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Home » success » Page 5

There Are No Hopeless Teens

Noff making faces with Tsoof's glasses

As a teen, I faced many challenges with how the system viewed my abilities. Since then, I got a degree in Special Education and promised myself that no teen that crossed my path would ever be hopeless. Over the last 30 years, I have had the honor of working with many teens who were given up by the system and have done my best to act on my promise.

A young boy (let’s call him Aaron) came to see me 3 years ago. He was a tall and handsome young teen in a big body. He was in 10th grade and his mom was very worried about him. She raised him by herself, together with his youngest brother after a very challenging breakup.

Aaron attended one of the most prestigious private high schools, located over an hour and half’s drive from his home and his academic scores were low. He was failing in most of the subjects. He also got in trouble with every teacher possible and had no friends.

Every day was a challenge. In the morning, Aaron refused to go to school. In the afternoon, he refused to do his homework. The school told his mom that Aaron was hopeless. But he was just was a smart kid that was lost in the system.

This post is part 15 of 19 in the series From the Life Coaching Deck

Read There Are No Hopeless Teens »

Published: March 15, 2016 by Ronit Baras
Last modified: August 28, 2018In: Education / Learning, Beautiful people Tags: story, k-12 education, attitude, teens / teenagers, parenting teens, special education, education / learning, school, practical parenting / parents, success, beliefs, hope

Smile and Have a Nice Day!

Teenage in a beanie girl smiling happily

My youngest sister sent me a gift recently. It was a book called Cave in the Snow: Tenzin Palmo’s Quest for Enlightenment by Vicki Mackenzie. Gal, my husband, started reading it before me and I am reading it now 20-30 pages behind him. Every time he shared a suggestion from the book with me, I tried it. Tenzin Palmo suggested to the readers to find peace and happiness in different ways. Since I am in the happiness business, I have dedicated my life to finding techniques to increase happiness, methods to teach these techniques and ways to help others find their own techniques, so I welcomed her suggestions.

One of her simple methods was to smile. You smile widely (for no reason) and keep smiling through 3 deep breaths. Repeat this 6 times a day. That’s it. 3 breaths, 6 times a day, smiling. To start, you can put a pencil between your teeth, and this will hold your mouth in a smiling position.

Simple, right?

Tenzin Palmo said we’d feel a difference in 6 days, so I decided to try her technique myself.

It took exactly 1 day to feel a difference. The second day was even better, the third day was even better. If you are a mindful person and good at rating your moods, you will notice small changes every day. After a week, the improvement stopped and my happiness state was high and uplifted.

Try it. What have you got to lose (except some anger, sadness and fear)?

Read Smile and Have a Nice Day! »

Published: March 8, 2016 by Ronit Baras
Last modified: February 2, 2024In: Personal Development Tags: self confidence / self esteem / self worth, health / wellbeing, personal development / personal growth / personality development / self improvement, feeling, success, emotional intelligence, how to, research, change, happiness, social skills

Make a List: Ronit’s Gratitude Examples List

Indian woman showing gratitude

So now you know about why it’s important to be grateful and how you can get yourself into a state of gratitude with not much effort and in a very short time. You just need to make a list of 100 things you are grateful for.

Many of my clients say this is not an easy exercise. They can think of 10 or 20 things, but not a 100. So I give them examples of my own gratitude. Usually, when I start sharing my gratitude list with my clients, they say, “Oh, yeah, I’m grateful for this too”.

I truly believe that all people have lots of things to be grateful for and if they struggle to find these things, it is only because they haven’t practiced doing it and maybe they need ideas.

This post is part 38 of 49 in the series Make a List

Read Make a List: Ronit’s Gratitude Examples List »

Published: February 18, 2016 by Ronit Baras
Last modified: May 27, 2024In: Personal Development Tags: success, emotional intelligence, personal development / personal growth / personality development / self improvement, depression, how to, beliefs, research, change, happiness, perception, focus, positive, gratitude, attitude

Things to Be Grateful for

it's not happiness that brings us gratitude. It's gratitude that brings us happiness.

In our ever more stressful world, it can be challenging to find things to be grateful for if you don’t know where/how to look. I hope this post will help.

In the last chapters of the make a list series, I covered many topics that can bring awareness, happiness and success for people. I already know many who have tried making those lists and have made a huge change in their lives.

One major aspect of success in life is gratitude. If you want to learn from happy, successful people, it is a good idea to imitate their beliefs, thoughts and mindset, and when asked about their success and happiness, successful people have gratitude as part of their life.

