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Posts tagged 'positive'

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.

Read Emotional Freedom: Let Go and Be FREE! »

Published: August 11, 2016 by Ronit Baras
Last modified: December 26, 2019In: Personal Development Tags: depression, expectation, how to, negative, beliefs, control, change, happiness, perception, positive, responsibility, personal development / personal growth / personality development / self improvement, emotional intelligence, freedom

Parenting Focus: Point Your Flashlight and Magnifier at Good Things

Flashlight

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”.

Read Parenting Focus: Point Your Flashlight and Magnifier at Good Things »

Published: June 23, 2016 by Ronit Baras
Last modified: July 18, 2020In: Parenting, Personal Development Tags: happiness, law of attraction, positive, attitude, acceptance / judgment / tolerance, self confidence / self esteem / self worth, focus, emotional development, success, practical parenting / parents, emotional intelligence, how to, identity

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

Read How to Have a Good Day Everyday »

Published: May 3, 2016 by Ronit Baras
Last modified: August 13, 2020In: Parenting, Personal Development Tags: how to, personal development / personal growth / personality development / self improvement, kids coaching, feeling, change, practical parenting / parents, happiness, Life Coaching, neurolinguistic programmiing / NLP, hope, memory, focus, positive attitude tips, success, positive, emotional intelligence

Gratitude: The Happiness Attitude

When we focus on our gratitude, the tide of disappointment goes out and the tide of love rushes in - Kristin Armstrong

Over years of learning about happiness and success, emotional stamina and wellbeing, I realized that gratitude is the best antidote for frustration. Frustration is a feeling, a thought. If we change the thought to gratitude, we will no longer feel any pain.

Life is full of challenges as we grow and become more aware of our surrounding. We are born into total dependency and we learn from our parents and other adults around us how to be frustrated when our desires are not fulfilled. This brings us lots of heartache and suffering.

The way we react to frustrations in life as kids is the way we will react to frustrations in life as grownups. We also pass this way of reacting to our children and the cycle never ends. If our reaction to frustration is positive and empowered, we hope the cycle will continue, but if our reaction to frustration is painful, we must stop the cycle NOW!

This week, I had a chat to my 14-year-old daughter Noff. We talked about her being very frustrated about an upcoming school assembly, which she hated. I told her about Pollyanna, the girl who inspired me to be a positive person and change my life from frustration to success. I asked her, “What is good about the assembly tomorrow?” She answered straight away, “It’s the last assembly of the year and there are no classes during assembly”. This made her feel better.

You see, there is something good in everything, even if it seems all bad at first glance.

Read Gratitude: The Happiness Attitude »

Published: April 14, 2016 by Ronit Baras
Last modified: April 14, 2016In: Personal Development Tags: positive attitude tips, positive, attitude, focus, personal development / personal growth / personality development / self improvement, gratitude, feeling, success, frustration, emotional intelligence, how to, choice, change, happiness

Make a List: Ronit’s Gratitude Examples List

Indian woman showing gratitude

So now you know about why it’s important to be grateful and how you can get yourself into a state of gratitude with not much effort and in a very short time. You just need to make a list of 100 things you are grateful for.

Many of my clients say this is not an easy exercise. They can think of 10 or 20 things, but not a 100. So I give them examples of my own gratitude. Usually, when I start sharing my gratitude list with my clients, they say, “Oh, yeah, I’m grateful for this too”.

I truly believe that all people have lots of things to be grateful for and if they struggle to find these things, it is only because they haven’t practiced doing it and maybe they need ideas.

This post is part 38 of 49 in the series Make a List

Read Make a List: Ronit’s Gratitude Examples List »

Published: February 18, 2016 by Ronit Baras
Last modified: May 27, 2024In: Personal Development Tags: emotional intelligence, personal development / personal growth / personality development / self improvement, depression, how to, beliefs, research, change, happiness, perception, focus, positive, gratitude, attitude, success

Things to Be Grateful for

it's not happiness that brings us gratitude. It's gratitude that brings us happiness.

In our ever more stressful world, it can be challenging to find things to be grateful for if you don’t know where/how to look. I hope this post will help.

In the last chapters of the make a list series, I covered many topics that can bring awareness, happiness and success for people. I already know many who have tried making those lists and have made a huge change in their lives.

One major aspect of success in life is gratitude. If you want to learn from happy, successful people, it is a good idea to imitate their beliefs, thoughts and mindset, and when asked about their success and happiness, successful people have gratitude as part of their life.

It is always amazing for me to hear successful people saying, “I am lucky”, “I am fortunate”, “I am so grateful”. Those people, who worked hard (and long) for their successes, never forget to appreciate the things they have. The difference between them and unsuccessful people is that they never take what they have or what they achieve for granted.

This post is part 37 of 49 in the series Make a List

Read Things to Be Grateful for »

Published: February 9, 2016 by Ronit Baras
Last modified: January 24, 2023In: Personal Development Tags: change, happiness, perception, focus, positive, gratitude, attitude, success, emotional intelligence, personal development / personal growth / personality development / self improvement, depression, how to, beliefs, research

Be Positive! Why? Because you worth it!

Think Do Be Positive written on a blackboard

In recent years, we hear about being positive as a major aspect of happiness and success. Most people want to be positive, but don’t know how. When I talk to people about being positive, they say that they learned at school how to read and how to do basic math, they learned how to ride a bike and help at home, but no one ever taught them how to be positive. Therefore, it is one thing to understand why it is important to be positive, but another thing to actually be positive.

