Ronit’s 100 Happy Valentine’s Day Tips

This year, Gal and I are celebrating our 34th Valentine’s Day and we are very proud and happy to be together. We are also sad to look around and see that fewer and fewer couples are able to find happiness and love on this day. Over the last five years, more of my clients experienced relationship breakdowns than ever before. Divorce and separation are very sad and challenging for the couple and for their families.

This week, I received a request from a radio show to share 5 Valentine’s Day tips with their listening couples. This made me think that I have many more tips and the fill list from my relationship tool kit is below.

I highly recommend having such a list for yourself. If you could give other couples advice on how to have a happy relationship, what would you say? Write down your ideas and read them every once in a while (even I have to read my own advice from time to time, especially in tough times).

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Be Happy Without Money

Many people think that happiness requires money. Money definitely helps, but it really is not a pre-requisite for happiness. Most of my coaching clients want to improve their wealth, believing that money brings happiness.

What they do not understand is that it works better the other way, happiness brings more money. The belief that money can buy happiness usually comes from mom and dad. My clients learned it from their parents, who learned it from their parents who learned it from their own parents, and on and on. Can you see the cycle here? If you have kids, you have to make sure to stop it!

There is lots of research on the science of happiness. It tells us that happiness is a chemical reaction in the body. We can build up our happiness by doing things that stimulate our ‘happy’ chemicals. Luckily, we do not need money for all of them. For example, I got a little happiness sign and I love taking photos of it. The camera is digital and the photos are free. But it makes me happy anyways.

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Teaching & Education Beliefs: Think Ahead

Teachers, just like everybody else, do better when they think ahead and get organized. Today’s 20 teaching and education beliefs are about this. If you are here for the first time, you may want to start reading “Teaching & Education Beliefs” from the start of the series.

1. When I need to cover a topic over 8 weeks, I aim to finish it early, maybe in 6 weeks. This gives me time to deal with unexpected circumstances that pop up. If everything goes to plan, we have 2 weeks to have fun. If not, we have two weeks to compensate for the delay.

2. If I want to help my student, I must take care of myself. Kids are born with senses to read the people around them. There is no point pretending when you are around them. They will be able to tell when something is wrong.

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Teaching & Education Beliefs: I Am an Educator

In today’s part of Teaching & Education Beliefs, I want to share with you the first 20 of the top 100 beliefs I have about teaching and education.

Last week we discussed where beliefs about teaching come from: from our parents and our own teachers. In this post, I want to share some helpful tips that I found useful through my career.

1. I am an educator. I teach, I coach, I present, I motivate, I do public speaking, I write, I do my community work. In all those roles, I educate kids and grownups on how to find the gifts they have inside and let themselves shine.

2. School is not a place where kids come to gain knowledge; it is a small version of real life. Children have opportunities to use trial and error without detrimental consequences. Kids come to school to learn about themselves, grow and evolve.

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Six Human Needs: Love and Connection Examples

Couple connecting fingers with matching anchor tattoos

Love and connection are needs that we all have from the day we are born, right up until the day we die. Here are some examples of gaining/expressing/feeling love and connecting with others.

Please remember that what is seen as a positive way of achieving love and connection for one, may be considered negative by another. For growth to happen, we each have to go through this process on our own.

Being in a loving relationship

Research on relationships, health, wealth and wellbeing proves that those who live for a long time and are happy together are those who stay in their relationship for many years. It can be relationship with another person or with a whole community. Every time we connect with someone else and the communication or connection is positive, we fill up our love tank.

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I See You

Pressure is an isolating feeling. People under pressure see themselves as if they were under attach and their top priority is to survive, if only emotionally. So they focus on their own feelings, regard most interactions with suspicion and withdraw into a “safe space” as much as they can.

The problem with pressure is that it also damages our ability to reason and function severely. It interferes with remembering things, with being creating and with our perception of what goes on around us. We see the world through narrow slits in a thick armor, we see everything tinted bright red, we hear everything pitchy and sharp and very little makes sense.

Intense pressure can even make us feel like there is no hope and nobody to help us. It is as if we are invisible.

A long time ago, I saw a movie, I think it was Ordinary People, where a mother walked over to her teenage son, touched him gently and said, “I see you”. That line stuck with me and I have used the idea in it many times with the people I love.

I think the “I see you” method works well because the other person is using an invisible shield that is very effective at blocking direct methods, like advice, jokes and uninvited help. It works especially well with teenagers, who see many things as threats to their identity and independence.

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Fathering Adventures

Sometimes, the Universe seems to conspire to make us do something. In this case, I think it wants me to write about how important fathers are in the life of their children. We keep focusing on parenting in this blog, but there is a difference between mothering and fathering, which we have not discussed much.

I have a friend who goes on a men’s camp every year. When his boys were young, he went by himself and felt very supported there. As soon as his boys turned 13 and were allowed to go with him, away they went together and spent a great time bonding – singing, dancing, doing physical exercise and watching performances. He has been nagging me to come with him on that camp for a few years now, saying there is something special about the freedom and “safe space” it provides.

So far, I have not gone.

In the past few months, Ronit worked with several boys whose father had died or spent a lot of time away from home.

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How to Stop Parental Bullying

In the last chapter of the bullying series, I wrote about bully parents (some people call them toxic parents) and although I think there is sometimes a fine line between carrying out our parenting responsibility and bullying, there is no doubt that bullying is a cycle that will never end unless we help parents stop it.

Yes, we have law enforcement officers whose job is making sure it does not continue, but if parents stop bullying their kids from fear of the police or the authorities, it will only increase their sense of disempowerment. Their focus will be again on gaining power without the authorities’ knowledge, which will create another cycle of making kids afraid of reporting and worse, hiding their physical injuries and hurts from others. This reduces the support structure available to bullied children and the chances of stopping the bullying or recovering from it.

Parents must stop the bullying cycle not because of the fear of being caught, but because they have gained power and understanding through developing their emotional intelligence. This way, the parents will be happy too.

We must stop the cycle of bullying so that in 10 years, we will talk about it as history and say, “This is what people did in the past, but we are more civilized and in control and we are better parents for our children”. We need to be proud of making a difference.

In this post, I want to help parents discover if they were bullied themselves when they were young and if there is a form of bullying in their home towards their own children.

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100 Ways to Say “I Love You!”

Giving flowers is a great way to say "I love you"

There are many ways to say “I love you” to someone – partner, children, family members and friends. But as you may know, not all of them are as effective. That’s simply because people are different. So here’s how to come up with 100 ways to say “I love you” and choose the best one for each person.

As you probably know, love is one of the most wonderful feelings. Some people claim there are only two feelings: love and fear. Every good thing in life is a form of love and all the bad things are forms of fear. A stronger version of this only recognizes one feeling: love. All the rest (fear, anger, sadness, etc) is lack of love.

Voltaire said, “Love is a canvas pattern furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination”. Whether you define love as the ultimate feeling or just an important one, there is no doubt that being loved and loving can make us the happiest ever.

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100 Exciting Activities for When Your Kids are Bored

Many parents struggle with keeping their kids busy. One of the things parents hate hearing the most is “I’m bored”. Parents are very busy nowadays and feel they need money to give their kids what they want.

Weekends and holidays are the main stressful times for parents and many of us need a holiday after the holidays to recover, because keeping the kids busy can be hard work.

But in fact, there are many fun and exciting activities you can do with your kids with little or no money at all. You just need to look around a bit.

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