How to Handle Pressure

Our world today is a stressful place, full of pressure from every direction. That much is obvious. In fact, there are many things designed specifically to put pressure on us and keep us feeling stressed, and they are getting stronger and stronger over time.

Being a parent and having to raise kids adds another dimension to the pressure, because we not only have to stay calm ourselves, we also have to help our children relax and teach them how to handle pressure or everyone will go nuts.

I was unlucky in that respect.

My dad was raised by a very strict father, who taught him there was a “right” way to do everything – eat, dress, shave, speak, study, work and behave. Every other way was “wrong”. This was not a matter of personal preference but of “general consensus” and he treated any deviation from propriety with the same high severity.

There were things my dad decided not to do to me, like using physical violence. I was not beaten as a child, although my dad was beaten when he was little. That was a good thing. However, I grew up with strict rules I was expected to follow and not many things were open for discussion.

But I have come a long way since then and you can too.

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Making Money Addiction

When I was about 15 years old, I learned the hard way that sometimes you want things and only when you get them, you realize they were not what you wanted. Addiction is like this too – you want something and shortly after you get what you want, you realize it was not what you wanted.

As a life coach, I talk a lot about wanting. I believe wanting is essential in life. It is the driving force of our existence. But today, I want to tell you about a session on my life coaching deck that reminded me again why the question “Why?” is as important as the question “What?” Chris, one of my wonderful clients, taught me a wonderful lesson about what happens when you do not know why.

All I knew about Chris was that he was a businessman in his early fifties, married, with no kids and a lack of motivation who was looking for a life coach. Nothing special. We all have those periods in our life when we just find it hard to get up in the morning.

This is what I told myself when I prepared for his session. The first time he came, when I opened the door, I saw from the corner of my eyes a classy Mercedes Benz parked outside. Well, the first thing I could think of was “Oh my god, what a beautiful car”. I have to say it made me more curious about the reason he came. I thought that car was the result of lots of motivation.

“Why are you here, Chris? What do you want?” I asked him.

He looked confused. “I really don’t know. I think something’s wrong with me”.

This post is part 6 of 19 in the series From the Life Coaching Deck

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Don’t eat and run

Gal and I used to eat whatever our parents ate. We went to the supermarket and picked from the shelves the exact same things we had seen our parents choose or whatever was on sale. It took us 5 years of managing our own economy and a sick girl to discover that what we eat and how we eat has a strong impact on our life. Some things you just cannot learn at school.

It happened more than 20 years ago and since then, we have learned more and more about what to eat to be healthy in body and mind. I know that not everyone is convinced that healthy eating is the right solution and I understand. After all, the concept of “health” is very wide. When I sit with my clients at a cafe and order iced coffee with ice cream and whipped cream, I am 100% convinced it is healthy for my soul. So we may not agree about what food is healthy, but I think we can all agree on how to eat.

We live a very fast lifestyle. All the people around you will tell you they have no time – no time for the kids, no time for fun, no time for hobbies, no time for friends and no time for eating. Many shops and massive businesses have come to life to cater for this “fast food” lifestyle. We grab a shake, eat a meal on the way, in the car, during a meeting, while watching TV, during phone conversations and when reading a book. We think we are saving time, but we are making it harder for our digestive system to make the best of our food and this creates a never-ending cycle. What we eat is not digested properly, we lack essential nutrients, we feel tired, we become ineffective and what usually takes us 2 hours, suddenly takes us 4 and we have just lost 2 hours of our precious time, so we need to catch up and save time by grabbing some fast food or eating our healthy food on the run.

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How Time Flies

Life happens so intensively and so rapidly we do not get many chances to reflect on it. Parenting children is a long and important part of our life, so when we live it every day, it is easy to feel things will always be this way – homework, bedtime stories, teaching new kills, the heavy responsibility and the fantastic moments of joy.

But it is not. Time flies when you are having kids.

In the past few weeks, Ronit and I have done some reflection and some planning. Last week, we went away on our own for a couple of days and spent most of that time dreaming about the future and coming to many important realizations about how our life will change.

In 3 weeks, Tsoof will be graduating from high school. In 5 months, he will be going to university. In less than a year, he will get his driver’s license.

In just over a year, Eden will finish her Bachelor’s degree and start working in psychology, while she continues to study. Shortly after that, Noff will start going to high school (she is our baby and she is only 10 now, but this is what will happen, whether we believe it or not).

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Are You a Normal Parent?

The concept of being “normal” has been problematic for me since I studied special education. Normality is a set of common behaviors, yet sometimes I think it is overrated. Within a group of “nuts”, who would you call a normal person?

Usually, I reject the desire to be normal, because I believe we need to examine every situation separately and manage our behavior accordingly. This week, I had my beliefs questioned when I heard about a conflict between parents who are both my clients about the way to raise their 2-year-old daughter.

Damian and Alice were very successful. They were wealthy, established professionals, yet they struggled to raise their 2-year-old daughter Mel. Damian was anxious about their daughter and Alice tried very hard to reach “normality”.

At first, I thought Alice’s desire to be a normal family cluttered her perception. I did not really understand what she meant when she said, “Damian is not normal”, but the more I got to know them, the more I realized that although striving for normality may be limiting, having no sense of normality can be devastating for children. I understood that isolation and normality could not go hand in hand.

