What Others Think about You Is … None of Your Business

Man covering his face with a mask showing words like meaning, persona, memory, conditioning, etc

When I was young, if someone asked me to complete the sentence “What others think about you is …” I would have said, “the most important thing in life”. I thought that, because of how I grew up. My mom, who is over 75 years old now, still thinks that we live to impress other people and navigate our life based on what they think about us.

When I studied Education, I realized that most parents in the world teach this to their kids. At first, they say, “Whatever your parents think about you is the most important thing in life”. Later on, they say, “What your teachers think about you is also important”.

They are all very surprised when their kids become teenagers and transfer this to their peers and add, “Whatever your friends think about you is the most important thing in the world”.

It is a natural progression. If you practice worrying and navigate your life based on what others think about you, you become good at … worrying and navigating your life based on what others think about you.

Simple!

When you follow this path, you never learn who you are and how to navigate life based on what you think of yourself.

Read What Others Think about You Is … None of Your Business »

Emotional Intelligence Helps Raise Stress-Free Kids

We would all love to have stress-free kids, but we don’t. In fact, most parents today are stressed about their children’s stress level, which is a Catch 22.

My philosophy is that what we feel as parents is projected onto our children through very sophisticated neural mirroring functions that we all have. So stressed parents raise stressed kids, and when kids are feeling anxious or stressed, we feel even more stressed. This is a never-ending vicious cycle.

I think high emotional intelligence is the cure for stress and parents need to focus on increasing their own emotional intelligence and that of their children.

You are probably asking yourself, “What is the connection between emotional intelligence and stress-free kids?”

High emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize our own feelings and manage them. So if our children recognize our stress, they can learn ways to deal with this situation and can grow up without taking our feelings on themselves.

As hard as it is to admit, our children are stressed due to their relationships, schooling, academic achievements, digital connections, peer pressure and intense exposure to the media. This is part of their everyday life, and as their parents, we need to seek alternative ways to medication in order to switch this pressure off.

Read Emotional Intelligence Helps Raise Stress-Free Kids »

3 Emotional Painkillers

Man holding his face in his hands in pain

In Holistic Approach to Emotional Pain, I explained why pain is not a punishment and we do not need to fight it. I also explained how the use of physical or emotional “substances” only makes us feel the pain longer and disrupts the function of the natural pharmacy we have in our body, which is in charge of flooding our system with “painkillers”.

In this post, I will share 3 “emotional painkillers” that will make pain go away faster.

1. The Rating Technique

The first emotional painkiller is used frequently by nurses and doctors. When you are in a hospital, before giving you your painkillers, the nurse will ask you to rate your pain from 1 to 10 and use this as a guide to determine your dosage.

This makes you develop an awareness of your feeling. If you say that the pain is a 9, the nurse will give you more painkillers and you will feel a bigger relief from them. If you say the pain is 3, the nurse may ask if you can wait a little longer and give you nothing for an hour.

Read 3 Emotional Painkillers »

How to Simplify Your Life and Reduce Stress and Overwhelm

Sign saying Good morning, let the stress begin

Life seems to be stressful and overwhelming to most people. The more we are on “automatic pilot”, the more we feel out of control. When people are stressed, they think life is very complicated, so it is easy to see that simplifying life can reduce stress and overwhelm.

All around the world, stress is increasing. It affects mental and physical health, with severe challenges to cognitive abilities, behavior, sleep, academic achievement and health. Some say it is the number one cause of illness and death in our society. Unfortunately, the magnitude of stress is increasing as our lifestyle is not simple and more and more children are affected by it, directly or indirectly.

The Catch 22 of stress

The Australian Psychological Society 2014 Stress & Wellbeing Survey found that the main causes of stress are finances, health, family, the desire to be healthy and the health of loved ones. You can see the results in this infographic, which shows how the Australian society reacts to stress.

When you see the causes of stress, you can realize how we create a loop, a Catch 22, in our mind, which leads to stress. For example, financial problems causes stress and stress causes more financial problems. It is a never-ending cycle, which we must stop.

Read How to Simplify Your Life and Reduce Stress and Overwhelm »

Holistic Approach to Emotional Pain

Unfortunately, I have had a lot of pain in my life. Sometimes, it was physical pain and others times it was emotional pain. I know how pain feels, sounds, looks and what it does to my ability to think.

I think every person in the world experiences pain. In fact, everything that doesn’t happen the way we expect, causes us pain, and we can separate the pain by intensity or level of importance.

Many people separate physical and emotional pain. I strongly believe they work the same way in our mind.

I am not a medical doctor, more of a “heart” or “mind” doctor, and I mainly work with my clients on emotional pain. In my work as a happiness coach, I take clients through a process that uses their happiness as a tool to overcome their emotional pain. I tell all of them that it does not mean they will have no pain in their lives, but we will make sure that in the competition between pain and pleasure, pleasure will win.

First, it is important to remember that pain is an emotion that is important for us. Together with happiness and satisfaction, pain functions as guide, like a compass or GPS. When we feel great, this tells us, “Keep moving in the direction you are now”. And when we feel pain, this tells us, “Recalculating … please make a u-turn at the nearest available point”.