It is always amazing for me to hear successful people saying, “I am lucky”, “I am fortunate”, “I am so grateful”. Those people, who worked hard (and long) for their successes, never forget to appreciate the things they have. The difference between them and unsuccessful people is that they never take what they have or what they achieve for granted.

This post is part 37 of 49 in the series Make a List

Read Things to Be Grateful for »

Published: February 9, 2016 by Ronit Baras
Last modified: January 24, 2023In: Personal Development Tags: research, change, happiness, perception, focus, positive, gratitude, attitude, success, emotional intelligence, personal development / personal growth / personality development / self improvement, depression, how to, beliefs

10 Life Philosophies for Peace of Mind

Sleeping fox - such peace of mind

Life is full of stress and it can be hard to achieve peace of mind. Many people don’t even remember the last time they felt at peace.

Life coaching helps people understand that peace and stress are in our mind and we can control them by changing what we think. Once we understand that we are what we think, we can change our life by choosing to think other things.

Here are 10 quotes that can be adopted as life philosophies. With these philosophies, we can manage tough times, we can be happy and relaxed, avoid stress, be successful and take control over our life, rather than feel that life is happening to us and we are at the mercy of our circumstances.

Read 10 Life Philosophies for Peace of Mind »

Published: December 1, 2015 by Ronit Baras
Last modified: March 24, 2019In: Personal Development Tags: inspiration, guilt, success, forgiveness, emotional intelligence, how to, fear, choice, control, change, happiness, Life Coaching, gratitude, personal development / personal growth / personality development / self improvement

100 Tips for My Children

Ronit and Noff on the beach

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 »

Published: November 24, 2015 by Ronit Baras
Last modified: January 24, 2023In: Personal Development, Parenting Tags: determination, inspiration, story, success, attitude, emotional intelligence, choice, stress / pressure, trust, self confidence / self esteem / self worth, failure, mobile phone, beliefs, practical parenting / parents, change, forgiveness, relationships / marriage, assertive, love

Be Positive! Why? Because you worth it!

Think Do Be Positive written on a blackboard

In recent years, we hear about being positive as a major aspect of happiness and success. Most people want to be positive, but don’t know how. When I talk to people about being positive, they say that they learned at school how to read and how to do basic math, they learned how to ride a bike and help at home, but no one ever taught them how to be positive. Therefore, it is one thing to understand why it is important to be positive, but another thing to actually be positive.

This is why I tell people that I should call my program Happy Being instead of Be Happy, because first we need to understand that happiness is important and then we need to learn how to be happy – how to make it a state of being.

Research done in North Carolina by psychologist Barbara Fredrickson has found out that being positive is important not only for our immediate success but also for long-term happiness.

Lions and snakes

When we have negative thoughts, we activate the primitive brain. Over there, all we see are lions and snakes that are a threat. Our body goes into a “fight or flight” mode and shuts all other thinking mechanisms in order to focus on the threat in front of us. Thinking, analyzing, evaluating, prioritizing, connecting, thinking creatively and considering efficiency are all luxuries that the brain is unable to do while under threat.

Happiness does not reside in the primitive brain, so it is important to notice when you go there. If you are scared, angry, aggressive, withdrawn, anxious, worried or upset, you are in the primitive brain. Your body has taken over your mind and you are out of control.

Take a deep breath! Try to think of something good and happy. Go to a happy place in your imagination. You need to convince your brain that what is happening to you is not a real lion and not a real snake. Only after you do that, you can change your emotional state and start thinking clearly.

Read Be Positive! Why? Because you worth it! »

Published: November 17, 2015 by Ronit Baras
Last modified: November 18, 2015In: Personal Development Tags: research, wisdom, change, happiness, gratitude, positive, success, attitude, meditation, education / learning, how to, forgiveness, negative, failure, beliefs

How to Calm Anxiety: 25 Easy Tips

When we fill out thoughts with right things, the wrong ones have no room to enter - Joyce Meyer

In What is Anxiety, I explained the process of creating anxiety. Today, I want to start describing how to calm anxiety with simple, everyday tips anybody can do.

It is important to remember that Anxiety is a thinking process that we do in the present of imagining a negative future. Anxiety is the modern evolution of the “fight or flight” response. We are not certain about the future and we predict a horrible one. Most of us are very bad fortunetellers, but still most people try fortunetelling in hope that the future will somehow change from being scary to being great, if only in our mind.

