage failure and disappointment from ourselves. That is a very natural and, in some way, a very healthy mechanism. When we feel the failure is too big to bear, we try to get the load off our shoulder in order to survive emotionally. The main problem with passing blame and justifying is that they block our way forward.

Since life is a journey of personal growth and development, whenever we blame or justify, we keep ourselves standing in one place (to rest and to take the load off). This is not always bad, because sometimes, our journey is hard and things get heavy, so we do need to stop and rest, rethink until we can start moving forward again. But when we do it a lot, we are in constant “loading off” mode and we are constantly stuck.

The difference between justifying and blaming is that justifying is holding circumstances responsible for a failure and blaming is throwing the responsibility onto another person.

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How to Raise Gifted Children: Switch-Finding Rules

To help your children find their gifts and talents, it is good to find yours first. Children learn best by example and this will make you a role model for being gifted. Here are my simple rules for finding your switch.

Do not do anything out of fear, guilt or shame, because that will just make your brain a darker place. If you want to help your kids, make sure they do not do things for you. Doing things just to please others is a sign of a dark, dark place and no learning and growth can happen there. So do not make your kids feel guilty for not practicing their musical instrument and do not make them feel bad about not achieving.

Most people (and children) already have the light shining through them, but they just do not recognize it or appreciate it. Finding the things you are good at is a very good way to narrow down the search for your light switch. If you let go of following the school system, which only focuses on three areas, you will find that there are millions of other places to look and millions of things to look for.

The “things I am good at” list is a very important list for grownups and for kids. Kids are not used to saying things like that about themselves and they grow up to be grownups who do not appreciate themselves. Try making this list on your own, but if you are stuck, ask others to help you by telling you what they think you are good at. Children may need more help to make this list. As I always say, aim to put 100 items on your list.

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The Art of Letting Go: Living up to Others’ Expectations

Our life works so that we are born into living up to others’ expectations. It starts with fitting into our parents’ expectations and then goes through 12-15 years of living up to our teachers’ expectations and nothing at all focuses on living up to our own expectations. In fact, as I recall from my early years, adults said to me over and over again that life was not about what I expected while they did everything in their power to make me fit their expectations.

There are several problems with living life that way and the common thing between them is that they are motivated by the fear of not matching others’ expectations.

Let go of living up to others’ expectations by speaking your mind, by listening to your gut feelings and by aligning your beliefs, values and rules to match them. Use your feelings as a guide. I am not suggesting that you live in the world on your own to minimize external influences, but whatever comes from the outside, ask yourself, “Does this match my feelings? Does this match what I believe? Does it feel right to me?”

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