Read Holistic Approach to Emotional Pain »

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.

This post is part 7 of 7 in the series Things I Want My Kids to Know

Read 100 Tips for My Children »

Kids under Stress: How to Deal with Stress the Easy Way

In Kids under Stress: Diagnose Stress Symptoms without Psychiatrists, I covered easy ways to diagnose symptoms of stress in children, without having to go to psychiatrists that are very likely give your child medication that might prevent them from developing coping mechanisms and might damage them for life.

Once you have confirmed the stress, you will want to know how to deal with stress and start helping your child. So here is a list of easy solutions you can use at home to help your child cope. No Psychiatrists. No Medication. These methods take the same time to work as medication does, are just as effective and have no side effects, so they are much better in the long run.

Read Kids under Stress: How to Deal with Stress the Easy Way »

Kids under Stress: Diagnose Stress Symptoms without Psychiatrists

Boy looking worried. Worrying too often can be one of many stress symptoms

Stress is the epidemic of the modern world. All health concerns are associated with stress and as time goes on, stress goes up and stress symptoms show earlier and earlier in life. I was shocked to discover that psychiatrists now prescribe drugs to children as young as 3 years old!

Yes, instead of teaching children to deal with the feelings they have, which is what emotional intelligence is all about, we give them drugs that prevent their body from coping and developing the mechanisms to cope with stress.

Use of drugs to manage stress prevents the body from producing chemicals to calm the body. Over time, the stress increases and we have to increase the use of drugs to cope with natural and healthy life processes. Sadness, disappointment and anger are all healthy feelings, essential for our survival. The use of drugs to suppress them sends a message to the body that they are not healthy feelings for us and makes us helpless and powerless.

As a parent, I have a strong desire to keep my kids away from therapists (yes, even doctors, as much as I can). Why? Because for some reason, kids who are in therapy for a long time form the belief that something is wrong with them. As a life coach and special education professional, I can tell you that working with disabilities and learning difficulties is much easier than working with a child that thinks something is wrong with him or her.

Read Kids under Stress: Diagnose Stress Symptoms without Psychiatrists »

Common Stress Causes

In 3 Strategies to Find Your Sources of Pressure, I explained why it is important to recognize the sources of our pressure in order to eliminate stress in life and gave three strategies to find the stress causes in your life. If you have used these strategies, you are ready to use this list of common stress causes to refine your findings.

1. Lack of sleep is a major cause of stress.

2. Craving is a small source of pressure. Whenever you say to yourself, “I have to eat/do/be something”, you are putting pressure on yourself.

3. Addictions are a huge cause of pressure. Why? Because when we don’t have that thing we are addicted to, our brain goes into panic attack. Addiction can be to food, drinks (alcohol, coke…) to people, routines. If you want to know if you are addicted, try leaving without that thing for 3 weeks and see how the pressure builds up.

4. Caffeine is a big source of addiction. When our body has overdoes of Caffeine (coffee, tea, coke and chocolate) it will become edgy. If you want to recognize how much it affects you, stop any caffeine for 3 days and notice how nervous you are because your body goes through withdrawal symptoms.

Read Common Stress Causes »

3 Strategies to Find Your Sources of Pressure

Stress - it can come from many sources of pressure

Many people are very stressed, because they are under lots of pressure. If you ask them about their sources of pressure, they are not very good at pinpointing it, which only makes their life more stressful and seem to have even more pressure. Catch 22…

Stress is very debilitating in our daily life. Much research connects our health and wellbeing directly to the level of stress and our ability (or inability) to manage it. Stressed people are sick more often, have more conflicts, more relationship breakdowns and are less effective at work. These things result in earning less money, so they live in this vicious cycle that each point of pressure only feeds more pressure on other areas of life. Like I said before: Catch 22!

Pressure is related to something specific. Stress is the result of accumulated pressures. When these pressures go over a threshold, it’s too much for us to handle. We go into stress and turn our focus from control to feeling helplessness and anxiety.

In life coaching, it is very important for people to recognize that they are under pressure and that when it accumulates, it creates stress and then they are anxious about the outcome or the future. The three feelings of pressure, stress and anxiety go hand in hand in people’s reaction to events in life. I call them brothers, because they come from the same family of fear and in that family, they appear in this order. First, we have pressure, which accumulates and turns to stress, which immediately creates anxiety about the future.

In this post, I will give you 3 strategies to find your sources of pressure and eliminate stress in your life. If you follow them, in the order they are presented, you will find relief. At first, it will be a small relief, which will accumulate. The same as pressure, accumulates and turns to stress, relief accumulates and turns into control.

Read 3 Strategies to Find Your Sources of Pressure »

Emotional Intelligence Helps Raise Stress-Free Kids

3 Emotional Painkillers

How to Simplify Your Life and Reduce Stress and Overwhelm

Holistic Approach to Emotional Pain

100 Tips for My Children

Kids under Stress: How to Deal with Stress the Easy Way

Kids under Stress: Diagnose Stress Symptoms without Psychiatrists

Common Stress Causes

3 Strategies to Find Your Sources of Pressure

Get Happiness by Email

Join Us on Social Media

Books by Ronit Baras

Related Links