Make a list: Events that Have Shaped Your Life

Events in our life shape our thinking, beliefs and overall attitude. When I ask people, “Please share the things that have shaped your life”, they come up with big things, mainly traumatic events that were hard to ignore.

I can relate to this too, because when I worked on my own list, the first things that came up were the big things – moving house, changing city, changing country, the birth of my kids, loss and painful failures. I did have some positive, wonderful, exciting events too, like the birth of my kids and winning prizes and awards, but there were not as many of them as there were hits.

Focusing on the big things is natural. However, I believe that the small things, the ones we neglect to pay attention to, may contribute a lot to how we conduct ourselves in a way that we hardly recognize.

I’m saying this is because very often, when my clients bring up their past and examine it, they talk about small incidents that were big for them at the time, even out of proportion.

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Lessons Learned

The word “lesson” makes most people see themselves sitting in a class with a teacher talking at the front. Many times, it brings up extra homework and fear about being tested on subjects learned. What a shame, because life is a long lesson, with lots of work (at home and outside of home) and daily tests!

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Matters of Life and Death

Throughout my childhood, I often heard my parents talking about “making the right decisions”. I remember wondering many times, “What are the right decisions?” I remember the strongest feeling I had from what my parents thought about the right decisions was that decisions were always a matter of life and death.

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Sarcasm – The Weapon of Helplessness

Ronit and I have a very good friend, who has been in a difficult personal situation in the past couple of years. He feels very frustrated by his circumstances and sees himself powerless to break out of them and live a happy life again.

Often, when he talks to other people, he uses sarcasm.

For example, one day he was contacted by a large company, which I was not familiar with. He got excited about it, but wanted to seem like he was keeping his cool, so as not to get disappointed if he did not get an order from them later on. So he said to me, “Gal, I just got off the phone with company XYZ”.

“What is this company?”, I asked.

“Oh, it’s just a small company nobody knows”, he said in a seemingly casual tone.

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How School Promotes Low Self Esteem

Last week, in Self Esteem Mini-Course (part 1), I wrote about the definition of self-esteem. This week, let us explore how school promotes low self-esteem in children and shapes our society in the opposite way.

Since our self-esteem is based on our perception of ourselves and school is the place we spend most of our time between the ages of 6 and 12, every school experience either increases or decreases our self-esteem.

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What Is Self Esteem?

I believe that every parent wants their kids to have high self-esteem, so I have decided to publish a few posts over the coming weeks about self-esteem, what it is and how to increase it, so every parent reading this will be able to help their kids develop this very important emotional strength.

So first, what is self-esteem?

Self-esteem is a reflection of a person’s overall appraisal of their own worth

In other words, self-esteem is the score each person gives their abilities and skills.

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Optimism or "What’s the big fuss about Emotional Intelligence (Emotional Quotient)?"

Man in office smiling with "Be Happy" sticker on his forehead

Since the Be Happy in LIFE program and the Garden of Eden program are based on promoting Emotional Intelligence, I have been asked many times to explain the main idea behind them.

Although Emotional Intelligence (EQ – Emotional Quotient) became popular after the publication of Daniel Goleman’s Book, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, in 1995, it was researched and developed during the 70’s and 80’s.

It was psychologist Howard Gardner’s book Frames of Mind, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, which began the development of EQ.

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Heroes

We all like watching “Heroes” on TV and reading books about strong or creative people who have done things others did not expect them to do. Hearing, reading about or meeting such people is very motivating. Heroism is the courage to face fears, therefore fear and heroes go together.

Fear is a basic human emotion that works like a survival instinct. In a sense, fear helps protect us from danger, though it has reached a point where we see danger even in places where it does not exist.

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Overnight Success

I read a lot about success and attend personal development and wealth creation seminars. It is very inspiring. Unfortunately, the more I do this, the more I hear about people who are making it big time overnight.

The overnight success factor works very well on people who are not successful. It really helps sell stuff. Look at some of the best overnight success promotions:

– Lose 14 kilos in 14 days!

– How to make $250,000 from property without using your own money!

– Use this drink and be blond and beautiful in just 4 days! (OK, so I made this one up myself ;))

I bet overnight success was invented by unsuccessful people to help them feel better about their lack of success.

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7 Easy Steps To Detoxify Your Life

Fruits and mint for detox in heart shapes

This happens to many people. They get up one day feeling sick and tired of trying so hard and determine to change. Some of us are lucky to be really sick and are forced to listen to our body and detoxify. I have a group of clients who all know one another (they referred each other to me) and they imitate me saying “Sickness is health” (they say it in a funny way, I must sound very funny when I say it).

Sickness is our body’s way of talking to us. When we are sick, the level of poison in our body has reached a warning level. If we do not stop to detoxify, we can ruin our own life and the lives of the people we love.

Having been very sick during childhood, I was shocked to discover when I was just 16 that my thoughts were pure poison. I had bad thoughts about myself, my abilities and my talents. I had bad thoughts about others around me and, of course, I never took any responsibility over my life. Not that I didn’t want to, but I do not think I knew what it meant.

Well, what do you know? As soon as I realised this, I fought my way back to school (after failing too many subjects and being kicked), I started going out with a boy, I got an excellence scholarship and was sent with the first-ever Israeli youth delegation to Egypt, to help establish new relationships just after the peace agreement was signed between the two countries. You can certainly say this was one of the best “sick and tired” points of my life.

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