Precious Jellybeans

There are some things I wish I knew when I was younger. For example, that life is short and we had better make the best of it. Luckily for me, I realized this when I was 16. It was painful and scary at first but eventually very liberating. Life is what we have. There are no rehearsals, no practice tests, no rewinds or regrets. We can work with it but not against. And time is our most precious gift. It is the only real currency that exists. Some people make a good use of it and others spend it or waste it.

Since that time of realization, I have been searching for ways to get this message across others: life is short, live it!

Recently, my daughter Eden sent me this clip that demonstrate time as our most precious asset using jellybeans as a metaphor. It was beautiful and the message is clear and simple. Here it is. I hope you like it too.

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Ask Ronit: My Son is Very Clingy

Clingy kids can be very exhausting. We love them very much but we want to be able to do things without them from time to time. I have met many parents who are fighting this clinginess and they express a lot of frustration. I think the exhausting thing not necessary the clinginess itself. It is more from the fight, the feeling of failure and the expectation that it should be different.

This week, I received a question on my blog from a mother of a 9 year old boy. Mel wanted to know what I would suggest for dealing with a clingy child.

Here is what I wrote Mel. I hope you will find it encouraging. Most importantly, it is not as bad as it looks.

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How to Feel Good: Smiling

The tip for today is a very simple way to feel good, instantly – smiling.

The good thing about smiling is that it a two way street – smiling creates a happy feeling, and feeling happy makes you smile. It does not matter where you start – the feeling or the smile. When we experience joy, the muscles in our brain contract and start a positive loop of feeling even more joy. This is not a new science. As early as the 1870s, Charles Darwin first suggested that facial expressions did not just express emotions, but could actually induce them.

Smiling has been studied for years. In 1989, psychologist Robert Zajonc compared the mood of participants asked to make the long “eee” sound (which involves the same muscles as smiling) and those who were asked to make a long “ooo” sound (which involves the same muscles as frowning). Zajonc found that the people who made the “eee” sound felt much better.

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Start Your Happiness Journey

My dad always said that the process of anything in life depends highly on how your start it. A good start will set us up for a nice and easy process, while challenging starts will set the tone for struggle. I think happiness is a lifelong quest. I chose to adopt my dad’s philosophy and tried to instill this belief in my children.

Here are my A to Z rules for having good starts and continuing the happiness journey. I hope you will find them successful and encouraging.

Act on your goals rather than waiting for things to happen to you. If you want to start feeling happy, make it happen. Act on it. Waiting for that “one day” when your life will be they way you want it to be will only reinforce the fact that you are far away from it. Moving slowly, by taking action, towards your goal, will make you feel like you are just that tiny bit closer.

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How to Feel Good: Trigger Your “Feel Good” Hormone

This week, during the question and answer section at the end of my presentation, someone asked me to share some tips on how to feel good.

The request made me think of a few of things:

1. Be Happy in LIFE (my business) is all about feeling good.
2. I am a “feel good” coach. This is what I do for living – I teach people how to feel good.
3. I have thousands of tips to share. This blog alone has more than 1,000 posts so far and many of the posts contain more than one feel good tip.

This made me think that maybe presenting a topic in the form of tips might be easier for people to read and implement. So here goes. I am starting the Feel Good Tips series. I hope you can make good use of it.

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Be Happy Without Money

Many people think that happiness requires money. Money definitely helps, but it really is not a pre-requisite for happiness. Most of my coaching clients want to improve their wealth, believing that money brings happiness.

What they do not understand is that it works better the other way, happiness brings more money. The belief that money can buy happiness usually comes from mom and dad. My clients learned it from their parents, who learned it from their parents who learned it from their own parents, and on and on. Can you see the cycle here? If you have kids, you have to make sure to stop it!

There is lots of research on the science of happiness. It tells us that happiness is a chemical reaction in the body. We can build up our happiness by doing things that stimulate our ‘happy’ chemicals. Luckily, we do not need money for all of them. For example, I got a little happiness sign and I love taking photos of it. The camera is digital and the photos are free. But it makes me happy anyways.

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Blessings for the New Year

To start off the New Year, I wanted to share some blessings with you. This year I will celebrate my 50th birthday and I think this year’s blessings should fit that age.

I received this New Year message from my cousin. It made me smile so I hope it will make you smile too.

Wishing you all lots of love, happiness, health, and wealth for the New Year.

May your hair, your teeth, your face-lift, your abs, and your stocks not fall.

And may your blood pressure, your triglycerides, your cholesterol, your white blood count and your mortgage interest not rise.

May you get a clean bill of health from your dentist, your cardiologist, your gastroenterologist, your urologist, your proctologist, your podiatrist, your psychiatrist, your plumber, and the Internal Revenue.

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Make a list: Inspiring Movies

I really love movies. I remember the first movie I ever watched on the big screen at the age of 11. My dad used to have a second job selling movie tickets in the small town we lived in. He could never let us in for free but he would make cones out of newspaper and give us free popcorn.

Movies have always been a source of inspiration for me. As an author, I see the stories I write unfold like movies in my head. I think an author is kind of like a director, only an author has to do all the aspects of production in their head.

I get a lot of inspiration for my writing from the people in my life. Lucky for me, my profession allows me to meet lots of them, which means I can mix and shuffle their stories to create new situations, scenarios, and outcome for my books. This is something I can do entirely in my head, and when everything is arranged just right, I write down on paper the story I saw in my mind.

People are also a great inspiration to me for how I want to live my life. I have made a point to learn something by observing the lives of the people around me. Each of them has something to share.

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Nothing wrong with feeling bad

Everybody feels bad sometimes – sad, lonely, upset, worried, even angry. OK, except Tibetan monks, maybe, but only after 20 years of meditation and a strict diet of warm water. The rest of us sometimes feel bad.

The problem with feeling bad is not so much that we find something hard to deal with, but that we have been brought up not to feel bad, so we feel really bad about feeling bad. That, of course, makes everything worse, because now, we are feeling bad about ourselves and blocking ourselves from processing and letting go of the original bad feeling.

When I was growing up, I was often told that only girls cried. “Take it like a man”, people said to me and to all of my friends who were boys. The girls were not supposed to take it like men, but they were instructed not to bother others with their feelings and to “show their happy face” like “a good girl” should. So happiness was clearly good and resentment, anxiety, regret and sorrow were bad.

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Global Free Hugs Day

The 19th of October (my birthday, how exciting) has been declared “Global Hugs Day”. Free huggers will be going out to streets around the world from 11am to 1pm local time, offering free hugs to all and spreading human warmth.

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