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Live Life with No Regrets

Regrets are a heavy burden we carry with us throughout our life. They are punishments we give ourselves for thinking about something we have done, or not done, that we wish we could have done differently.

I remember my mom warning me “you’re going to regret this”. She said it because she had no other ways to convince me to do things her way.

Regrets are very funny, because we can only have them after we experience something. The reason I say they are funny is that if I was a fortuneteller and could predict the outcome, I would have done things differently anyway. So regrets can only happen in hindsight which is always 20/20.

13 common regrets we can all do without

If you want to know what most people regret, just to prepare yourself and try to rethink things before you do them, here is a list of the most common regrets. Try to avoid them as much as you can (if you can).

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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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Emergency Relationship Coaching Essentials

I have seen many couples who are in pain in their relationship. Many of them come for relationship coaching when they can no longer stand the pain. I have been in a relationship with my boyfriend/partner/father-of-my-children for 35 years and I have learned over time that couples can love each other very much but still be in this pain.

It is easy to take each other or the relationship for granted. The investment of energy we put into the beginning of this relationship (the chase) cannot continue with the same passion and effort forever, so we all ease the pressure of the hunt, which is natural and more sustainable, and sometimes we ease it too much.

The good news is that getting help is much better than not. Every year, I have more couples coming for relationship coaching. Every year, we hear about another couple we knew from our travels around the world who separated or divorced. Every year, our kids tell us about more friends whose parents divorced, and every year, another couple from our community is in some crisis and considering divorce.

Those people didn’t get help. At least not on time to sale their marriage. Do you know the phrase “seek and you shall find”? If they asked for help, they would have found it.

Those who did come for relationship coaching look for help because they still love each other and want their marriage to work. When both of them come with the desire to make their marriage work, it will work. Why? Because whether you think you can or think you can’t, you are always right, and they think they can.

Many of them search for quick fix and want to leave the session feeling fully in-love and without hurts and hard feelings, which never happens in the first session, though they leave with big hope because I give them emergency tools to manage the communication while allowing the pain to dissolve.

This post is part 30 of 33 in the series Save Your Marriage

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Be Positive! Why? Because you worth it!

In recent years, we hear about being positive as a major aspect of happiness and success. Most people want to be positive, but don’t know how. When I talk to people about being positive, they say that they learned at school how to read and how to do basic math, they learned how to ride a bike and help at home, but no one ever taught them how to be positive. Therefore, it is one thing to understand why it is important to be positive, but another thing to actually be positive.

This is why I tell people that I should call my program Happy Being instead of Be Happy, because first we need to understand that happiness is important and then we need to learn how to be happy – how to make it a state of being.

Research done in North Carolina by psychologist Barbara Fredrickson has found out that being positive is important not only for our immediate success but also for long-term happiness.

Lions and snakes

When we have negative thoughts, we activate the primitive brain. Over there, all we see are lions and snakes that are a threat. Our body goes into a “fight or flight” mode and shuts all other thinking mechanisms in order to focus on the threat in front of us. Thinking, analyzing, evaluating, prioritizing, connecting, thinking creatively and considering efficiency are all luxuries that the brain is unable to do while under threat.

Happiness does not reside in the primitive brain, so it is important to notice when you go there. If you are scared, angry, aggressive, withdrawn, anxious, worried or upset, you are in the primitive brain. Your body has taken over your mind and you are out of control.

Take a deep breath! Try to think of something good and happy. Go to a happy place in your imagination. You need to convince your brain that what is happening to you is not a real lion and not a real snake. Only after you do that, you can change your emotional state and start thinking clearly.

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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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Shoes for Orphan Souls: When Giving is Receiving

When I was a kid, we had only two pairs of shoes each and most of them were “hand me downs” from older siblings and relatives. We sometimes got new shoes as birthday presents. When we asked for sports shoes that we needed for school, our parents would say that we should think about all kids in Africa who had nothing to eat, because for them, shoes were a luxury.

One day, when Noff asked for new shoes yet again, I said to her that while hers still sat on the shelf, kids in Africa would benefit from the shoes that were too small for her, which were in a perfect condition. I didn’t know then how true my words were.

