Personal Development, Personal Growth, Self Growth Tag - Page 2 of 58

Family Goal Setting: Set Yourself Up for Success

Family goal setting is very important. If you’ve had a chance to read the post about family goals, you know that for a family to be happy and successful, you need driven parents who give good instructions to their “taxi driver”.

The taxi driver is the “creature” we have in our mind that at any point in time, asks us “where would you like me to take you?” and to do a good job, he needs two sets of coordinates – pickup point and destination – and very clear and specific instructions.

If you’ve answered the tough questions in the previous post, you should now have a better perspective on what you want your family to be like. You are already in better shape than most of the parents in the world.

I can tell you that in my personal research of thousands of parents, most of them didn’t know what they wanted. They were the kind of passengers that tell their driver, “Drive”, without saying where. They say, “I don’t know what to expect. Just take me to where most people go”. This guarantees they will get lost and bump into lots of traffic jams.

This post is part 2 of 6 in the series Family Goals

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Make a List: Judgment of Right from Wrong

Judgment is a very tense concept. We hear many objections to it, like “Do not judge a book by its cover” or “Don’t judge a man until you’ve walked a mile in his shoes”. Still, although judgment is considered negative, we have lots of judgment towards everything that happens around us.

The reason we do is that we need judgment to navigate through life. If you consider judgment as the process of determining right and wrong, then judgment is essential to our survival. This is especially true for social survival.

We must have some kind of judgment towards everything we do in life, because it helps us choose what to do and what to avoid doing. Judgment and decision-making are Siamese twins. They have the same DNA and are inseparable. Making decisions requires us to use judgment to determine which of our choices we consider the best. So, judgment is not bad if we use it to make better choices.

This post is part 43 of 44 in the series Make a List

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Family Goals: Let’s Ask the Tough Questions

Some people think it’s funny to talk about family goals, because they link goals with business and a family is not a business.

That’s true! They are not the same, but what drives them forward is exactly the same. Please note the word “drive”. Imagine that running a family is like driving a car. I can be a beaten car, no fuel, flat tires, squeaking wipers and no lights, or it can be in tip-top shape and race forward with air conditioning, a sound system, brand new tires and bright lights to show the way.

Which car are you driving your family in? What conditions are you creating for relationships to be strong and for the family members to succeed and be happy?

This post is part 1 of 6 in the series Family Goals

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Make a List: 100 Things I Want People to Think of Me

Generally, I think we need to live our life based on our own judgment be developing a sense of self that functions as a moral GPS (or compass), and not by other’s judgment or external rules and beliefs. In life coaching, the task of finding who we are relies on our ability to strip away other’s expectations and what they think of us. Instead, we learn to listen to our inner voice and “redesign” ourselves.

This process of redesigning who we are happens in the context of being part of a society, because connections and relationships form a huge part of our experience. When we “bare ourselves” and take off the “clothes” of what others think of us, the “shoes” of where they think we should go, the “coat” of others’ compliments or criticism, we need to put on new “clothes” that we love and feel comfortable with to warm us through life’s challenges.

Sometimes, looking at ourselves from the outside, can help us see things with fresh eyes.

This post is part 42 of 44 in the series Make a List

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From Sickness to Health: Happy Ending

On the third week of my parents’ visit, after the withdrawal from her pain killer patches, my mom came back to life. When we played “3 things that made me happy today”, she cooperated.

We still avoided long trips, but she was willing to walk in the shopping center for 4 hours to buy some gifts she wanted to take home with her. She also walked with Eden and Ayla around the neighborhood.

When we asked her about sweating at night, it dropped to once a night or none at all and she cooked a lot more, because her arm was stronger. For her, cooking is part of her identity. Not being able to cook made her feel useless. The results of her blood sugar were excellent, and she was in pain, but rated it much lower.

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

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From Sickness to Health: Baby Ayla

When I was studying special education, we used to say that if you hang around kids, it keeps you young. I always believed it was true. Kids are born clean and pure and their energy is only corrupted by the presences of the anxious, angry, frustrated and sad people in their life.

Only later on, I discovered that this is actually done through mirroring. When we hang around other people, we sense what they are feeling and our mind “lights up” in the same way they do.

Babies laugh a lot and trust fully. They love physical touch, enjoy every second and, although they can’t do many things, it never stops them from trying again, and again, and again. There is a lot we can learn from babies.

My mom always loved babies. I first discovered this when my eldest daughter, Eden, was born. I was in the hospital for 10 days and my mom offered to come and stay with us for a week after I got out and help me.

This post is part 10 of 11 in the series From Sickness to Health

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From Sickness to Health: The Placebo Effect

I’m a strong believer in the power of the mind. Recently, I had a chat with a friend, who told me that her mom had died at a relatively young age. She’d had cancer for a while, and then, her doctors told her she had 3 months to live. She died exactly 3 months later. I think that what we believe manifests itself in our life.

For years, I have been using the placebo effect on some of my child coaching clients. I give them “special pills” that make them smart, happy, healthy and friendly (I can only use it on children, because I get consent from their parents, while they don’t know the real deal). The success rate of my placebo treatment is 100%.

Why?

Because when I install in those kids the belief that they are smart, happy, healthy and friendly, they can’t get it out of their system. Their subconscious mind makes it true.

The idea to use the placebo effect on my mother came up after we saw John the Wizard. He said it would take 6-12 months to get the painkillers out of her system and I read somewhere that we needed to go through all the seasons in order for the body to replace all its cells. At first, that freaked me out. My time was limited, and I knew that as soon as she went home, things would be out of my control.

This post is part 9 of 11 in the series From Sickness to Health

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From Sickness to Health: Miserable Discount

My mom was a very hard-working woman all her life. She started working when she was 12 years old. Since she was the oldest sister in a family where girls and women were “service providers”, she was convinced that it was her job to cook, clean and serve the men in her family.

She couldn’t afford to take time off or do things for fun. Everything she did was work. She either worked at home or worked somewhere else to bring money home. There were 9 people in her family. In our family, there we were 7. So, there was never an end to the work.

The only breaks she could ever get were when she was sick!

This post is part 8 of 11 in the series From Sickness to Health

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From Sickness to Health: New Diet and The Drug Dealer

This post is part of a series of blog posts about my mom’s journey from sickness to health. My mom is a 78-year-old woman who was sick and whose doctors could not help her. Everyone was just waiting for her to die. She came over for a visit in Australia for 5 weeks and healed. The posts I share here are the ways we helped her. I hope they will encourage you to never give up, so read the whole series.

It was the third week of my mom’s journey from sickness to health. This time, when I suggested we go to see “John the Wizard” again, my mom was very happy. John was extremely impressed by her choice to stop taking Lyrica “cold turkey”. He said to me in English, which she didn’t understand, it takes months to get people off this medication and the withdrawal symptoms are horrible.

My mom did it in one day!

This post is part 7 of 11 in the series From Sickness to Health

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From Sickness to Health: John the Wizard

In the first week of my parents’ visit, we played a game. Everyone around the table talked about a good memory they had. Martin Seligman, the founder of Positive Psychology, said that if we focus on 3 happy things that happened to us throughout the day, our happiness level will increase.

We decided to do it as a family, so that my mom would be able to focus on good things in her life and learn to appreciate them and be grateful for what she had.

In our family, we play this game a lot in different versions. I also use it with my clients when I notice that their mind is full of fear of the unknown future, or when they only talk about bad things, doom and gloom. It works very well, and it is easy to see how their body language changes from the change of focus.

This post is part 6 of 11 in the series From Sickness to Health

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