family matters Tag

Posts tagged 'family matters'

Better Family Relationships: How to Build Trust

Family relationships can be hard, let’s be honest. We have a relationship with everyone we come in contact with. Some relationships are short. Some are long. Some are intimate, and others not so much. In every relationship, our actions affect the dynamic. We can’t just do or say whatever we want, whenever we want.

Why? Because we don’t exist in a bubble. Our words have meaning.

It’s amazing how many people are never exposed to the concept of effective and thoughtful communication. I find people of all ages coming to my leadership camps and saying, “How has no one ever taught me this?”

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28 Easy Ways to Save Money When You Go Shopping

Shopping was a different experience in the past year. The changes the COVID-19 pandemic caused were good for some, because it was an opportunity to save money. But for others, it increased the shopping costs and left them spending more than ever before.

It’s important to understand that we shop to gain a feeling. Even when we buy food, we try to increase our feeling of variety. We could all survive perfectly well on potatoes or bread and butter all day, but that wouldn’t satisfy our need for variety.

I remember years ago I did juice cleanse, and the thing I missed the most was … chewing. I could get all the nutrients I needed from the juice, but it just didn’t give me the satisfaction of chewing.

Shopping for things we need is not the same as “going shopping”. The problem is that today, people are so stressed that even simple grocery shopping is no longer just buying what we need. Instead, it’s become stocking the cupboard with things we don’t need.

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Amazing Awakened Spirit in a Beautiful Teenager

Teen boy's face and hand appearing out of darkness

Teens have a bad reputation. People often label them as rebellious, difficult and even troubled. Over the years, I’ve worked with many teens, and some of them have an awakened spirit that blew me away.

Jordan was a 17-year-old boy who came to see me because he had some difficulties with his parents. When I read his parents’ description of him, and the description he had written about himself, I knew he was different. No doubt about it. I just didn’t know how much.

His parents wrote he had been clingy as a child, had no friends, didn’t listen to them and had no direction in life. But when I read his own description, I was very confused. The way he described himself – his desires, challenges and what he wanted from his coaching – was in total contradiction to what his parents wrote about him. This was an issue for sure.

This post is part [part not set] of 19 in the series From the Life Coaching Deck

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Is Money a Curse or blessing? My New Book: The Will

Yay, I did it! My new book, The Will, was published in November 2019 and I am proud to the max.

In this post, I’ve decided to answer all the questions I got from Carol Grainger, who edited the book, about the book and the process of writing it, from the first time I told her about it until the last edit.

Stick around and enjoy the ride with me.

The Will is a fictional novel. I love the story medium to help readers take their own journey in answering the question of whether money is curse or a blessing.

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Make Your Bed to Make Your Day

Believe it or not, if you make your bed in the morning, it will make your day. You’ll be happier, clearer and more productive. There’s research showing it’s true.

I have been on a search for family tips from the moment I had children. Almost 30 years ago, becoming a mother made me realize that efficiency can help me a lot in managing work and home, and that being efficient gave me more time with my kids.

As parents, we need to choose how to balance our time across many important things. Slowly, we tend to let go of some things we care about for other things we find more important.

In my leadership training, I emphasize that life is not hard when we need to choose between things that are very important and things that are less important. That’s an easy choice! It is much harder to choose between things that are equally important to us. When children appear, we have to do that a lot, and that’s not easy.

This post is part [part not set] of 24 in the series Handy Family Tips

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Best Family Quotes by the Amazing Virginia Satir

The family quotes in this post were written by Virginia Satir, the mother of Family Therapy. I appreciate her and have learned a lot from her over the years, and some of her best quotes hang where I can read them again and again.

Virginia Satir’s quotes about family and her philosophy about family relationships have become a great compass for me. I would like to share them with you and inspire you to consider and adopt her ideas about family.

One of the reasons I enjoyed Virginia Satir’s work was that she started as an educator, and so did I. I have a soft spot for people who are educators as, because I think their spin on their work is different and more effective.

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Best Family Quotes that Will Change Your Life

Family quotes, and other quotes, have been part of my life and personal growth since I was 16 years old.

For the first time, I had my own room. I took a sheet of thick paper that looked like an old scroll, burned its edges with a candle, wrote some quotes on it (by hand) and put on to my wall with sticky tape.

Recently, my sister helped clean up my parents’ house and found the quotes I left there 38 years ago. One of the family quotes was from the book Illusions by Richard Bach, which I had received as a gift.

This book has made a huge impression on my life and this quote changed the way I looked at family and life.

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Open Home: Guests Welcome

Good families don’t just happen. They are made with awareness and action. As a parent, I encourage you to write family goals, so you can lead your family to a happy, healthy and wealthy lifestyle. I didn’t grow up in an open home, and I decided to change that, so I set some goal.

In this post, I want to share one of my family goals, which I wrote to replace a behavior form my parents’ home I didn’t like at all – closed doors.

My mom was always preoccupied with what other people thought about her. I never blamed her for it. Well, that’s not true. When I was very young, I even hated her for it. It was exhausting.

Anyway, when I was 16 years old, I realized that this was how she had grown up. What other people think about her was her reason for living. She dedicated much of her life to please people whose opinion mattered to her. This took over her life and, as her children, also ruled our lives.

One thing that bothered her greatly was having a clean house. The problem was not that she wanted the house to be clean, but that she panicked whenever we had guests.

This post is part 6 of 6 in the series Family Goals

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My Personal Tips for Important Family Goals

This post is personal, because I’ve been asked by people to share my view of the ideal family and how I reached that point in life when parenting was such bliss for me.

I have to say that I don’t think we are the ideal family. We have ups and down and challenges with our children. We just sort them out quickly and in a very efficient way.

Why do I say that? Because even if you are doing all the right things – give good instructions and coordinate things with your partner – you’ll face traffic jams. For more about this, read the Family Goals series from the start.

Why? Because that’s life. You take a deep breath, overtake the traffic jam and sometimes just need to meditate until the road is clear from glass scattered on the road from someone else’s accident but there is no life without it. I clarify this because some of my clients just collapse when they think they do everything well and still, there are parenting accidents.

So, here I’m sharing some of my goals (I’ve had thousands over the years). I hope it’ll give you some ideas of what you can aim for. Take only the goals that matches your philosophy in life. Remember, most of our decision making is done by the subconscious mind, if a goal that I chose to peruse is against something you have in your subconscious, you’ll go through lots of self-sabotage and experience lots of frustration.

This post is part 5 of 6 in the series Family Goals

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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 6 in the series Family Goals

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