From Sickness to Health: Working Together on a Shared Goal

Ronit Baras with her mother and younger sisters

Last week, I shared with you how the stories my mother told herself brought pain into their life. My mother was in constant pain and was on loads of medications and pain killers and nothing really helped. She was depressed and often talked about dying. Even the joy of having 5 new grandchildren in the last 8 years didn’t help her, and my mom loves babies very much.

Today, I would like to tell you how my siblings and I gathered and made choices to change my mom’s life and heal her.

It started a year before my parents came to visit. My dad seemed very frustrated. Even the doctors said my mother needed mental help. One day, my siblings and I created a WhatsApp group and considered different ways to approach the problem.

This post is part 2 of 11 in the series From Sickness to Health

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From Sickness to Health: The Story of Our Life

I am in the business of helping people find the joy in life and have been doing this for 33 years. Over the years, I have helped many people and saved many families from pain and heartache. I am very happy and proud to be a life coach and view my clients’ successes as also mine.

My greatest victory happened recently, when my mother, who is 78 years old, came to Australia to stay with us for five weeks. She came here to heal. My mom was unwell most of her life. Since I remember her, she was overweight, had swollen legs and could not stand on her feet for long. In the last 13 years, things got so bad that one of her therapists said that the only place she was going was the cemetery.

This post is part 1 of 11 in the series From Sickness to Health

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No More Disappointment: The Biggest Loser Leads the Dance

Many forms of therapy try to help the client overcome pain. One big source of pain starts during childhood, when kids, with their lack of life experience, feel that they are a disappointment to their parents. Here is the story of Simon, who believed he was the biggest loser in his parent’s eyes.

Simon was an angry and frustrated teenager when he came to sit with me on my life coaching deck. I read what he and his parents had written to me and felt frustrated to see how yet another whole family was a victim of circumstances. Parents’ love can be overwhelming sometimes and being unaware of feelings and lacking the ability to manage them sabotages the relationships at home.

Parents need courage to realize that they are the most powerful in this dysfunctional dynamic, but most of them feel helpless and send their kids to be “fixed”. A relationship with a child is a dance. Some parents do not understand that they need to lead.

This post is part 17 of 19 in the series From the Life Coaching Deck

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How to Stop Bullying with Empathy: The Story of Two Apples

Bullying is an epidemic. It touches every part of our life and children are very vulnerable to bullying, because they do not have the tools to prevent it.

From the bully’s point of view, bullying is an act of fear. When the bullies feels inferior for some reason, they search for someone weak to pick on, in an attempt to feel better about themselves. Therefore, the best way to prevent bullying is to develop confidence and for children, this is still work in progress (it is work in progress for grownups too, but children are just at the beginning of this process).

What we need to change the world from bullying to respect and collaboration is empathy. As parents and educators, we can develop empathy in easy and effective ways.

This post is part 35 of 35 in the series Bullying

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How to Develop Kids’ Thinking: Ask the Right Questions

Parents often ask me how to develop kids’ thinking, so that they grow up to be successful and happy. My answer is: ask the right questions.

Beliefs form the boundaries around our thinking. They separate between what we think we can and cannot do. What we believe we can do is within the boundaries of our thinking. We call these “empowering beliefs”. What we think we cannot do is outside the boundaries of our thinking. We call these “limiting beliefs”.

We are all limited in the way we think. Why? Because we do not know what we do not know. Think of the brain as a map we design from the moment we are born. We are exposed to many things and form beliefs that we use to navigate life.

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Stop Verbalizing and Justifying Your Negative Feelings

As a life coach, I teach mindfulness. To me, mindfulness is observation of sensations, thoughts and emotions without judgment. Our conscious mind is in charge of 10% of our actions and our subconscious mind is in charge of 90%. Therefore, mindfulness is a simple and highly effective way to increase our awareness, overcome negative feelings and gain more control over our actions.

One basic tools used to reach high EQ is “Name the feeling”. Researchers have found that when people give a name to a hard feeling they have, their brain decreases the intensity of the feeling. Matthew D. Lieberman, professor of psychology and director of the UCLA Social Cognitive Neuroscience lab, has shown that simply labeling emotions reduced the activity of the amygdala, the brain’s center of emotional responses, which reduced fear. Naming emotions also increased activity in the pre-frontal cortex, the mind’s regulator.

