happiness Tag - Page 2 of 33

How to Keep Negativity Away from You

Last week, in Toxic People and Why You Should Stay Away from Them, I wrote about the kinds of people we should stay away from when we feel they are damaging our self-esteem. In this post, I will cover some ways to keep those people away from your heart and minimize their influence on your mind.

The main difficulty we have with energy consumers is that we take their negative influence with us, even when they are not present physically. By taking it with us, we spread the bad vibes to other areas of our life and affect other people in our lives negatively.

Think of this negativity, as a virus that spreads and damages people’s self-esteem. To overcome the virus, you need to find its source and then, make sure it will not spread.

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Toxic People and Why You Should Stay Away from Them

I think that the people in our life have the potential to help us evolve into better versions of ourselves. On the other hand, toxic people drain us from energy and do not help us move forward. In some ways, they even take us backwards.

When my youngest sister traveled, I made her a journal to capture her experiences and added quotes. One of them was this:

“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.”

– Mark Twain

This quote now hangs on my fridge too.

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Experiences, not Possessions: How to Best Spend Money on Your Kids

If you wonder how to give your kids the best life possible, do not buy them things. Instead, give them great, exciting experiences. Research shows they will remember special events and adventures longer and relive the joy and excitement again and again.

We live in a world of abundance. If you want to understand how much you have today, all you need to do is think of how your life would have been 50 years ago. I like asking myself, “What did my parents not have 50 years ago that I (or my kids) have today?” It is a good lesson in perspective.

Unfortunately, not every person who asks this question reaches the same conclusion. Some people feel grateful and other feel fear. Grateful people, who feel that they are fortunate, tend to appreciate what they have and care for it. Fearful people panic and start to accumulate things. No matter how much they accumulate, they are never happy. Fear takes away the joy of what they already have.

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Make a list: Life Lessons Learned

Old people often reflect on life and give the younger generations their list of life lessons learned. It is as if experience gives them the credit to give tips to the young on how to live life.

Well, it does! Experience is important and the best thing about it is that it helps develop perspective.

Unfortunately, not all old people with lots of experience have the perspective to give “young ones” and many of their tips are not applicable to the way life happens now. What worked for my parents, who are now in their 80’s, might not work for me or for my children.

Does this mean I cannot learn from them? No! I can learn a lot from them, but it is best to develop my own lessons, because the lessons I learn by myself are the lessons I can live by.

This post is part 39 of 44 in the series Make a List

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Psychological Pain Shouldn’t Kill You. It Can Make You Stronger

I have written before about emotional pain as a reaction to a perceived threat and our body’s way of telling us that something is wrong. Psychological pain is not the enemy. It is the messenger. And it is very important not to kill it.

Many people will tell you that when you come out of the other side of pain, you feel stronger. I have learned the hard way that the fear of pain takes more energy than the pain itself. Worry is an example of it. When we worry, we experience psychological pain from something negative we have imagined in our head. Yes, all in our head.

There are many techniques to turn psychological pain into psychological strength and the more you use them, the less you feel the pain. I have gathered some of them here to share with you. All of them are proven and practical. I use them with my clients.

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The Optimism Creed

Everybody in the world wants happiness. Ask around and you will see. Optimism is a way to reach happiness and if you want to go this way, you must first believe that it will take you to where you want to go.

When we talk happiness at my workshops, many people highlight the obstacles to happiness. They share stories of heartache, disappointment, frustration, failure and pain. For them, you can only be in a state of happiness when everything in life functions at a 100%. When I ask them, “What makes you happy?” they mostly list what needs not to happen, which shows a focus on the past and on avoiding pain.

When I draw their attention to this focus, they make a list of what needs to happen for them to be happy. This is better, but we quickly discover that one painful thing is enough for them to feel unhappy, but to feel happy, they need the whole list to happen at the same time. This way, they make sure that unhappiness is easy to reach and happiness is really hard.

When my clients understand that this is a problem, they usually ask, “Ronit, how do we change the formula?” and one of the best ways to do it is by practicing optimism.

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Mindfulness Questions to Change Your Life for the Better

Questions are very important on our way to mindfulness. The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates thought that questions could lead us to many discoveries. One of the most important discoveries is that questions can reveal to us what we think and lead us to a better life. The formula is simple. When we ask good questions, we get good answers that can help us grow and evolve to a better version of ourselves.

As a life coach, I use questions a lot. I know that some questions I ask (myself or others) will lead to pain and others will empower. Questions can trigger responses like “let’s move on”, “let’s do something”, “let’s think positively”, “let’s plan”, “let’s change perspective” and “let’s appreciate”, like pressing a button.

Every thought we have also triggers a feeling, so by “pressing the button” for that thought, we can create that feeling. For example, the “good memory” button will make us happy and “bad memory” button will bring us pain and suffering.

We may not have more bad memories than good memories, but if we press the “bad memory” button more often, we will have more suffering.

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My Personal Spring Cleaning of the Mind

My life changed when I was a teenager. I was in the middle of 10th Grade when the school counselor gave me a letter telling me that since I had too many failures in my report card, I would not be able to stay for 11th Grade.

There was nothing special about it. I counted the days to the end of the year, so I would not have to go to school anymore. I hated school with every cell of my body. I was looking forward to the end of it.

The change happened when there was a contradiction between what I wanted and how it felt. You see, I wanted to leave school at the end of 10th Grade anyway, but it just did not feel right.

This inner conflict was a very big quantum moment in my life. It made me wonder, “How was it possible to get what you want and still be unhappy about it?” It is a big question. Have you ever asked yourself this? I suggest you do!

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The Devastating Relationship between Expectations and Conflicts

Conflicts determine the quality of every relationship. Even the most loving couples, friends or family members face conflict in their life. It is because we are different people, with different life experiences, tendencies, desires, fears, challenges and upbringing.

Every moment in time, whether we have judged it as a negative, positive or neutral, has molded us into the people we are today. We can define ourselves as the accumulation of all those split-second moments of experience and how they have affected us.

It is important to remember that even twins, having the same genetic code, do not have the same path in life, because each of them was in a different place in their mother’s womb, was born at a different time, has a different name and reacts differently to the same experiences. As hard as it may be to accept, the chances that two people will go through the same experience and come out of it the same way is zero.

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Emotional Freedom: Let Go and Be FREE!

I do not know about you, but once, whenever I thought about freedom, I thought of a prison. I imagined someone trapped in a closed place against his will. It was always a physical place, with bars and darkness, and just thinking of it upset me.

When I started studying how the brain works, my perception changed. I learned that there is another prison – a very secure place that is the hardest to escape. Most of us live in the prison of our own mind, in which we are limited by our way of thinking.

I remember the time that I experienced the loss of my child. I could feel how quickly I was building my own prison and how each thought was adding one more bar and one more lock around me. The hardest realization was that only I could set myself free.

No one in their normal mind wants to be trapped inside their mind. Yet, in some way or another, we all are. This is because we are not in our normal mind. Yes, me too. Do not take this too hard, but Buddhists think we are all delusional, trapped in the prison of our own ego.

Think about it: imprisonment is the absence of freedom. We only desire freedom when we feel that we do not have it. If you feel free, why would you search for freedom? This comparison between what we have and what we lack, followed by the bad feeling we have about it, is a prison in itself.

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