Stop Looking for Certainty and Have Faith

Certainty is a great asset in life. We all seek certainty. Some seek it inside themselves and others seek it externally. Some find it in faith, others in routine. Certainty gives us lots of confidence in the world around us. We use it to mourn the fact we were not born fortunetellers. We do not like the idea that we cannot control the future and this shakes our confidence. If we want confidence, we must lean on some things to will stay stable in our life.

I find certainty an overrated concept. In marriage, for example, people seek signs of certainty that they have chosen the right match.

One of my clients was very upset her boyfriend asked her to sign a prenuptial agreement and did not want to marry. I specifically say, “did not want to marry”, because she said that he did not want to marry her, but he did not want to marry anyone else either. He just did not believe in the institute of marriage.

When we examined this desire for certainty, we realized that if she married him in a flashy, white dress wedding, she had a greater chance of divorcing him. The more we discussed it, the more she realized that the intentions, the desire to work on the relationship and the commitment do not change if they have the same bank account, a white wedding or an expensive honeymoon. All couples start with the right intention and lucky us, they cannot see into the future.

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Biological Parents are Best for Child Safety

When children are born, their parents are typically concerned for their safety. People spend a fortune making sure their children use the safest beds, the safest car seat and safest stroller. This is very natural and very important. For some reason, when the same parents’ relationship breaks down and they separate, the importance of their kids’ physical and emotional safety is often neglected.

Why?

Because once they separate, the decision-making process about the children is divided. Unfortunately, in some cases, parents’ separation means that one parent raises the kids and the other poses a risk to their safety. In other cases, the conflict between the parents puts the kids’ emotional, and sometimes physical, wellbeing at risk. In severe cases, both parents are a risk to their children’s safety and there is a need to remove them from their home completely.

My sister is a social worker in a special unit that takes kids away from their family and puts them in foster care. This always happens because the emotional and/or physical safety of the child is at risk and none of the parents is able to keep them safe. My sister claims that this just moves the kids from one unsafe place to another unsafe place. Unlike Cinderella’s fairy tale, their stories never end in living happily ever after. Instead, stepparents and foster parents struggle greatly to supply a safe environment for the children.

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There is Life after Relationship Breakup

Woman punching man in anger with boxing glove

Relationships are at the heart of human society. Some say that being in a relationship is a basic need. In the bible, even the animals in Noah’s ark were in pairs. I think we are meant to be in relationships. Having a partner to share our life and be with us along the way gives lots of certainty in life. Together we share love, friendship, adventures, struggles, finance and children, and together, it is always easier and more fun. Unfortunately, sometimes, it just does not work. In fact, in our society today, relationship breakup comes more often than not and with it comes pain, grief and loss of hope.

I work with many couples through relationship breakups and with individuals rebuilding their life after breaking up with a partner, and I can reassure you, there is life after a relationship breakup. Usually, couples feel a hole in their heart that they wish to fill up. The desire to fill this hole drives them quickly into a new relationship that looks exactly like the one they left in pain.

Why?

Because the separation originated from a hole inside of them, which they thought the other did not fill, and they enter the new relationship with the same mindset. After a short time of excitement and attention, they realize that the new partner, lover or boyfriend/girlfriend cannot fulfill their needs and they go through the same breakup with more pain, more grief and more loss.

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How to Encourage: Ronit’s List of Compliments

Drawing of hand with the words You Are Beautiful

Since I wrote the first chapter of the compliments series, I have received some requests from readers to give them some ideas about compliments, so I thought it may be a good exercise to make a list of 100 compliments we can give others that will cover different areas of life.

By limiting myself to phrases that only focus on the other person and not on myself (because complimenting is giving, not taking credit and focusing on yourself), I got to 182.

Here’s my list of compliments. I suggest that you mark the compliments you find useful, change them to suit your needs and keep them somewhere handy. Then, refer to the examples when you need a compliment idea.

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How to Accept Compliments with Grace

As I said in Compliments: Give to Receive, most people don’t receive many compliments, because they don’t give many compliments to others, and this is caused by not feeling good about themselves. I hope everyone started the compliment challenge and that you already see the impact on your own confidence and sense of wellbeing.

Not feeling good about yourself also makes you feel uncomfortable when someone else gives you a compliment. As you might expect, an awkward response to a compliment will discourage the other person from giving you any more compliments.

In this post, you will learn how to accept compliments with grace.

Some people are not used to compliments, so they are shocked when someone says something good about them. Most people say something that reduces the compliment, like “It was nothing”, “You should have seen me do it last time” or “This time was not that good”, which is just like getting a gift from someone and saying, “Sorry, I can’t accept your gift, because I don’t deserve it”…

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Compliments: Give to Receive

Giving and receiving compliments are very important communication skills that boost our self-confidence and the confidence of the people around us. We grow up in a society that struggles with giving and receiving compliments. People are stingy at the giving end and uncomfortable at the receiving end.

What many people don’t realize is that complimenting others is a projection of a trait, skill or beauty that we see in ourselves. It is a gift of kindness that when we give, we also receive.

