Your Child’s Subconscious Mind Has No Sense of Humor

When people ask me to summarize my studies, I say they were all about how the brain works. The first four years focused on how to use this knowledge to stimulate learning. Later on, I learned how to work with the subconscious mind to avoid misery and have more success and more happiness.

Learning about the brain is a never-ending quest. There is much research in the world about the brain and its functions in health, in success, in relationships, in learning and in everyday life. Over the years, I have tried to share my learning about the brain and its functions through this blog, especially in relation to parenting and education.

Why parenting and education? Because these two areas are very close to my heart. Since you are reading this, you probably care about them too.

Today, I would like to share some insight that is very important in parenting and in education. I want to tell you how the conscious and the subconscious minds work. Specifically, I want to tell you about how the subconscious mind deals with humor.

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Life Coaching Tips: Quote Cards

When it is obvious that the goals cannot be reached, don't adjust the goal, adjust the action - Confucius

Today, I would like to share with you, my coaches and mentoring clients (and even parents) a tool I have for working with my life-coaching clients. This tool is also useful for every form of therapy and even for teaching and parenting. This tool is quote cards.

Sometimes, it is hard to start a discussion with children, teens or adult clients, and we want the messages to appear as if they are coming from somewhere else and not from us. Quotes are a wonderful way to do that.

Generally, quotes are a wonderful tool in motivation, because they typically communicate an idea powerfully using a very short and concise format. Many times, when you read or hear a great quote, it reinforces a belief you already have, or already want to have, and you think, “I couldn’t have said it better”.

In coaching, our goal is to help our clients switch from one emotional or mental state to another. We need to be very careful about helping them get to where they want to go, not to where we think they should go. This is why getting to know them and their coaching targets is essential to our work.

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Best Mother’s Day Gift: Time for Self-Care

It’s Mother’s Day again this weekend and the quest for the best Mother’s Day gift is on. This time, I want to inspire mothers around the world to give something to themselves, and you can help.

As a mother, I find it very hard to take time for myself. I am so used to giving and giving and giving, maybe I forgot how to take. You see, I am self-employed and the balance between work and life is mine to control. Some say it is easier. I think it is harder.

I had my first business straight after I graduated from college and I was already a mother by then. It was tough, but it made me efficient. When my kids were young, I never protested. I accepted that giving was part of my role. Over time, I learned to take time for myself in the spaces between being with my kids, my husband, housework and my job, and gradually increased it.

Time for ourselves is short in our society and as hard as it is to admit, mothers have even less of it than anyone else.

Why mothers?

In our society, mothers are in charge of many aspects of family life. I do not really like the stereotypical jokes about what mothers do in the time it takes dads to say “Jack Robinson”, or what happens when mom is sick vs. when dad has the Man Flu, but there is a lot of truth in them.

One of my clients protested this for a long time. She was in charge of her household and family life for 4 years. When she was ready to get back to work and asked her husband to be with the kids for one evening a week, he did not manage.

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How to Have a Good Day Everyday

Every day may not be good but there is something good in every day

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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Living with Passion and Purpose is Within Your Reach!

SoundStruck playing Etna, a paint drumming piece by Tsoof Baras

Living with passion and purpose seems like a fluffy dream to many people who have settled on their job and career, but there are many others who are living proof that living with passion and purpose is possible, maybe with a little bit of guidance.

My son Tsoof, who is 20 years old, finished his four-year degree in music recently. 3 days a week, he teaches school students the joy of percussion playing and the rest of the time, he works on his show and his band SoundStruck.

This week, in one of his musical performances, I had a chance to talk to many of the young musicians there about their plans for the future. Some of them looked for a job that would bring them money. They worked in a retail shop, in the bakery, played a gig once every two months, and the rest of the time, they had to pay the rent somehow. Others, like Tsoof, worked in the music industry and lived with purpose and passion.

I was a proud mother. You see, Tsoof leaves home 3 days a week at 6:30am, works full days, never complains, never says it is too hard. When one of his students is away, he uses the time to practice and write music, and he loves his students, loves the work, loves music and gets excited about the compositions and the work he does for his show.

My son is not the only one in that group. Others are also passionate and dedicated, working hard and loving every minute of it. I was happy to discover this.

