Make a List: Self-Kindness

I have written a lot about kindness. I think that it makes the world go around and I like to think about it as a ripple. One act of kindness ripples and touches the lives of those who are far away from us.

The movie Pay it Forward showed the power of kindness in making the world a better place. I remember at the age of 16, I was a school captain and we had a teacher, named Reuben, who helped us a lot to change the lives of the students in our school. One day, a girl in the group asked him why he was dedicating so much time to us. He said, “If I make a difference in the lives of six of you, and each of you makes a difference in the lives of six other people, eventually, this world will be a better place”. I was 16 years old and this gave me a perfect understanding of the ripple effect of kindness.

For the last 32 years, I have been teaching emotional intelligence and kindness. used to be the part in EQ that we relate to others. In the last 10 years, it has changed for me as I became the state director of a not-for-profit organization, called “Together for Humanity”, which delivers diversity education.

Why?

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The Power of Complimenting: Don’t Be Stingy

Some parents are stingy with complimenting. I do not blame them. They probably grew up with stingy parents, who probably grew up with parents that did not compliment them either. I have said many times that we suffer today for things our ancestors did, which have not evolved.

Wake up, parents! We do not need to do the same things our great-great-grandparents did, because in some areas of life, they were not great at all. Giving compliments was definitely one of these areas.

The belief “back then” was that compliments got in the way of “building character”. I have clients and friends who say it aloud, “If you compliment people, especially children, they become complacent”.

What?!

Since when is complacent a bad word, anyway?

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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.

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Mental Pain Shouldn’t Kill You. It Can Make You Stronger

The word depression projected onto a sad man's face

I have written before about emotional pain as a reaction to a perceived threat and our body’s way of telling us that something is wrong. Mental pain is not the enemy. It is the messenger. And it is very important not to kill it.

Many people will tell you that when you come out of the other side of pain, you feel stronger. I have learned the hard way that the fear of pain takes more energy than the pain itself. Worry is an example of it. When we worry, we experience mental pain from something negative we have imagined in our head. Yes, all in our head.

There are many techniques to turn mental pain into psychological strength and the more you use them, the less you feel the pain. I have gathered some of them here to share with you. All of them are proven and practical. I use them with my clients.

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Assertiveness: Successful Communication Summary

Middle-aged woman in a suit looking assertive

You can learn assertiveness skills at any stage of life and you can always improve them and gain more respect for yourself and others. In this post, I have gathered all of my assertiveness tips in one big list. I hope this summary will be useful for you and for your children and students.

If we create a society full of assertive people, we will not have conflicts and we will live with each other with respect, so pass this along to everyone you know.

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Assertiveness: Know Your Rights

Assertive woman writing "I'll do it My Way"

So far, I have covered things that affect our ability to be assertive. This post adds some tips on how to know your rights, keep them and be assertive about them. I hope they will help you on your quest to develop your emotional intelligence and communicate with assertiveness.

When you are assertive, you express yourself with confidence without hurting others. You are firm, not a bully. You are clear, not manipulative. You are honest, not aggressive. Healthy communication is based on honesty, clarity and confidence.

First, you have to know your rights in every communication. It takes two to tango and when one has more rights than the other does, this will not be an assertive relationship. I suggest teaching kids these rights too and giving them opportunities to practice them.

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Assertiveness: Live by Your Own Standards

Faceless woman with a sign showing arrows pointing at the word CONFIDENCE

Assertiveness is a helpful skill in life, yet most people do not have it. They do not have it because they could not learn it at home or from anyone else except professionals. You see, the people who teach assertiveness must be very confident and not afraid that you might use assertiveness with them, and these people are hard to find.

Am I assertive all the time? No, not really. Sometimes, I choose avoidance or aggression, and every time I use them, I feel uncomfortable. They either hurt me or others, which is not very good. Still, I aim to use assertiveness in my communication with others and most of the time, I do.

Assertiveness requires confidence to express your own thoughts and feeling without fear and without the need, desire or intention to hurt anyone else. It is important to distinguish between having the intention to hurt and actually hurting someone else.

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The Optimistic Creed

Everybody in the world wants happiness. Ask around and you will see. Being optimistic is a way to reach happiness and if you want to go this way, you must first believe that it will take you to where you want to go.

When we talk happiness at my workshops, many people highlight the obstacles to happiness. They share stories of heartache, disappointment, frustration, failure and pain. For them, you can only be in a state of happiness when everything in life functions at a 100%. When I ask them, “What makes you happy?” they mostly list what needs not to happen, which shows a focus on the past and on avoiding pain.

When I draw their attention to this focus, they make a list of what needs to happen for them to be happy. This is better, but we quickly discover that one painful thing is enough for them to feel unhappy, but to feel happy, they need the whole list to happen at the same time. This way, they make sure that unhappiness is easy to reach and happiness is really hard.

When my clients understand that this is a problem, they usually ask, “Ronit, how do we change the formula?” and one of the best ways to do it is by practicing optimism.

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Assertiveness: Things You Should Keep to Yourself

Keeping things to yourself does not mean keeping them a secret. Assertiveness comes from confidence, while secrets come from fear. Sharing is expressing yourself confidently without reservation and without any pressure to convince others or justify your own thoughts and beliefs.

Here is a list of things you can keep to yourself or share selectively. If you are confident about them, you do not need validation, approval or to have the majority with you to hold them. If you want someone’s opinion, ask. If someone asks for your opinion, respect their choice not to accept it or to do whatever they want with it. If they disagree, do not like it or do not want to use it, it should not create any doubt in you. Some things are yours to keep and you can share them, but never with pressure. Pressure is not assertiveness.

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Happy Friendship Anniversary

This week, Gal and I celebrated 36 years of being together. We have known each other for 37 years, been a couple for 36, lived together for 31 and been married for 29 years. Every year, we celebrate our friendship anniversary instead of our wedding anniversary, because our wedding experience was not a very happy experience and we would really like to celebrate a happy thing in our life rather than an event we never liked.

I have a relationship philosophy that worked very well for me over the years. I am happy that my philosophy, together with Gal’s, brought us together to this anniversary. We still fight. We still disagree on things. We are very different in many ways, but we are still friends who love each other and care about each other greatly.

In my sessions, I share with my clients my formula for happy relationships. After each session, I send them a summary of the topics we covered, so they can reflect and work on their relationship. I have decided to include them here with the hope that many more people will use them to reach happy, supportive and loving relationships.

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