success Tag | Page 3 of 39

Use Your Self-fulfilling Prophecy to Help Your Kids Succeed

What does “self-fulfilling prophecy” have to do with good education and helping your kids succeed? Everything!

To raise our children to be successful, happy, healthy and productive grownups, we need a holistic approach. Yet our society and education system take a different approach. Governments spend billions of dollars every year to establish and run educational institutes where kids learn literacy and numeracy. Children dedicate 13 to 15 years of their life to learning things that will play a small part of their adult life.

Do not get me wrong, I think it is important to learn to read. I am also a qualified math teacher and think math is important. But tell me, out of a week of your life, with 24 hours a day and 60 minutes every hour, how much time do you analyze poems or find square roots of numbers? Do your amazing English and math abilities determine how happy, successful, healthy, friendly and productive you are?

I wish!

Learning depends greatly on the self-fulfilling prophecy of the teacher. Yes, I know, it sounds harsh, but the quality of the learning is highly dependent on what goes on in the teacher’s mind (and in the holistic approach, parents are also teachers). Every time I finish a day of professional development for teachers, the teachers are surprised to discover that what they think of the students manifests itself in the students’ behavior, social interactions and academic achievements.

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Find Your Inner Child and Discover Your Intuitive Wisdom

I have been working with children all my life. I think they have some wisdom that fades over the years. This is “thanks” to the education system, which teaches kids to ignore their intuitive wisdom and focus on memorizing, analyzing and following external rules. I always see my students as my greatest teachers, because they teach me what I once knew and forgot.

Children live from the heart. When they do something, they do it with every cell in their body. When they are happy, there are happy with every cell in their body, and when they are sad, it is heartbreaking to watch them.

My own children have made it easy for me to examine this purity, which is later lost. I have three of them, and they are totally different. Although they are 6 years apart in age, it was easy to notice that inside, they had a free spirit and only used the intuitive voice inside to guide them. When they played, they played with all their senses. They were not afraid to be silly or loud. When they ate, they never counted calories and I could see the satisfaction on their face when the food smeared all over it. I have hundreds of photos of them eating with a mess and looking very happy, which makes me wonder, “What do they know that we don’t?”

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Parenting Focus: Point Your Flashlight and Magnifier at Good Things

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”.

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How to Overcome Hard Times with Mindfulness

Hard times are part of life. Even the happiest and most successful people go through hard times. When they describe their successes, they typically share the hard times and how they got over them. When you are in the middle of a difficult period, it feels all consuming, like end of the world. It feels… hard!

Unfortunately, negative thinking can make the hard times feel even harder. Think of it as driving a car. Good times are like driving in a flow, when all the traffic lights are green and it feels like you are cruising. Hard times feel like there is a stop sign or red light at every intersection, and driving seems to take forever, because the cars in front of you cannot move forward, while you are running late for an important meeting.

When your thinking is negative, it feels like you are driving… backwards.

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Help Teachers Practice Social Responsibility

Being an educator, I think a lot about my role as a social activist. Yes, being a teacher is all about making a difference in the world by inspiring children to be the best they can be and to make a difference in their world.

You see, this is the best way to make the ripple continue. I have a social responsibility to give my students the tools to build this world and live in it in peace and harmony, with themselves, with the land they live on and with others. This way, they will continue this cycle with everyone they meet in their life.

Making a difference is on the agenda of everyone who considers becoming a teacher. It is part of the job description nobody ever reads before embarking on their teaching adventure, but everyone totally understands within a very short time of teaching.

Most of the time and energy of teachers is dedicated to literacy and numeracy and very little is dedicated to activism and making a difference. Most teachers, even those who understand their role well, are forced to drill the kids with more assignments, tests and pressure to perform. Social responsibility shrinks from providing values, morals and being a role model to producing obedient children who do not think for themselves and focus on survival and scores.

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Money Can Buy Happiness If You Use It Wisely

I grew up in a poor family. We were five children, my mom left home early in the morning and my dad was the town postman and when he finished his first job, he worked a second job as a handyman. “Money cannot buy happiness” was my parents’ motto.

