The Art of Letting Go: Be Right or Be Kind

I think the desire to be right is another survival mechanism that humans use in order to manage uncertainty. The belief that the truth is absolute and that our aim in life is to find it and live by it is false. Trying to make others live by our truth is even worse. This mindset brings lots of pain and misery to everybody and if we want happiness to come into our life, we need to let go of our desire to be right.

The desire to be right is always accompanied by the risk of losing the relationship, because the question who is right only appears when there is a conflict. Being right is another part of our identity, our emotional “skeleton”, and most people believe that letting go of it might make them unstable. In fact, people who have a high need to be right are trying to overcome a deep feeling inside of them that they are wrong. People who are secure trust that they are OK, that their beliefs are good for them and that they only need to follow what is right for them, so they do not need to “prove their points” to others.

The concept of being right is a relative concept and always stands opposite being wrong. When you have a high need to advertise your “rightness”, you are trying to force your surroundings to fit into your definition of right and wrong. This is the source of many conflicts in our society. In relationships between parents and children, the parents often think that they are “right” and their kids are, well, just too young to know what to do. This continues at school, where many teachers think that they hold the absolute truth about what and how kids must learn (and why). Sometimes, it leads all the way to relationship breakdown and, in extreme cases, even to war.

This post is part 4 of 10 in the series The Art of Letting Go

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The Art of Letting Go: Trapped by Labels

Creating labels is another function we use in order to help us survive this world. Humans use labeling to manage the complexity of our environment.

Think about schooling. We send all the kids within a date range to 1st Grade when the difference in age between them is much higher than that between the youngest child in 2nd Grade and the oldest child in 1st Grade (could be just one or two days). We have built a whole education system on that huge range of 365 days, in which kids were born at different times of the day, have different family structures, live with a different number of other people in the same house, come from different socio-economic backgrounds and have different interests. Still, we categorize them all as 1st Graders.

Labeling is part of our day-to-day life. We do it for our own sake and not necessarily for the sake of those we label.

If you take 1,000 random people and put them next to each other, you will not find two that have the exact same skin color or the exact same hobbies. Yet, we often label people by skin color or say they all love drawing, although their skin is different in shade and texture and some love drawing animals, some prefer to draw plants and each person uses a different technique.

In 1930, Linguist Benjamin Whorf came up with the “linguistic relativity hypothesis”. According to him, the words we use not only describe what we see, but actually determine what we see.

This post is part 3 of 10 in the series The Art of Letting Go

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Best Anger Management Tips and Quotes

Hulk - the symbol of bad anger management

If you kick a stone in anger, you’ll hurt your own foot
– Korean Proverb

Some people are angry. Most of them learn anger from their parents and are trapped in a vicious cycle. One of the saddest things is an angry family, in which the parents are angry at the kids, who are angry at their parents, who are angry at their kids…

Sounds familiar?

Anger always comes from frustrated expectations
– Elliott Larson

Some say anger peaks during the teen years. I am not sure this is true for everyone. I know many teens who are joyful and happy. I was angry until I became a teenager, so I believe anger has nothing to do with age and hormones and everything to do with awareness. I think anger is a mindset that clutters our thinking and we are angry because we have poisoned ourselves with thoughts of disappointment and frustration.

For every minute you are angry, you lose sixty seconds of happiness
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Let’s face it, we are all angry at times. We are angry when things do not happen the way we want them to. Anger is a form of extreme disappointment that we think we are directing towards what we believe to be the source of the disappointment, but in fact, we direct it only towards ourselves. When I think of anger, I immediately see a bottle of poison.

This post is part 2 of 3 in the series Anger Management

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Moving Forward

As you probably know by now, life does not always work the way you expect it to. As a parent, you also know that your kids do not always do what you expect them to. Sure, it is tough sometimes, but it is the same for everybody. No matter how hard we try, we sometimes face situations we do not like.

The main difference between people who succeed in life and those who do not is what they do next. This is also the difference between parents who raise happy and successful kids and those who do not.

While I was thinking about this topic, I remembered a quote by an American president about taking action. When I looked it up, it turned out to be by Theodore Roosevelt, who is also quoted as saying many other highly appropriate things. I will include these within this post for your enjoyment and your (kids’) benefit.

“Never throughout history has a man who lived a life of ease left a name worth remembering”
– Theodore Roosevelt

Stopping progress

The best way to keep yourself right where you are and place yourself at the mercy of your circumstances, or your kids’ behavior, is to keep finding reasons for not making any progress.

No matter what anyone says to you, what are the chances it will be perfect? None. So you can always respond with, “Oh, no, this doesn’t cover everything”, or words to that effect.

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Best Marriage Quotes that Will Change Your Life

Marriage today is not what it used to be. I believe some of it is due to couples believing that they cannot fix their marriage, heal from conflicts and overcome the challenges they go through as part of life.

Couples that are still together do not have fewer difficulties. They sort them out before they get out of control.

In my relationship coaching program, I hear many couples use statements that make fun of commitment, mock stability and relationships and encourage giving up the marriage as an easy, accepted and preferable thing. They have read them on the Internet, seen them in “funny” PowerPoint presentations or watched them in video clips.

One of my clients is going through a divorce over something that could be easily fixed if both partners could sit together and talk. They had an argument over money. She wanted 150K, he wanted to give her 90K and to sort this out, they have had to hire lawyers, go to court and pay the 60K the argued over in fees. So forget about it, because divorce is never easy!

If you check the beliefs of divorcées about marriage, you will find that they always have the wrong ones – those witty, mocking, sarcastic beliefs.

My suggestion is to make sure you swap them with good beliefs. To help you do it, I have gathered the best marriage quotes I could find. I hope you will find some you like and can adopt, and I hope you can make good use of them.

This post is part 20 of 34 in the series Save Your Marriage

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Smart Girl

The last month has been a bit cold in Brisbane (not snowing or anything, just chilly). We bought a pile of wood to put in our fireplace, but since our ceiling is very high, it takes a while to heat the whole house. So for the first 10 minutes of the morning, each of us has a small heater in the room and we get dressed in front of it and Gal and I have a radiator heater in our office, which keeps us fairly warm.

Last week, on Saturday, our 9-year-old daughter Noff got up and stood next to the radiator. She was feeling cold and while we prepared breakfast, she brought the radiator next to the dining table and stood next to it, refusing to move. While we were setting the table, she peeked under the dining table, looked at the radiator and said in a triumphant voice, “I have an idea!”

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Life Formula

This week, I was asked by one of my clients about the formula for a successful, healthy and happy life, but as much as I wanted to give him the formula, I could not.

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Lean on Me

Once upon a time, there was a princess in a far away kingdom. When the princess was born, she cried a lot. Her parents, the king and queen, called all their advisors for help. Some said she was cold, others said she was tired, some said she was hungry and others said she was wet, but one old advisor said, “The princess is in the middle of a fight”.

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Just a Little Bit of Gray Hair

While on our long vacation recently, I managed to organize a reunion of my high school friends. We got together with our partners and kids for an afternoon picnic, after 25 years apart.

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Best Parenting Quotes that Will Change Your Life

Great parenting quotes are an awesome way to inspire ourselves as parents. These words of wisdom can help change our life and the life of our kids.

As you may know, I love quotes (and if you’ve had a chance to read my book or my life coaching website, you know). Since I was young, I believed that the quotes we choose to adopt help us plant thoughts in our mind.

If we choose inspiring, motivating and encouraging quotes, we develop have an inspiring, motivating and encouraging mindset. If we choose sarcastic, pessimistic and disappointed quotes, we will have exactly what we bargained for.

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