happiness Tag | Family Matters

How to Have a Good Day Everyday

Martin was a gorgeous 7-year-old who came to me for child coaching. His mom called and said she felt she could not help him. He never had a good day. He did not even know what one looked like.

After an abusive relationship with her husband, she divorced him and moved away to start a new life. They had been living in a nice place and their life changed dramatically.

For the first six months after they divorced, Martin’s mom insisted on taking him to see his dad, but his dad did not show up. When his dad did show up, he was angry and aggressive and Martin refused to spend time with him.

Since his dad did not care whether he came or not, his mom decided to stop putting pressure on them to see each other. “Martin is way better than before. He used to cry and have nightmares, but it’s much better now”, she said.

Still, six months passed and Martin was angry, negative and grumpy and life was tough on him. He never smiled, the whole world was bad, it is everyone else’s fault and every tiny thing made him blow up with anger and throw temper tantrums. After years of abuse, Martin’s mom told me she needed help, because she felt she was losing her son.

So first, we played “If I were a wizard”.

This post is part 16 of 19 in the series From the Life Coaching Deck

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How to Join Your Kids’ “Fun Club”

Last week, I worked with a 7-year-old kid and when I asked him what mom or dad can do to make him happy, he said, “Be fun”. When I asked him if he liked his teacher, he said with a big smile, “Yes. She’s fun!”

I have heard this phrase from children many times. For them, fun is a currency. This is how they measure their relationships with their parents or with other people. First, you need to be fun. Then, you fit on a scale from “a little fun” to “great fun”.

The opposite of fun is old

I have written about the fun incentive as a motivation tool. It is also a trust tool, because it is a fantastic way to build rapport with your children. From working with many kids and raising my own children, I know that if you are not fun, you are old! Every time they say it, I feel I deserve it.

So as a parent, you need to get into your kids’ “fun club”. If you are in, they consider you as a partner for life and you can instill many thoughts, beliefs and ideas in their mind, as the best role model. If you are not at all in the club, you stand no chance.

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Turn Your Dreams of the Dream Job into Reality

Most people do not have their dream job. Many people around the world go to work because they have to, because it pays the bills, because this is what expected of them or because they have nothing else to do. The lucky ones get up in the morning with excitement, leave home (or not) and spend most of their days doing something they feel passionate about.

I have to say I am one of the lucky ones. I get up every day and get paid to do something I love. It does not feel like work, more like living my passion and my purpose, which is inspiring and motivating and helps a lot with getting up in the morning.

Research shows that doing the work we love improves many aspects of our life and makes us happier. Happiness, as you know, affects our health, our relationships, our finances, our mental wellbeing and our work. It is a never-ending cycle. We love our work, which makes us happy and improves our productivity and the enjoyment of our work, which bring us more happiness. This way, being happy about your work is like passive income that keeps on growing.

This upcoming event will give you a unique opportunity to turn your dreams of a dream job into reality too.

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Gratitude: The Happiness Attitude

Over years of learning about happiness and success, emotional stamina and wellbeing, I realized that gratitude is the best antidote for frustration. Frustration is a feeling, a thought. If we change the thought to gratitude, we will no longer feel any pain.

Life is full of challenges as we grow and become more aware of our surrounding. We are born into total dependency and we learn from our parents and other adults around us how to be frustrated when our desires are not fulfilled. This brings us lots of heartache and suffering.

The way we react to frustrations in life as kids is the way we will react to frustrations in life as grownups. We also pass this way of reacting to our children and the cycle never ends. If our reaction to frustration is positive and empowered, we hope the cycle will continue, but if our reaction to frustration is painful, we must stop the cycle NOW!

This week, I had a chat to my 14-year-old daughter Noff. We talked about her being very frustrated about an upcoming school assembly, which she hated. I told her about Pollyanna, the girl who inspired me to be a positive person and change my life from frustration to success. I asked her, “What is good about the assembly tomorrow?” She answered straight away, “It’s the last assembly of the year and there are no classes during assembly”. This made her feel better.

You see, there is something good in everything, even if it seems all bad at first glance.

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Distorted Definition of Depression Increases Depression

Depression is a big problem in our society. People think that nowadays we have more depression, when in fact we do not. What we have is a distorted definition of happiness and depression.

Here are some myths about happiness and depression that make people feel even more depressed.

Myth 1: Happy people are happy at all the time

When I go over the happiness scale with my clients, many of them think that they are supposed to be happy all the time. I can understand how people with this distorted definition of happiness can feel depressed. Some of them say that on a scale of 1-100, a happy person feels 95 happy or even 100. Since 100 is a state of total excitement and bliss, we cannot experience the excitement if we are high all the time.

Human beings’ nervous system notices differences. Feeling just a little bit happier than before works just as well when you go from 32 to 35 as when you go from 62 to 65. So every day, focus on being just a little happier than you were yesterday.

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How to Get Rid of Procrastination

Procrastination is a big problem for anyone who would like to achieve anything. Although from the outside it looks like it is not a problem to do nothing at all, it is not a state of doing nothing from the inside. Inside, there is a fear that right now, doing nothing seems better than anything we can think of doing.