Only later on, when I started making a lot of money as student, I realized that poor people come up with these beliefs about money to justify their lack of money and they disconnect money and happiness to give their life a better meaning. What my parents really meant was that we could be happy in many ways and money was not a condition to happiness. I agree with that.

Money brings an enormous feeling of happiness if you use it to … give.

Researchers at the University of British Columbia and Harvard Business School checked the connection between spending money and happiness and they found out amazing things that are important for all happiness seekers to know.

In one experiment, they gave students $5 or $20 and asked half of them to spend it on themselves and the other half to spend it on others. One group was taking the money and enjoying it, while the other was giving it to someone else to enjoy.

What they found was that the “givers” were significantly happier at the end of the day. So money can buy you happiness if you use it to make someone else happy.

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The 10,000-hour Rule and Becoming a Facebook Expert

When my son had some friends over for lunch one day, we had a talk about what they did in their spare time. This question always interested me, because my son, Tsoof, never had any spare time in high school. In the last year of high school, he started at 7am and finished around 5pm most days of the week. Since he was in bed by 8:30-9:00pm, there was not much time left for other things.

I was very surprised when some of them told me they spent 3-4 hours during weekdays on Facebook, and on the weekend, they even got to 6-8 hours.

I was shocked!

It made me realize why Tsoof was in a different state to them. Back then, he had no Facebook account, he was a student leader, he was taking a university course, he had 8 before-school and after-school activities every week and he was an excellent student.

I told them that if they understood the 10,000-hour rule, they would see that they were gearing up to be experts in … Facebook.

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Eddie the Eagle: Determination and Great Parenting

Watching the movie Eddie the Eagle this week made me think again about my own children and the many children I work with. I realized that no one ever gets to the top, whether it is a top in a ski slope, the top of a class, the top of a sport or the top of a skill without determination and without someone holding the ladder while they climb up.

Being a different child is not easy. I know what it means, because I was different. There are two reasons for this. One, you cannot look at others and do what they do. Two, others do not like different people. There is something awkward about them, something that means hard work. Being social means building rapport, and it is hard to relate to someone who is different.

Supporting children in their adventures is linked strongly with the permission we give ourselves, their parents, to dream big. When we practice dreaming and following our dreams, we give our children permission to do the same.

In the movie, Eddie’s dad, who is a plasterer, tries constantly to convince his son to stop trying to be in the Olympics, while his mom is supportive of his adventures. At one point, Eddie asks his dad, “Have you ever had a dream?” and his dad said, “Yes… to be a plasterer”.

Michael (Eddie) Edwards was a clumsy young boy with a physical disability who dreamed of being an Olympic athlete. He is physically challenged and socially unaccepted, and while his mom supports his dreams, his dad does everything in his power to get him “off the clouds” and be “normal”.

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How to Have a Good Day Everyday

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 18 in the series From the Life Coaching Deck

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Living with Passion and Purpose is Within Your Reach!

Living with passion and purpose seems like a fluffy dream to many people who have settled on their job and career, but there are many others who are living proof that living with passion and purpose is possible, maybe with a little bit of guidance.

My son Tsoof, who is 20 years old, finished his four-year degree in music recently. 3 days a week, he teaches school students the joy of percussion playing and the rest of the time, he works on his show and his band SoundStruck.

This week, in one of his musical performances, I had a chance to talk to many of the young musicians there about their plans for the future. Some of them looked for a job that would bring them money. They worked in a retail shop, in the bakery, played a gig once every two months, and the rest of the time, they had to pay the rent somehow. Others, like Tsoof, worked in the music industry and lived with purpose and passion.

I was a proud mother. You see, Tsoof leaves home 3 days a week at 6:30am, works full days, never complains, never says it is too hard. When one of his students is away, he uses the time to practice and write music, and he loves his students, loves the work, loves music and gets excited about the compositions and the work he does for his show.

My son is not the only one in that group. Others are also passionate and dedicated, working hard and loving every minute of it. I was happy to discover this.

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