Parenting Focus: Point Your Flashlight and Magnifier at Good Things

Parents want to raise happy children. In all of the many parenting workshops I run, regardless of their parenting style, cultural background or socioeconomic status, all the parents want their kids to be happy, healthy and successful. The problem is that parents whose kids are not happy, healthy and successful do not understand how they contribute to this. They just cannot see how their parenting focus and the attention they give to problematic things creates these problems.

When children do not behave like we want them to and when they do things we do not like, we tend to pay attention to their behavior more than when they behave like we want them to and when they do things we like. This attitude only makes them continue to behave “badly” and creates a never-ending cycle of attention to “bad” behavior.

When pay attention to the problems, the problems keep growing, and then we pay attention to them more and we trap ourselves and our kids in this dysfunctional parenting style. In life, we get what we focus on. Some call it “the law of attraction”, I call it “the flashlight model”.

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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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International Women’s Day 2016

1 in 3 women will be raped, beaten or abused in her lifetime - Amnesty International

Recently, I was asked to take part as a facilitator in the 2016 International Women’s Day at Griffith University, which was organized by a very good friend of mine, Wendy Flannery, from the amazing organization Believing Women for a Culture of Peace.

Do you ever think you know a lot about something and then discover that what you thought was very far from the way things really are?

I have been involved in diversity education for many years. During those years, I was convinced that I was aware of all the challenges women faced, so I was very surprised to discover just how unaware I was.

During the event, there was an introduction to the declaration for the dignity and human rights for women. We had speakers from different religions and they all declared that we are far away from having fair and equal rights for women.

The shocking bit for me was statistics of women’s position in the world, which highlighted the need for serious social change.

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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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Does Classroom Technology Improve Academic Achievement?

Technology, including classroom technology, is a very important part of our life in this day and age. When I had my first computer at the age of 24, my kids were born in a house with a computer that everyone could access whenever they needed. Today, we all have our own laptop and mobile phone (which is technically another computer).

Do you think that this technology improves their academic achievement?

I have been wondering for a long time whether the introduction of more classroom technology translates to higher academic success.

Recently, I saw some research done by The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), whose mission is to promote policies that will improve the economic and social well-being of people around the world. OECD ran an international study on the impact of introducing computers into the classroom on academic achievement and their conclusions were alarming.

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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”.

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Common Stress Causes

In 3 Strategies to Find Your Sources of Pressure, I explained why it is important to recognize the sources of our pressure in order to eliminate stress in life and gave three strategies to find the stress causes in your life. If you have used these strategies, you are ready to use this list of common stress causes to refine your findings.

1. Lack of sleep is a major cause of stress.

2. Craving is a small source of pressure. Whenever you say to yourself, “I have to eat/do/be something”, you are putting pressure on yourself.

3. Addictions are a huge cause of pressure. Why? Because when we don’t have that thing we are addicted to, our brain goes into panic attack. Addiction can be to food, drinks (alcohol, coke…) to people, routines. If you want to know if you are addicted, try leaving without that thing for 3 weeks and see how the pressure builds up.

4. Caffeine is a big source of addiction. When our body has overdoes of Caffeine (coffee, tea, coke and chocolate) it will become edgy. If you want to recognize how much it affects you, stop any caffeine for 3 days and notice how nervous you are because your body goes through withdrawal symptoms.

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Lesson in Perspective: King Solomon’s Ring

Children live in the moment and as their parents, we sometimes need to teach them a lesson in perspective, because perspective comes from our long experience of realizing how different things turn out.

Recently, my daughter and son performed on a big festival and while they prepared for the event, our house was full of music. Our son Tsoof is a seasoned performer, but our youngest daughter Noff was struggling to manage her anxiety and enthusiasm at the same time.

The event was beautiful. She was excited and nervous and when it was all done, a good thing happened: many of her friends, and other people who watched her perform, sent her messages of encouragement and support.

So, she needed a lesson in perspective. To manage the excitement before the event, she needed optimism that everything would be fine, and to manage the overflow of support messages, she needed humbleness.

Why? Because before she sang, she was nervous, and after she sang, she was over the moon and she didn’t know how to react to this overflow of compliments and needed to land.

In both cases, she needed to understand that her experience in the moment would not last forever.

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How to Deal with Anxiety: What is Anxiety?

If you live in the past, you will suffer depression. If you live in the future, you will have anxiety. If you live in the present, you will be content. Lau Tzu

What is anxiety? Anxiety is one of the biggest problems of our society today. Research has found that it is one of the main reasons for sickness, relationship problems, crime and failure. People who are anxious have a bad physical reaction to thinking about the future.

Everybody feels anxiety sometimes. It is a natural reaction to what is perceived as danger – an evolution of the “fight or flight” response. While for most people, experiencing anxiety in small doses is normal and healthy, for others, feeling anxious about the future or about situations over which they have no control may cause real interference with daily living.

The problem is with the frequency of the fear and the perception of danger, when in fact there may be no real danger. When people experience mild anxiety, we call it “worrying”. When the fear takes over and blocks the person from living a normal life, we call it “Anxiety Disorder”.

Think about it this way: anxiety is when your mind goes towards a possible, horrible, bad, unpleasant future and you react to it NOW. No one is anxious when they think about getting compliments, or having a great time. We are anxious about something that MAY go wrong in the future.

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