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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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Assertiveness: Successful Communication Summary

You can learn assertiveness skills at any stage of life and you can always improve them and gain more respect for yourself and others. In this post, I have gathered all of my assertiveness tips in one big list. I hope this summary will be useful for you and for your children and students.

If we create a society full of assertive people, we will not have conflicts and we will live with each other with respect, so pass this along to everyone you know.

This post is part 6 of 6 in the series Assetiveness

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Assertiveness: Know Your Rights

So far, I have covered things that affect our ability to be assertive. This post adds some tips on how to know your rights, keep them and be assertive about them. I hope they will help you on your quest to develop your emotional intelligence and communicate with assertiveness.

When you are assertive, you express yourself with confidence without hurting others. You are firm, not a bully. You are clear, not manipulative. You are honest, not aggressive. Healthy communication is based on honesty, clarity and confidence.

First, you have to know your rights in every communication. It takes two to tango and when one has more rights than the other does, this will not be an assertive relationship. I suggest teaching kids these rights too and giving them opportunities to practice them.

This post is part 5 of 6 in the series Assetiveness

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Assertiveness: Live by Your Own Standards

Assertiveness is a helpful skill in life, yet most people do not have it. They do not have it because they could not learn it at home or from anyone else except professionals. You see, the people who teach assertiveness must be very confident and not afraid that you might use assertiveness with them, and these people are hard to find.

Am I assertive all the time? No, not really. Sometimes, I choose avoidance or aggression, and every time I use them, I feel uncomfortable. They either hurt me or others, which is not very good. Still, I aim to use assertiveness in my communication with others and most of the time, I do.

Assertiveness requires confidence to express your own thoughts and feeling without fear and without the need, desire or intention to hurt anyone else. It is important to distinguish between having the intention to hurt and actually hurting someone else.

This post is part 4 of 6 in the series Assetiveness

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Assertiveness: Things You Should Keep to Yourself

Keeping things to yourself does not mean keeping them a secret. Assertiveness comes from confidence, while secrets come from fear. Sharing is expressing yourself confidently without reservation and without any pressure to convince others or justify your own thoughts and beliefs.

Here is a list of things you can keep to yourself or share selectively. If you are confident about them, you do not need validation, approval or to have the majority with you to hold them. If you want someone’s opinion, ask. If someone asks for your opinion, respect their choice not to accept it or to do whatever they want with it. If they disagree, do not like it or do not want to use it, it should not create any doubt in you. Some things are yours to keep and you can share them, but never with pressure. Pressure is not assertiveness.

This post is part 3 of 6 in the series Assetiveness

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Happy Friendship Anniversary

This week, Gal and I celebrated 36 years of being together. We have known each other for 37 years, been a couple for 36, lived together for 31 and been married for 29 years. Every year, we celebrate our friendship anniversary instead of our wedding anniversary, because our wedding experience was not a very happy experience and we would really like to celebrate a happy thing in our life rather than an event we never liked.

I have a relationship philosophy that worked very well for me over the years. I am happy that my philosophy, together with Gal’s, brought us together to this anniversary. We still fight. We still disagree on things. We are very different in many ways, but we are still friends who love each other and care about each other greatly.

In my sessions, I share with my clients my formula for happy relationships. After each session, I send them a summary of the topics we covered, so they can reflect and work on their relationship. I have decided to include them here with the hope that many more people will use them to reach happy, supportive and loving relationships.

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Assertiveness: Keeping Things Private

In order for us to be assertive, we need to create clear boundaries between us and other people. In the previous post about assertiveness, I explained that assertiveness is the ability to express our needs and desires without hurting others and that this skill is important, yet nobody learns it at school. In this post, I will describe the things we do (and should not do) that sacrifice our own best interest and let other people into our personal space.

In order to be assertive, we must understand that everyone is entitled to his or her own thoughts, beliefs and actions. At the same time, we do not have to accept them as applicable to us. We should always stick to the things that are important to us and take care of ourselves first.

This post is part 2 of 6 in the series Assetiveness

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Be Your Child’s Speech Therapist with Mouth Gym

Over the last 30 years, I have had a chance to see many children with speech difficulties. Children who do not speak properly may sound cute at first, but this might become an obstacle as they grow up. At some stage, their parents stress about it and take them to a speech therapist or a speech pathologist.

But parents can fix some of the speech problems very easily. This post includes my tips for fixing one of the major speech difficulties – physical sound production. Hundreds of parents around the world have used them and changed their children’s life. If your child has trouble pronouncing words, you do not need a speech therapist. Using the suggestions below will do the same for your child.

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Assertiveness: It is better to be Wise than to be Right

What a shame! Assertiveness is not something we learn at school, so if you cannot learn it from your parents, because they never learned it from their own parents, then you can be easily manipulated and pushed over.

Everybody hates being pushed over. I see it as a natural part of life. We all do everything we can to improve our position, and if others are in our way, we push them aside. Sometimes, well, most times, we hurt people along the way without any bad intentions. Assertiveness can help us do better in life without hurting anyone.

Many of my clients mainly need assertiveness. When we do not have it and we cannot express our needs and assert our rights, we resort to either avoidance or aggression. It is the old “fight and flight” response. We see a lion or a snake and we either run away or attack. So when I see aggression or avoidance, I know that assertiveness is needed.

This post is part 1 of 6 in the series Assetiveness

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Leadership, Management and Parenting

My mother-in-law was an experienced teacher and a manager at an adult education institute. Many years ago, when she was still alive, she told me about a management course she was taking that shook her perception of her work. She was very surprised to discover that there were many types of managers.

After her course, we had many discussions about how management, leadership and parenting are very similar in their essence. At that time, I was running my first business, where I was a manager, a leader and a parent. I managed all the aspects of the business and led the educational program, while being a young mother.

I thought about these three roles we play for years and managed to combine them into something that worked really well for my family and me. Hopefully, the ideas below will work well for your family and you too.

Parenting is a management position. For the family “business” or “operation” to run properly, we need to manage time, manage our emotions and those of our family members, manage money, manage habits, manage education, manage health, manage work and manage time off. In fact, all aspects of family life, we even need to manage things we have no control over (yes, it is very frustrating that we cannot control everything).

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