Many people know this concept, but some of them take it too far, because not all verbalizing is healthy for us. Many people believe that if we name the “problem”, we are half-way into solving it. After working with many clients, I can tell you that almost 90% of them know what their problems are, but they are far from solving them.

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Make a list: Life Lessons Learned

Road sign with all arrows leading to the right way

Old people often reflect on life and give the younger generations their list of life lessons learned. It is as if experience gives them the credit to give tips to the young on how to live life.

Well, it does! Experience is important and the best thing about it is that it helps develop perspective.

Unfortunately, not all old people with lots of experience have the perspective to give “young ones” and many of their tips are not applicable to the way life happens now. What worked for my parents, who are now in their 80’s, might not work for me or for my children.

Does this mean I cannot learn from them? No! I can learn a lot from them, but it is best to develop my own lessons, because the lessons I learn by myself are the lessons I can live by.

This post is part 39 of 49 in the series Make a List

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Reading Challenges: Children with Weak Visual Perception

There are many possible causes for kids’ reading challenges. Sometimes, the kids need to deal with such overwhelming emotions they cannot learn anything, including reading. Other time, the teacher is not teaching how to read properly (yes, you will be surprised how many kids cannot read because their teachers did not teach them how to read properly).

However, some children have reading challenges due to their weak visual ability. This means that their brain is wired so that they are not very good at absorbing and processing visual input. It is important to understand that this is a brain function and has nothing to do with eyesight.

Many parents think that when their kids cannot read, we just need to read with them more, but that is not the case. It is like giving someone who cannot hold a pen different kinds of pens to solve the problem. Yes, reading more brings some benefit, but a weak visual ability requires stimulating the visual perception at a more basic level. Once this is done, reading becomes easier and more natural and no longer frustrates the child.

Strong visual perception is essential for good decoding and memory of symbols. Reading requires mostly visual perception to analyze and memorize, and some auditory support for non-basic words.

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Emotional Freedom: Let Go and Be FREE!

Barbed fence with plant growing outside it

I do not know about you, but once, whenever I thought about freedom, I thought of a prison. I imagined someone trapped in a closed place against his will. It was always a physical place, with bars and darkness, and just thinking of it upset me.

When I started studying how the brain works, my perception changed. I learned that there is another prison – a very secure place that is the hardest to escape. Most of us live in the prison of our own mind, in which we are limited by our way of thinking.

I remember the time that I experienced the loss of my child. I could feel how quickly I was building my own prison and how each thought was adding one more bar and one more lock around me. The hardest realization was that only I could set myself free.

No one in their normal mind wants to be trapped inside their mind. Yet, in some way or another, we all are. This is because we are not in our normal mind. Yes, me too. Do not take this too hard, but Buddhists think we are all delusional, trapped in the prison of our own ego.

Think about it: imprisonment is the absence of freedom. We only desire freedom when we feel that we do not have it. If you feel free, why would you search for freedom? This comparison between what we have and what we lack, followed by the bad feeling we have about it, is a prison in itself.

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Use Your Self-fulfilling Prophecy to Help Your Kids Succeed

What does “self-fulfilling prophecy” have to do with good education and helping your kids succeed? Everything!

To raise our children to be successful, happy, healthy and productive grownups, we need a holistic approach. Yet our society and education system take a different approach. Governments spend billions of dollars every year to establish and run educational institutes where kids learn literacy and numeracy. Children dedicate 13 to 15 years of their life to learning things that will play a small part of their adult life.

Do not get me wrong, I think it is important to learn to read. I am also a qualified math teacher and think math is important. But tell me, out of a week of your life, with 24 hours a day and 60 minutes every hour, how much time do you analyze poems or find square roots of numbers? Do your amazing English and math abilities determine how happy, successful, healthy, friendly and productive you are?

I wish!

Learning depends greatly on the self-fulfilling prophecy of the teacher. Yes, I know, it sounds harsh, but the quality of the learning is highly dependent on what goes on in the teacher’s mind (and in the holistic approach, parents are also teachers). Every time I finish a day of professional development for teachers, the teachers are surprised to discover that what they think of the students manifests itself in the students’ behavior, social interactions and academic achievements.

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