Recently, I ran leadership training with a group of high school students and we talked about compliments. It took us 10 hours to change the lives of all those students and increase their self-confidence ratings by 20% to 50%. Yes, in just 10 hours of a very busy training day, we change their attitude towards themselves and other people.

One of the leaders came to me in the evening, after the session with the parents, to say “Thank you”. She said that the part about compliments was very meaningful for her. She felt that it was a shame they didn’t teach communication skills in primary school and that it was important to give compliments to others, and even more important to accept compliments. On the ride home, I thought about it and realized I had never written about compliments in my blog, so I thanked this girl for bringing it to my attention.

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Live Life with No Regrets

Regrets are a heavy burden we carry with us throughout our life. They are punishments we give ourselves for thinking about something we have done, or not done, that we wish we could have done differently.

I remember my mom warning me “you’re going to regret this”. She said it because she had no other ways to convince me to do things her way.

Regrets are very funny, because we can only have them after we experience something. The reason I say they are funny is that if I was a fortuneteller and could predict the outcome, I would have done things differently anyway. So regrets can only happen in hindsight which is always 20/20.

13 common regrets we can all do without

If you want to know what most people regret, just to prepare yourself and try to rethink things before you do them, here is a list of the most common regrets. Try to avoid them as much as you can (if you can).

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Emergency Relationship Coaching Essentials

I have seen many couples who are in pain in their relationship. Many of them come for relationship coaching when they can no longer stand the pain. I have been in a relationship with my boyfriend/partner/father-of-my-children for 35 years and I have learned over time that couples can love each other very much but still be in this pain.

It is easy to take each other or the relationship for granted. The investment of energy we put into the beginning of this relationship (the chase) cannot continue with the same passion and effort forever, so we all ease the pressure of the hunt, which is natural and more sustainable, and sometimes we ease it too much.

The good news is that getting help is much better than not. Every year, I have more couples coming for relationship coaching. Every year, we hear about another couple we knew from our travels around the world who separated or divorced. Every year, our kids tell us about more friends whose parents divorced, and every year, another couple from our community is in some crisis and considering divorce.

Those people didn’t get help. At least not on time to sale their marriage. Do you know the phrase “seek and you shall find”? If they asked for help, they would have found it.

Those who did come for relationship coaching look for help because they still love each other and want their marriage to work. When both of them come with the desire to make their marriage work, it will work. Why? Because whether you think you can or think you can’t, you are always right, and they think they can.

Many of them search for quick fix and want to leave the session feeling fully in-love and without hurts and hard feelings, which never happens in the first session, though they leave with big hope because I give them emergency tools to manage the communication while allowing the pain to dissolve.

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100 Tips for My Children

Over 26 years of being a parent, I have made a huge effort to give my kids the rules of life that, in my belief, will set them up for a better life. Every parent wants to raise happy, healthy, successful, kind, smart, courageous, creative, friendly and wealthy children that have lots of love and happiness in their life.

I say that parenting is a sales job. If you sell your life philosophy to your kids well, you have great relationships with them and you know they will do well. If you are not a good sales person (even if your philosophy works well for you), you will face lots of conflict and frustration.

Years ago, I started writing a series called Things I want my kids to know. I think I want my kids to know everything I have written in this blog, but this series is a good summary. In this post, I would like to give my kids 100 tips from my bag of tips for a happy, healthy, successful and loving life.

I encourage you to make your own list of 100 pieces of advice you want to share with your kids, so that one day, when they ask themselves what you wanted for them, they will have it in writing.

Remember that giving advice is something you give from your own free will, with the full intention of doing good. It is your child’s choice whether to take your advice or not. We give! They need to choose to take. If they don’t take our advice, it may be because they are not in a good relationship with us and there is a distrust. It may be because they are not ready, you haven’t presented it well, you are not a good role model for what you suggest, or their life circumstances are different from yours and they can’t see how they can apply your advice to their life.

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Stop Making More Money

Pay attention written in dollar note pattern

Liam was a very handsome man. When he entered my life coaching deck, I didn’t believe he was almost 40 years old. He looked 25 and I wondered what kind of woman would leave such a great-looking guy. On his client details form, he wrote that he had two boys and that his wife had left home suddenly and took the boys with her.

If he was the first man who came to coaching because his wife had left all of a sudden, I would have thought that something was wrong with his wife. Who on Earth leaves home all of a sudden? With two boys? After 12 years of marriage? But Liam was not the first and, unfortunately, will not be the last man whose wife left all of a sudden.

During the initial assessment of his life, he told a story of a great love, two well established professionals, parenting maturely, living in their own house and even owning an investment property. Their life was the ultimate picture of a perfect marriage.

“When did the relationship start shaking?” I asked Liam, trying to find the most reasonable explanation for “all of a sudden”. He said that it had started when his youngest daughter was born, about 4 years earlier, and then he told me the typical story of a marriage that brings wives to leave “all of a sudden”.

He worked until 8 or 9pm some days. He worked on weekends. His main goal was to make more money. For every problem he had at home, his solution was making more money. When his wife wanted him to take a day off and spend time with the family, his mind went straight to “If I made enough money, I wouldn’t have to go to work so many hours and then I could be with my family”.

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