This is why I tell people that I should call my program Happy Being instead of Be Happy, because first we need to understand that happiness is important and then we need to learn how to be happy – how to make it a state of being.

Research done in North Carolina by psychologist Barbara Fredrickson has found out that being positive is important not only for our immediate success but also for long-term happiness.

Lions and snakes

When we have negative thoughts, we activate the primitive brain. Over there, all we see are lions and snakes that are a threat. Our body goes into a “fight or flight” mode and shuts all other thinking mechanisms in order to focus on the threat in front of us. Thinking, analyzing, evaluating, prioritizing, connecting, thinking creatively and considering efficiency are all luxuries that the brain is unable to do while under threat.

Happiness does not reside in the primitive brain, so it is important to notice when you go there. If you are scared, angry, aggressive, withdrawn, anxious, worried or upset, you are in the primitive brain. Your body has taken over your mind and you are out of control.

Take a deep breath! Try to think of something good and happy. Go to a happy place in your imagination. You need to convince your brain that what is happening to you is not a real lion and not a real snake. Only after you do that, you can change your emotional state and start thinking clearly.

Read Be Positive! Why? Because you worth it! »

Published: November 17, 2015 by Ronit Baras
Last modified: November 18, 2015In: Personal Development Tags: how to, forgiveness, negative, failure, beliefs, research, wisdom, change, happiness, gratitude, positive, success, attitude, meditation, education / learning

How to Calm Anxiety: 25 Easy Tips

When we fill out thoughts with right things, the wrong ones have no room to enter - Joyce Meyer

In What is Anxiety, I explained the process of creating anxiety. Today, I want to start describing how to calm anxiety with simple, everyday tips anybody can do.

It is important to remember that Anxiety is a thinking process that we do in the present of imagining a negative future. Anxiety is the modern evolution of the “fight or flight” response. We are not certain about the future and we predict a horrible one. Most of us are very bad fortunetellers, but still most people try fortunetelling in hope that the future will somehow change from being scary to being great, if only in our mind.

It won’t, unless we change the way we go through that process, and actively, with intention, change it!

In this post and the next, I will share with you 59 tips on how to calm anxiety. Each of those tips can do the trick for short time and if you continue doing them, they will become a habit. All you need are 2-3 tips that you feel conferrable with and alternate them.

Some of the tips are very much applicable to children, so teach your kids to develop strategies to manage and calm their anxiety as soon as possible. Research shows that kids as young as 3 years old already experience anxiety, and if they live in a very anxious house, they will master anxiety very early in life.

In schools, we see many anxious kids and this can be very exhausting for the body. Think of your body in “fight or flight” mode 30 to 40 times a day. An anxious child becomes so sensitive that every word said around them becomes a lion or a snake. The road from here to developing full-blown anxiety disorder is not too long.

This post is part 2 of 3 in the series How to Deal with Anxiety

Read How to Calm Anxiety: 25 Easy Tips »

Published: October 1, 2015 by Ronit Baras
Last modified: October 6, 2015In: Health / Wellbeing, Personal Development Tags: tips, focus, research, health / wellbeing, responsibility, personal development / personal growth / personality development / self improvement, success, control, feeling, emotional intelligence, mind, thought, depression, change, practical parenting / parents, anxiety, motivation, role model, hope, fear, perception, negative, positive, failure, questions, action

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.

This post is part 1 of 3 in the series How to Deal with Anxiety

Read How to Deal with Anxiety: What is Anxiety? »

Published: September 17, 2015 by Ronit Baras
Last modified: September 17, 2015In: Personal Development, Health / Wellbeing Tags: perception, fear, positive, failure, questions, action, tips, research, health / wellbeing, focus, personal development / personal growth / personality development / self improvement, responsibility, control, feeling, success, mind, thought, emotional intelligence, change, practical parenting / parents, depression, motivation, anxiety, hope, role model

The Placebo Effect: How to Treat Your Kids for Free

A jar of pills and a sign for placebo

“Using the placebo effect on kids is an effective technique to help them go through tough periods in their lives.”

This may seem like a bold statement, but when I learned about the placebo effect during my special education studies, I realized that the placebo effect activates the natural “pharmacy” we have in our bodies. When we believe something to be true, we make it true. It works the same when we take a physical tablet and when when we take an emotional tablet.

The more I explain what life coaching and emotional intelligence are, the more I realize how important the placebo effect is for my work. Most of my work is to plant positive ideas and beliefs in the minds of my clients. Once they hold on to those beliefs or ideas, I have done my job in setting them up for a better future.

The placebo effect works in the same way. You can plant an idea in your kids’ mind that they can do something, be healthy or be smart by giving them a sugar pill and telling them it will help them do or be what they want.

Actually, the placebo effect works for kids even when you apply it to their parents by convincing them that their kids are amazing and talented, because your pill will help them…

Read The Placebo Effect: How to Treat Your Kids for Free »

Published: September 15, 2015 by Ronit Baras
Last modified: March 2, 2020In: Parenting, Health / Wellbeing, Emotional Intelligence, Life Coaching Tags: research, personal development / personal growth / personality development / self improvement, guilt, focus, change, practical parenting / parents, special education, Life Coaching, school, aggressive, skills, story, success, assessment, emotional intelligence, positive, meditation, attitude, kids / children, beliefs, health / wellbeing

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