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Disengage Your Autopilot

Modern people spend most of their time on “autopilot”. Too often, our responses are simply programmed by our past experiences, our education and the enormous pressures of our life. We travel along the same road to work and it just zooms past the car window, seemingly unchanged. We interact with the same people, repeat the same patterns and get the same feelings.

You could compare a modern person, at least in Western society, to a Jumbo Jet. Change starts for us by making a lot of noise, feeling heavy and hardly moving. Then, we start rolling forward and pick up speed for a long time until we finally take off. But as soon as we are in the air, we look for a nice “cruising altitude” and “switch to autopilot”.

When you are a parent, this matters a great deal, because you are “carrying passengers” and these passengers are very precious – your partner and your children. Where you take them is important and how comfortable they are during your “flight” is also important. So sometimes, you have to disengage your autopilot and pay attention.

If you think about it, this unaware “flight mode” is a coping mechanism. It is a result of the overwhelming demands on our time, mental power and emotional intelligence placed by modern technology, lots of people, ever-changing world around us and massive barrage of information. We need to protect ourselves from all this noise, so we build a quiet cocoon by filtering out as much as we can.

But it does not have to be like this.

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Handy Family Tips: Laundry day

Unless you are raising celebrities that wear underwear once and make money from selling them to the highest bidder and unless you have a maid that allows your kids to put their clothes in the laundry basket and find it all ironed in the closet, you are a normal parent who must do the dirty job of washing the laundry. Luckily for us, we do not have to do it by hand and we have washers, dryers and chemicals that make life easier, although I may not appreciate the luxury of it because I hate washing or, I should say, I hate the thought of washing.

I do not know why, but for years, I hated doing the laundry. When Eden was born, I was amazed how many clothes a tiny baby could change. When the kids started going to school, with the need to have their uniform clean for school, I hated it even more. I think I always had this feeling that I was constantly washing clothes. No, I did not have to do it by hand or spin the washing machine by hand, but it sure felt like it. If you hate laundry too, this tip is for you.

This post is part 14 of 24 in the series Handy Family Tips

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Jaap De Nie, rest in peace

On Friday, the 30th of September, Gal and I were honored to participate in the funeral of Jaap De Nie, a friend of ours who died at the age of 68 in Holland. The wonders of technology (a digital camera connected to a mobile phone using mobile Internet and broadcasting on a web address) allowed us to sit in our house with his daughter, her husband and their two lovely kids, watch and hear the funeral and say our last goodbyes to this inspiring man, who lived as an example and died as an example.

We were honored to have met him and be inspired by his determination and courage to cheat death and live to see his daughter’s wedding, the birth of his nephews and his two grandchildren and to spend time with them against all odds.

We met Jaap about 7 years ago through his daughter. He was 61 and looked much older. He came from Holland to visit his daughter’s family in Australia. He and his gorgeous 37-year-old third wife, Ali, who was only one year younger than his daughter, were a fascinating couple. We talked for hours, gathering pieces of his life story and being inspired.

10 years earlier, the doctors discovered cancer that had spread throughout his body. They removed some of his organs, he went through chemotherapy and when the doctors could do nothing more, they told him to sort out his things and say his last goodbyes to his loved ones.

But Jaap decided to die skiing in Malaysia (yes, it is possible). Jaap called his two children and asked them to join him for the last weeks of his life. The two kids flew to be with their father, had a great time and nobody died.

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Proud to Be a Teacher

World Teachers’ Day was this week (5th of October) and I had been approached by a pre-service student at the University of Queensland for an who wanted to interview me for an assignment she had about being a teacher. At the end of the interview, she said to me, “I think they should use you as a motivator to make people choose teaching as a profession. You make it sound like it’s the best profession in the world”. I told her I had heard that many times before, because I am a teacher by choice and not a teacher by necessity.

Teaching, as you probably know, is not the best-paid job in the world. In some places, it is even in the lowest income range, which I find shocking. At the beginning of my career, I thought I valued education only because I needed to justify my choice of becoming a teacher, but every year that passes, I see that this justification is the only one there is, as there are so many disadvantages to being a teacher.

Maybe it was no coincidence I received this story by email on the day I had the interview.

A school principal addressed his students during a graduation ceremony.

He said, “Doctors want their children to become doctors, engineers want their children to become engineers, businessmen want their children to become CEOs, but a teachers also want their children to become one of them. Nobody wants to become a teacher by choice. Very sad, but that’s the truth”.

Then, he told them this story.

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Crazy, Stupid, Love

This is NOT a film review. It is a post on love and romance and marriage and kids and family and parenting. But it is inspired by the fact that Ronit and I watched the movie “Crazy, Stupid, Love” this week and it has been running around in my mind to the point where I just had to write about it.

Steve Carell makes movies that are full of embarrassing moments and this usually turns me off. I see him as the American version of Mr. Bean. I also find his acting melodramatic and externalized and I generally prefer subtle and deep. In this film, he was not only the main character, he was also the producer, which should have had me running in the other direction, except I only found that out in the final credits, and by that time, I already had a lot of respect for him.

If you have not seen Crazy, Stupid, Love, it starts with a marriage breakdown and divorce, continues through the attempted recover of both partners and their children and at the same time, weaves in the generational difference between the old one-partner-from-a-young-age and the new ongoing-partying-and-casual-sex-until-thirty-something.

I came away from the movie with a lot of love in my heart. In the past few days, there is more love in everything I do, more softness, more attention and more respect. I checked the patterns of my life against scenes from the movie and compared myself with the characters in it.

I want to share with you what I discovered.

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