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Turn Your Dreams of the Dream Job into Reality

Coffee cup, laptop and a woman's hands writing on a notepad

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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How to Simplify Your Life and Reduce Stress and Overwhelm

Sign saying Good morning, let the stress begin

Life seems to be stressful and overwhelming to most people. The more we are on “automatic pilot”, the more we feel out of control. When people are stressed, they think life is very complicated, so it is easy to see that simplifying life can reduce stress and overwhelm.

All around the world, stress is increasing. It affects mental and physical health, with severe challenges to cognitive abilities, behavior, sleep, academic achievement and health. Some say it is the number one cause of illness and death in our society. Unfortunately, the magnitude of stress is increasing as our lifestyle is not simple and more and more children are affected by it, directly or indirectly.

The Catch 22 of stress

The Australian Psychological Society 2014 Stress & Wellbeing Survey found that the main causes of stress are finances, health, family, the desire to be healthy and the health of loved ones. You can see the results in this infographic, which shows how the Australian society reacts to stress.

When you see the causes of stress, you can realize how we create a loop, a Catch 22, in our mind, which leads to stress. For example, financial problems causes stress and stress causes more financial problems. It is a never-ending cycle, which we must stop.

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10 Life Philosophies for Peace of Mind

Life is full of stress and it can be hard to achieve peace of mind. Many people don’t even remember the last time they felt at peace.

Life coaching helps people understand that peace and stress are in our mind and we can control them by changing what we think. Once we understand that we are what we think, we can change our life by choosing to think other things.

Here are 10 quotes that can be adopted as life philosophies. With these philosophies, we can manage tough times, we can be happy and relaxed, avoid stress, be successful and take control over our life, rather than feel that life is happening to us and we are at the mercy of our circumstances.

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Stop Making More Money

Pay attention written in dollar note pattern

Liam was a very handsome man. When he entered my life coaching deck, I didn’t believe he was almost 40 years old. He looked 25 and I wondered what kind of woman would leave such a great-looking guy. On his client details form, he wrote that he had two boys and that his wife had left home suddenly and took the boys with her.

If he was the first man who came to coaching because his wife had left all of a sudden, I would have thought that something was wrong with his wife. Who on Earth leaves home all of a sudden? With two boys? After 12 years of marriage? But Liam was not the first and, unfortunately, will not be the last man whose wife left all of a sudden.

During the initial assessment of his life, he told a story of a great love, two well established professionals, parenting maturely, living in their own house and even owning an investment property. Their life was the ultimate picture of a perfect marriage.

“When did the relationship start shaking?” I asked Liam, trying to find the most reasonable explanation for “all of a sudden”. He said that it had started when his youngest daughter was born, about 4 years earlier, and then he told me the typical story of a marriage that brings wives to leave “all of a sudden”.

He worked until 8 or 9pm some days. He worked on weekends. His main goal was to make more money. For every problem he had at home, his solution was making more money. When his wife wanted him to take a day off and spend time with the family, his mind went straight to “If I made enough money, I wouldn’t have to go to work so many hours and then I could be with my family”.

This post is part 14 of 19 in the series From the Life Coaching Deck

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Don’t Put Labels on Kids

This story illustrates the danger in putting labels on people. I hope it will show you why I always tell parents “Don’t put labels on kids”.

This week, I met Lena, 22-year-old girl who was diagnosed with anxiety disorder. She was so anxious she was afraid to run in the park because “people look at her.” She came to see me through a referral, with the support of her mom who was a doctor and was exhausted form seeing so many doctors and so many therapists and psychologists.

When I asked her mom, “What do you mean by ‘so many’?” she said that Lena had been in treatment for 10 years and been taking medication for that long.

“Does the medication help?” I asked.

“No”, she said, “She is at home, in her room, afraid to leave the house and the medication does nothing at all. If anything, things only got worse over the years”.

“Then why aren’t you considering stopping the medication?” I asked.

“Her doctor thinks things will get worse without it”.

Catch 22, right?

When Lena came, I could no longer discuss the issue with her mom, because legally, Lena was an adult and I had the privacy obligation not to discuss her coaching with anyone else. When she came, I tried to figure out what happened that had gotten her to where she was and things fad gotten so out of hand to the point of shutting herself at home and refusing to leave.

This post is part 13 of 19 in the series From the Life Coaching Deck

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