It won’t, unless we change the way we go through that process, and actively, with intention, change it!

In this post and the next, I will share with you 59 tips on how to calm anxiety. Each of those tips can do the trick for short time and if you continue doing them, they will become a habit. All you need are 2-3 tips that you feel conferrable with and alternate them.

Some of the tips are very much applicable to children, so teach your kids to develop strategies to manage and calm their anxiety as soon as possible. Research shows that kids as young as 3 years old already experience anxiety, and if they live in a very anxious house, they will master anxiety very early in life.

In schools, we see many anxious kids and this can be very exhausting for the body. Think of your body in “fight or flight” mode 30 to 40 times a day. An anxious child becomes so sensitive that every word said around them becomes a lion or a snake. The road from here to developing full-blown anxiety disorder is not too long.

This post is part 2 of 3 in the series How to Deal with Anxiety

Read How to Calm Anxiety: 25 Easy Tips »

Published: October 1, 2015 by Ronit Baras
Last modified: October 6, 2015In: Personal Development, Health / Wellbeing Tags: thought, depression, change, practical parenting / parents, anxiety, motivation, role model, hope, fear, perception, negative, positive, failure, questions, action, tips, focus, research, health / wellbeing, responsibility, personal development / personal growth / personality development / self improvement, success, control, feeling, emotional intelligence, mind

How to Deal with Anxiety: What is Anxiety?

If you live in the past, you will suffer depression. If you live in the future, you will have anxiety. If you live in the present, you will be content. Lau Tzu

What is anxiety? Anxiety is one of the biggest problems of our society today. Research has found that it is one of the main reasons for sickness, relationship problems, crime and failure. People who are anxious have a bad physical reaction to thinking about the future.

Everybody feels anxiety sometimes. It is a natural reaction to what is perceived as danger – an evolution of the “fight or flight” response. While for most people, experiencing anxiety in small doses is normal and healthy, for others, feeling anxious about the future or about situations over which they have no control may cause real interference with daily living.

The problem is with the frequency of the fear and the perception of danger, when in fact there may be no real danger. When people experience mild anxiety, we call it “worrying”. When the fear takes over and blocks the person from living a normal life, we call it “Anxiety Disorder”.

Think about it this way: anxiety is when your mind goes towards a possible, horrible, bad, unpleasant future and you react to it NOW. No one is anxious when they think about getting compliments, or having a great time. We are anxious about something that MAY go wrong in the future.

This post is part 1 of 3 in the series How to Deal with Anxiety

Read How to Deal with Anxiety: What is Anxiety? »

Published: September 17, 2015 by Ronit Baras
Last modified: September 17, 2015In: Health / Wellbeing, Personal Development Tags: health / wellbeing, focus, personal development / personal growth / personality development / self improvement, responsibility, control, feeling, success, mind, thought, emotional intelligence, change, practical parenting / parents, depression, motivation, anxiety, hope, role model, perception, fear, positive, failure, questions, action, tips, research

The Placebo Effect: How to Treat Your Kids for Free

A jar of pills and a sign for placebo

“Using the placebo effect on kids is an effective technique to help them go through tough periods in their lives.”

This may seem like a bold statement, but when I learned about the placebo effect during my special education studies, I realized that the placebo effect activates the natural “pharmacy” we have in our bodies. When we believe something to be true, we make it true. It works the same when we take a physical tablet and when when we take an emotional tablet.

The more I explain what life coaching and emotional intelligence are, the more I realize how important the placebo effect is for my work. Most of my work is to plant positive ideas and beliefs in the minds of my clients. Once they hold on to those beliefs or ideas, I have done my job in setting them up for a better future.

The placebo effect works in the same way. You can plant an idea in your kids’ mind that they can do something, be healthy or be smart by giving them a sugar pill and telling them it will help them do or be what they want.

Actually, the placebo effect works for kids even when you apply it to their parents by convincing them that their kids are amazing and talented, because your pill will help them…

Read The Placebo Effect: How to Treat Your Kids for Free »

Published: September 15, 2015 by Ronit Baras
Last modified: March 2, 2020In: Emotional Intelligence, Life Coaching, Parenting, Health / Wellbeing Tags: aggressive, skills, story, success, assessment, emotional intelligence, positive, meditation, attitude, kids / children, beliefs, health / wellbeing, research, personal development / personal growth / personality development / self improvement, guilt, focus, change, practical parenting / parents, special education, Life Coaching, school

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