Renew Your Mental Energy

I visited my parents and discovered the house where they had raised 4 kids was now too small for only 2 people, because it was full of boxes, blankets, appliances and clothes that could dress a whole battalion.

When I opened the fridge, I was shocked. In the packed mess of boxes and jars, only my mom knew what was in the depths of her fridge. They are only 2 people, but they still buy and cook for 7. You see, my parents’ house was so full of things they had been collecting and holding on to for years, those things did not allow anything new to enter their life anymore. They had blocked themselves.

As we approach the end of the year and it is time to have the “closing ceremony” and review what we have achieved, I found out during my visit that there was a neglected section in this whole New Year celebration and that was creating space for the New Year to enter.

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Rich Parent, Poor Parent

In many areas of life, we relive the same pattern over and over again, but we do not notice it. Just like riding a bike (the ultimate cliché about automatic habits), we pedal on, completely oblivious to each up and down movement.

Sometimes, circumstances make us take note of our patterns and we start thinking about them. Rarely, we change those ingrained ways of behavior and our life changes as a result, hopefully for the better.

Anthony Robbins compares human beings to thermostats. He says every person has a sense of where they feel comfortable and does many things subconsciously to stay in that place. Sure, everyone knows what would be better, but too good is also uncomfortable, because it does not fit our sense of identity and self worth.

So each of us lives within a certain range of “temperatures”. When it gets to “cold”, we take some action to “warm up”. When it gets to “hot”, we procrastinate for a while and even sabotage our previous efforts, until it is “nice and cozy” again.

One particular area in which this happens to us is our finances.

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Inspiring Kids

My daughter Noff (the youngest girl in the photo) is a very inspiring kid, especially since growing up in a house with two very talented siblings is not easy.

This is the story of how Noff composed her first piece of music at the age of 8, with very little knowledge and a lot of ingenuity, and how she continually uses her older brother and sister not as competition but as inspiration to stretch herself and do the best she can in every area.

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Winners and Losers

I like to walk around our beautiful neighborhood in the morning. It is one of the things that make me happy. I do it to warm up my body and mind, get my creative juices flowing (into the voice recorder on my mobile phone) and be ready for another great day.

About half way through my walk, when I was already going at a good pace and feeling pretty pumped, I saw a young Chinese woman leaving one of the houses and saying goodbye to a young man standing on the doorstep.

Suddenly, the young woman noticed a bus at a stop about 200 meters away. She became visibly uptight, her pitch rose and she looked like she was asking the young man what to do (as I do not speak Chinese, this is all my interpretation).

The man gestured towards the bus and looked like he was urging the woman to run for it and try to catch it. She kept pleading with him until he joined her and they started running toward the bus stop.

By the time they decided to run and crossed the street, I had been half way to the bus and it was still there. There were no passengers in sight, its doors were closed and it kept waiting.

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"F" Words

Now that my birthday is approaching, I wish to bless myself and all my readers with many “F” words.

Yes, I know many people feel offended by being blessed with the “F” word, but I think it is actually Fun.

As a parent, you probably think many times about kids’ manners. For some reason, there is too much attention (in my opinion) to kids using swear words. You see, saying the word “F” has become a rude word. It is not the word that is offensive (what can be offensive about the letter “F”?). It is the meaning people give it.

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I See Good People (and you can too)

In our time, pressure seems to be everywhere. There is a wealth of information like never before, which means we could find out about anything we wanted, only this takes time, so we look for “drip feeds” that will give us up-to-the-minute updates and we assume our sources do a reasonable job at finding and telling things as they are.

Reality is a bit different, unfortunately. Most of our information feeds are controlled by a fairly small group of huge profit-driven conglomerates, which make their money by selling. To sell well, they need people to “see red”, so they inspire fear via TV news broadcasts, bold newspaper headlines and various other methods.

The result of this is the general view that violent crime is everywhere, that different people cannot live together in harmony and that all too often, the only way to sort things out is to wage war on another ethnic group or country, even at the cost of “friendly” life.

So what can you do?

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Make a list: Expectations

I always say life depends on what we focus on. Our expectations are a way of focusing on what we would like the future to hold for us, which means our life depends on them.

Expectations can motivate you or hurt you and only we can determine what they will do to us. Here is it how this works.

We all have expectations, because we rely on them to make life more predictable and therefore safer and less stressful. We learn from past experiences and predict how thing will turn out.

A person without expectations is like one with very short-term memory, because he or she cannot remember how things will turn out and must re-learn life’s lessons over and over again.

When I ask my daughter for her name, I expect her to tell me the name I gave her when she was born. Every day, I get up in the morning, I expect the sun to be there (sometimes it is hidden behind the clouds, but it is still there). I expect my sister to call me on my birthday and say “Happy birthday”.

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Big Picture Kids

Every parent would like to give their kids abilities that will stick with them and make their life easy, happy and successful in every area.

One good and easy way of doing this is to raise kids who look at the big picture, because it increases their emotional intelligence and, as a result, their happiness and success in everything they do.

Kids who are able to see beyond local and immediate circumstances (“right here, right now and only me”) can handle and prevent difficulties more easily and it only takes practice to teach kids this mindset. Seeing the big picture means being able to detach and look beyond what is happening right here, right now into other places and other times that are being affected. It is very much like being in a helicopter (hence the term “helicopter view”, as opposed to “tunnel vision”).

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Get in Trouble

I do not know if this phrase is used a lot where you live, but in several places where we have lived, kids often say they are afraid to “get in trouble”. They typically use this expression in relation to their teacher, principal or some other adult who is responsible for them.

For example, we are on our way to school and Tsoof remembers he has forgotten part of his rehearsal uniform or some school play accessory. He stresses over it in the car and says, “[Word snipped]! Now I’m going to get in trouble”.

Embarrassing as this may be, I find this type of statement very annoying and frustrating. To me, doing (or not doing) something to avoid “getting in trouble” reflects negative external motivation. Not just negative, not just external, both!

And this is precisely the opposite of how I want my kids to be motivated, which means that some other adult in my kids’ life has managed to ruin my hard work (OK, Ronit helps too) and cause my little darlings to be motivated by some external threat. How dare they?!

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Make a list: Ways to be kind

In 1991, Allan Luks (former executive director of The Institute for the Advancement of Health and executive director of the Big Brothers and Big Sisters program in New York City) documented a study about kindness in a book called “The healing power of doing good: The health and spiritual benefits of helping others”.

In a survey he conducted among 3,000 people of all ages from 20 organizations around the USA, he found clearly that “Helping contributes to the maintenance of good health and it can diminish the effect of diseases and disorders both serious and minor, psychological and physical”. So there you have it – if you want to be happy and healthy, help others!

In his research, Luks found that helping others and being kind resulted in a sharp reduction of stress and increased the release of endorphins (the body’s natural feel-good drugs). Over 90% of participants in his research reported that regular volunteering lowered their stress level and contributed to their health and wellbeing.

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