Last year, I found out about a project called Shoes for Orphan Souls run by an organization in Texas whose focus is on giving shoes to orphans around the world. Shoes are very useful for kids in remote areas, where they need to walk for hours to bring water, to attend school or to reach a medical facility, and can contribute to better health.

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How to Save Your Kids from The Consumerism Trap

The world we live in promotes consumerism all the time. Sometimes, I feel like I need to take my kids to live in a hut or a cave, far away from civilization if I want to prevent them from falling into the consumerism trap. Just recently, the big shopping center closest to us was rebuilt. It is now more than doubled in size. I often have meetings there, in one of the cafes. I always look at all the people rushing past and wonder to myself, “Don’t they have anything better to do than just spend money here?” Of course, my excuse for being there is that I came there for work!

The scariest thing is going to the supermarket with my kids. We buy most of our groceries from two different supermarkets. To get from one to the other, we need to cross the entire shopping centered, which is shocking. Every window tells you why you must have that dress and that you are nothing without those shoes and that you are not cool if you don’t buy this and that you are fat if you don’t use that product. It is completely shocking and terrifying. People we know talk about how they do not have enough money for basic things, and yet their kids seem to have the latest iPhones and the latest brand name jeans that they bought for a bargain at $140 at a half price sale. They are totally over the moon that they can help their kids be considered cool for that price.

My main problem is that this excitement will last for a week at most. After that, the cycle of “buy me!” will start again, because we live in a society that teaches children to be consumers. We live in a society that convinces kids (and their parents) that they are inadequate and that they need to shop in order to survive! It is a trap because it turns desires and wants into needs. It is a very strong, well-oiled and sophisticated machine. It gives us that idea that “I can only be happy when I have this item”. As parents, we want our children to be happy from every teeny tiny thing they possibly can enjoy. We are helpless before such a well-rehearsed trap.

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Self Love Affirmations

Love is important and it takes up lot of our energy. We want to love and be loved in return. I think of love as a battery. When we have love, we feel powerful, energetic, optimistic, creative and motivated. It drives us forward and it is addictive. Yes, addictive. Once you feel love, you are not the same person anymore.

I realized all this about love when Eden, my eldest, was born over 25 years ago. With her, new feelings were born inside of me and there was nothing that could take those feelings away.

Before Eden was born, my first nephew, Adam was the first kid I ever loved. And I loved him so much (and still do) that I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to love my own child as much as I loved him.

When Eden was born, I was glad to discover that there is no limit to love. I loved Eden so much and my love for Adam did not change one single bit. But at that point, I realized that we bring kids into the world to learn to love ourselves. Our own kids teach us so much about ourselves and we should appreciate that.

This post is part 6 of 6 in the series Affirmations

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Knowing Your Happiness

I have been teaching happiness for many years and one of the things most of my clients want to know is how to find out when they are happy. You see, people are focused on what is going wrong in their lives. They have signs that tell them that things are not going great. Let me share some with you.

image”I am unhappy when I’m in conflict”

“I am unhappy when I don’t succeed”

“I am unhappy when things don’t happen the way I want them to happen”

“I am unhappy when people do not agree with me”

“I am unhappy when I am tired”

“I am unhappy when I don’t have the money to do all the things I want to do”

“I am unhappy if I can’t predict the future”

“I am unhappy if I am not in control all the time”

“I am unhappy when I worry”

“I am unhappy when people do not appreciate me”

“I am unhappy when others are more successful than me”

Research shows that people have more signs for unhappiness than signs for happiness.

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Positive Beliefs about Money

Being wealthy is more than counting the money you have in your bank account. It is a mindset. In the last chapter of Happily Wealthy Family, I shared many of the negative beliefs we often have about money. By identifying these beliefs, you can do your best to replace them with positive beliefs about money.

Here is a list of 100 positive beliefs about money, wealth, investing and rich people. Reading them does not mean you automatically adopt them. Find the ones you do believe in and make sure to hang them up in a place you can read every day. If you find others you want to adopt, find a story, a situation, or a person you know that is proof that this belief is valid.

For example, I had a belief that you have to be born rich to be rich. I wanted to believe that everyone could be rich. I knew a guy (who was my dad’s boss) who was very wealthy but was born to a very very poor family. With the help of this story, I could adopt the belief “Everyone can be rich!”

This post is part 9 of 10 in the series Happily Wealthy Family

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