Force of Habit

What we do on a regular basis, even with little things, becomes our future.

Yes, this is a bold statement, but it is true. The main challenge is that sometimes, we may not realize that what we have just done or said came out of habit. It is easy to see that we eat the same cereal for breakfast every day. That is a simple one to spot, as is driving the same way to work, choosing a certain style of clothes and the likes.

What is much harder to detect is a particular kind of thinking. Today, I want to talk about focused, persistent, determined thinking, as opposed to scattered, carried away, wishy-washy thinking.

We have many defining moments in life, but we do not always know that they are defining, because they simply add a little, or chip away gently, to the definition of who we are. Over time, however, these tiny changes in our self-definition become a whole different person than the one we could be otherwise.

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How to break bad beliefs with doubt

A year ago, I became the Queensland state coordinator for Together for Humanity Foundation. The foundation works in schools with grade 4 to 12 kids to fight racism and inspire cultural openness. It turns out that, out of 50,000 kids in Australia who have participated in the program, over 90% have had racist attitudes towards other cultures.

It may be hard for you to accept, but most kids are racist because they live in a racist society, in which stereotyping is a survival mechanism. It is not surprising to read their surveys and discover they think “Muslims are scary” and “Asians sell drugs”, mainly because they are exposed to this type of information at home or in the media.

Whenever I ask the kids, “Have you ever personally met a scary Muslim or seen an Asian selling drugs?” their answer is “No”.

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Never Too Late

For some people, the beginning of a new year (and their birthday), is a sad day. When everyone around talks about goals, motivation and New Year resolutions, it is hard to avoid measuring our achievements from the previous year and those we have not achieved stand out like a sore thumb. “There you have it – another proof you have not achieved your goals and time is ticking. If you don’t get your act together, it’s going to be too late”.

Is it?

The ticking of time as it runs out is an illusion we adopt as soon as we learn to tell the time. Together with the sense of the achievement (that we can tell the time), the loss of freedom and hope starts creeping in as time starts to control us. This is the birth of the notion that something can be “late”, which sits in our mind together with frustration, helplessness and giving up. From there, the road to “too late” is short.

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Handy Family Tips: Pre-Marinating

Being efficient is every parent’s dream. Time is a limited resource and the faster we do things, the more time we have left to spend with our kids. So when I meet “the girls” for an evening out, we always talk about household stuff and share ideas.

Making dinner is one particular task that takes lots of energy. I have heard many parents saying they come home at the end of a working day and start making dinner. As you know, if you do not buy fresh meat just before you cook it, you may need to take it out of the freezer and wait for it to thaw or spend valuable time to defrost it in the microwave or in tons of running water.

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Handy Family Tips: Dishwasher

Last month, I visited my sisters and nephews. One of my sisters is in her late 30’s and the other is in her early 40’s and both became moms just last year. For years, they had lived on their own and managed a household perfectly, but when their babies arrived, they started dedicating most of their time to their “bundle of joy” and managing their house became a challenge.

Although it seem like a gradual progression from living on your own to living with a partner and then living with kids, the shift from managing a house as a couple to managing a house with kids is huge and can shake the most organized people just as it happened to my sisters.

As a parent, you probably remember yourself saying, “I don’t have a spare second to do the basic things anymore”. My younger sister was happy simply because I was with her baby so she could take a shower in the middle of the day. “Sometimes, I don’t have time to eat”, she said.

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If I Were Santa Claus

Before Christmas comes, I always think about kindness. Santa Claus is a very nice guy, don’t you think? He makes so many people happy and it is not only the kids, because what makes kids happy also makes their parents happy (in fact, to some extent, it even makes their parents kids again for a while).

Playing Santa Claus is a very good game for everyone, especially for kids, because it gives them the opportunity to enter the “Santa Club” in their mind and feel the joy of giving, even if it is just in thought. For older people, it is an exercise in financial freedom, very much like playing “If I were a millionaire” or “If I won the lottery”, only this game is all about giving to others and being kind.

I like this Santa game and find it uplifting and easy to play. I invite you to join in.

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Better Parenting Skills

… The most surprising reason I got was from a father who was not from the school. He said, “I have a teen son and three weeks ago, I had a fight with him. It was such a big fight, I was willing to send him to a boarding school. That night, I met a friend of mine who is a teacher at this school and told her about what had happened. She looked at me and said, “You need the Ronit Treatment”, so I begged the principal to allow me to participate. I’m here for the Ronit Treatment”.

Everyone laughed.

“I’m an accountant and a contractor. I gave up a paid day in order to come here today, because my friend said it’s worth it,” he continued.

By saying this, the man raised the bar for all the participants in the room. I knew the level of expectation from the workshop was high and I was very happy about it, but this took things up another notch. If you have been reading my posts for a while, you know I believe that the more you expect to get, the more effort you put in and the more you will get in the end. These parents expected a lot and now they expected even more!

I asked the group to open their workbooks in page 2 …

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How to Praise Your Kids (5)

For over 24 years, I have been focusing on emotional strength and I believe this is the key to any type of success in life. I think rewarding kids for emotional stretches is the best way to praise them. As a special education teacher, working with kids who struggle and kids who are gifted, praising for effort was always one of my main tools. Remember, it is not the success that counts, but the emotional stretch. Although it may be a cliché, “Good try” has real power.

Research on emotional intelligence has found that persistence is a powerful ingredient in any success formula. So how do you teach persistence? My answer is “Reward every attempt and praise it, regardless of the outcome”. As I said, in special education, it is a major teaching tool and I have countless examples. Here is one from my own home that happened recently.

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How to Praise Your Kids (4)

You can see them on the sports filed or in a lesson. They are smart kids, but they need constant reminders of their abilities and reassurance that they are OK. I often wonder how come those kids are so good, so smart and so capable, no one else around them can compete with their skills and abilities, yet are still very competitive.

It is because over-praising can backfire.

An analysis of over 150 studies about praise discovered there is a risk in praising. Being praised caused students to be less persistent, to need more eye contact with the teacher and to be less confident when answering a question (you know those uncertain answers that sound like questions). Students who were praised a lot were less independent in their schoolwork.

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How to Praise Your Kids (3)

In 1969, Nathaniel Branden wrote that self-esteem is the single most important factor in people’s life and people need do all they can to achieve positive self-esteem. Later, as it happens sometimes in the psychology field, the self-esteem movement took this idea to the extreme. Every kind of feedback was suddenly considered as criticism and swapped with “rewards” to build self-esteem.

However, this sometimes created over-rewarding and achieved nothing, if not the opposite.

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