It is important not to confuse a state of bliss and contentment with procrastination. Bliss is doing nothing and enjoying it. Procrastination is doing nothing from fear of the outcome of anything we do.

Procrastination and anxiety are twins and anxiety is the elder. Anxiety is a fear of some imaginary bad future and procrastination is our coping mechanism with anxiety (not a very effective strategy, but a very common one).

When we use it too often, we reach the “whatever” stage, when we “pretend” we do not care what the outcome will be. We always care! Unless you are a Buddhist in your heart and soul (which is a good aspiration), you care about the outcome. You can say you do not care, but you cannot cheat your own subconscious mind into believing you are the Dalai Lama and will be happy with whatever happens.

When our mind thinks we are in danger (because of something someone said or because of what someone might say), it has three choices: fight, flight or freeze. Procrastination is equivalent to the “flight” response – running away at the sight of danger.

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3 Emotional Painkillers

In Holistic Approach to Emotional Pain, I explained why pain is not a punishment and we do not need to fight it. I also explained how the use of physical or emotional “substances” only makes us feel the pain longer and disrupts the function of the natural pharmacy we have in our body, which is in charge of flooding our system with “painkillers”.

In this post, I will share 3 “emotional painkillers” that will make pain go away faster.

1. The Rating Technique

The first emotional painkiller is used frequently by nurses and doctors. When you are in a hospital, before giving you your painkillers, the nurse will ask you to rate your pain from 1 to 10 and use this as a guide to determine your dosage.

This makes you develop an awareness of your feeling. If you say that the pain is a 9, the nurse will give you more painkillers and you will feel a bigger relief from them. If you say the pain is 3, the nurse may ask if you can wait a little longer and give you nothing for an hour.

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Holistic Approach to Emotional Pain

Unfortunately, I have had a lot of pain in my life. Sometimes, it was physical pain and others times it was emotional pain. I know how pain feels, sounds, looks and what it does to my ability to think.

I think every person in the world experiences pain. In fact, everything that doesn’t happen the way we expect, causes us pain, and we can separate the pain by intensity or level of importance.

Many people separate physical and emotional pain. I strongly believe they work the same way in our mind.

I am not a medical doctor, more of a “heart” or “mind” doctor, and I mainly work with my clients on emotional pain. In my work as a happiness coach, I take clients through a process that uses their happiness as a tool to overcome their emotional pain. I tell all of them that it does not mean they will have no pain in their lives, but we will make sure that in the competition between pain and pleasure, pleasure will win.

First, it is important to remember that pain is an emotion that is important for us. Together with happiness and satisfaction, pain functions as guide, like a compass or GPS. When we feel great, this tells us, “Keep moving in the direction you are now”. And when we feel pain, this tells us, “Recalculating … please make a u-turn at the nearest available point”.

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Smile and Have a Nice Day!

My youngest sister sent me a gift recently. It was a book called Cave in the Snow: Tenzin Palmo’s Quest for Enlightenment by Vicki Mackenzie. Gal, my husband, started reading it before me and I am reading it now 20-30 pages behind him. Every time he shared a suggestion from the book with me, I tried it. Tenzin Palmo suggested to the readers to find peace and happiness in different ways. Since I am in the happiness business, I have dedicated my life to finding techniques to increase happiness, methods to teach these techniques and ways to help others find their own techniques, so I welcomed her suggestions.

One of her simple methods was to smile. You smile widely (for no reason) and keep smiling through 3 deep breaths. Repeat this 6 times a day. That’s it. 3 breaths, 6 times a day, smiling. To start, you can put a pencil between your teeth, and this will hold your mouth in a smiling position.

Simple, right?

Tenzin Palmo said we’d feel a difference in 6 days, so I decided to try her technique myself.

It took exactly 1 day to feel a difference. The second day was even better, the third day was even better. If you are a mindful person and good at rating your moods, you will notice small changes every day. After a week, the improvement stopped and my happiness state was high and uplifted.

Try it. What have you got to lose (except some anger, sadness and fear)?

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Questions to Practice Mindfulness and Change Your Life for the Better

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

As a life coach, I master questions. I know that some questions I ask (myself or others) will lead to pain and others will empower people, like press buttons for “let’s move on”, “let’s do something”, “let’s think positively”, “let’s plan”, “let’s change perspective” and “let’s appreciate”.

There are many “buttons” in the brain that trigger a thought or a feeling. For example, the “good memory” button will make us happy and the “bad memory” button will bring us pain and suffering. We may not have more bad memories than good memories, but we will have more suffering if we hit bad memory buttons more often.

Questions can trigger happiness, empowerment, hope, anger, frustration or anxiety. When we ask, “Why do they hate me?” we trigger all memories supporting it. If we ask, “How can I make them love me?” our brain searches for memories of things we’ve done that have led to others showing us love.

Think of questions as instructions we give the brain to go and search for something. Like a dog – you throw it a toy or a boomerang and whatever you throw comes back (only the brain doesn’t bring it back wet).

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