Kindness to Yourself: The Secret to Raising Happy, Resilient Kids

Woman holding a red heart decoration for kindness day

Last week was World Kindness Day, and every year, when the date comes around, I can’t help but smile. But I also can’t help thinking, Why only one day? If there’s anything families need right now, it’s more kindness — not just for others, but especially kindness to yourself.

In my coaching work at Be Happy in Life and in the countless conversations I’ve had with parents over the years, this theme keeps coming up again and again. Parents want their kids to be confident, happy, and emotionally strong — but they forget that the journey starts with the emotional environment inside themselves.

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The Art of Relationships

I have been working with children, families and in the education space for over 38 years, and written many articles on many topics related to education, personal development, relationships, families, empowerment, leadership and parenting. This blog alone has over 1,400 original articles that I have written over the years.

During those years, I have been asked many questions about my philosophy and in this series, I wish to bring to you my philosophy about different topics in an interview format. Questions and Answers and today’s topic is “Art of relationship” as I see it.

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Increase Your Confidence Through Kindness

Woman looking at clouds spelling Believe in Yourself

We all want to be confident and raise confident children. In my workshops, when I ask parents to grant their kids four wishes, confidence is high on their list. Confidence is the faith we have that things will happen in a certain way or that we’ll manage whatever happens. It is a sense of satisfaction or happiness about things that happened or about to happen.

Most parents are very surprised when I tell them that kindness is a fantastic way to boost our confidence, so, let me show you what the connection is.

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Success vs. Talent: How I almost made the Olympic team

Some people think that talent is the only thing we need to succeed in life. I thought so too when I was young. I was very talented in gymnastics and I thought that talent was the only thing I needed. It was very hard for me to realize that talent was just a baseline and guaranteed nothing.

I’m all for helping our children find their talent, but finding it, and even pursuing it, is not enough for success. They need something more.

Not long ago, I had the honor of working with two amazing young athletes on the Australian Olympic team. They were both equally talented and had all the physical skills, but one of them had what it takes to succeed, and the other didn’t.

Working with them reminded me of my Olympic team adventure as a child and why talent is not enough for success.

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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.

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Parenting Autistic Children: Catch 22

The previous post in this series told the story of my first encounter with autism at a special school where I did work experience for 6 months. Today, I would like to introduce the problems families face when they notice something wrong in their child’s development. As you will see, the way the system works puts them in a Catch 22 situation.

Bringing a child into the world is a very exciting event in every family’s history. Noticing that something is wrong with a child is not easy to experience. As I’ve said before, mothers of autistic children were blamed in the past for the situation by the claim they did not connect with their child during the first weeks after birth.

Most of those moms sighed in relief when the results of an experiment confirmed that autistic babies were different from “normal” babies.

In the first stage of the research, every mom was given recordings of her baby crying and asked to guess the reason for the crying. Most moms of “normal” babies guessed correctly, while moms of autistic babies didn’t. So, those who advocated for the “let’s blame the mothers” said, “OK, then. That’s our proof”.

But the experiment continued.

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I Want to Become a Life Coach: What You Should Know First

As an experienced life coach, people often contact me and say, “I want to become a life coach. Teach me what to do”. If you are thinking of becoming a professional life coach too, this post is for you.

Life coaching is an uplifting and fulfilling profession. I have been doing this work, in various formats, for 32 years now. I enjoy every minute of it and find it my life’s purpose. I can highly recommend becoming a life coach as a fantastic option for those who want to help others succeed, achieve and be happy.

Why?

Because in coaching, the clients’ success is our success.

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Singing Family Full of Joy

Noff with a microphone and Tsoof on guitar

On my happy list, I wrote, “It makes me happy to listen to my kids singing”. This was true even when they were babies. I remember my youngest daughter Noff joining us in Alicia Keys’ song Fallin’ when she was one year old. She always joined on time and it made us all very happy.

Singing is a very sensitive thing for me. Well, it was very sensitive. Today, when I run workshops or stand in front of a big crowd during my presentations, no one can guess that years ago, when I was young, I sometimes had no voice. Speaking was difficult for me and singing was not even an option.

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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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Leadership, Management and Parenting

My mother-in-law was an experienced teacher and a manager at an adult education institute. Many years ago, when she was still alive, she told me about a management course she was taking that shook her perception of her work. She was very surprised to discover that there were many types of managers.

After her course, we had many discussions about how management, leadership and parenting are very similar in their essence. At that time, I was running my first business, where I was a manager, a leader and a parent. I managed all the aspects of the business and led the educational program, while being a young mother.

I thought about these three roles we play for years and managed to combine them into something that worked really well for my family and me. Hopefully, the ideas below will work well for your family and you too.

Parenting is a management position. For the family “business” or “operation” to run properly, we need to manage time, manage our emotions and those of our family members, manage money, manage habits, manage education, manage health, manage work and manage time off. In fact, all aspects of family life, we even need to manage things we have no control over (yes, it is very frustrating that we cannot control everything).

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