Helping You Achieve Success and Happiness!

Mel sat on my life coaching deck with a curious smile. Her mind was working at full speed. We always joked that her thoughts were on a constant race to nowhere. Sometimes, when people come to coaching, it is clear to me what they want to achieve, but Mel was different - she wanted someone to debate the philosophy of life with her. She wanted to achieve an idea. When I figured it out, I told her she could register for a philosophy course.

"No, Ronit. I can't do that with a bunch of young students", she said with a smile. Mel herself was a college professor.

"Why not? Why does it matter there are other people in the class and why does their age matter?" I asked.

"They are young and haven't had time to develop their thinking. I want a private philosophy lesson, in which you help me question everything in my mind", she said.

"And what makes you think that my thinking is developed enough?" I asked, unsure I could cope with her speed.

"I know you can. I've researched you for days and read everything about you. There is some sense about you that I want to learn", Mel said confidently.

Suddenly, it was not the Be Happy in LIFE coaching program I needed to use but something else that was foreign to me. Coaching is never about the coach, it is all about the client, and I had to make sure that would be the same with Mel.

"What do you want?" I asked her (this question repeated many times during our sessions).

"I want you to question what I think until I find the thing that I'm missing to make sense out of life", she said.

"Why would you want to do that?" I asked her, a bit worried. I never thought I had my own perfect formula, let alone someone else's. Making sense was not one of my greatest strengths and for a second, I was not sure how to give her something I did not have.

"Because something doesn't make sense and I can't live like this", Mel said.

I have heard this sentence in many different ways. For some people, things need to make sense and for others, it needs to feel right. It is almost like there is an ultimate truth or feeling that we need to discover in order to find our place in life.

"What will happen if you find a way to make sense of everything?" I asked her.

Mel stopped and looked at me surprised and then smiled a big smile. I knew my question had taken her to a different place in her speeding mind. She was happy, because I did exactly what she wanted. I stopped her thoughts for a second and put them on trial.

"I think this is the ultimate happiness", she said with a big happy smile, as if she had experienced that ultimate happiness for a brief moment, "There is peace and quiet in understanding everything". I got scared for a second, thinking I did not know I could help her understand everything, because I did not understand all of it myself.

I chose to tell you about Mel because she was generally miserable. On the surface, she ticked all the boxes of a wonderful life - she was a college profession, she had the cutest kids and she loved them very much, she was married and loved her husband deeply and she was financially secure. Yet, nothing made her happy - thoughts were her allies, but she found people most unreasonable. She was unhappy with the way they behaved and kept saying they did not make any sense.

Some people confuse acceptance with apathy, but there's all the difference in the world.
Apathy fails to distinguish between what can and what cannot be helped. Acceptance makes that distinction.
Apathy paralyzes the will-to-action. Acceptance frees it by relieving it of impossible burdens
- Arthur Gordon

Although I am not convinced there is a formula for being happy, I think there is formula for being miserable. Mel had that formula and lived by it every day of her life. Through clients like Mel, I have seen how the mind can create this suffering. As a very smart, curious person, Mel had some beliefs, thoughts and ideas that made her miserable and caused her to think she did not understand the world and could not make sense of it. What Mel missed was the understanding of acceptance. She confused acceptance with having low standards, with compromising on mediocrity and with giving up.

Mel was an amazingly smart woman, but she could not understand why others did not understand what she did. She did not understand why people did things that hurt others. She did not know how to relate to people without knowing their motives. She did not understand emotional (she called them "illogical") decisions. When I told her that I never make logical decisions, because I am kinesthetic, she looked at me shocked. "What else is there?" she asked.

For me, 6 things summed up Mel's thoughts and ideas and contributed to her self-torture. They were:

1. Fairness
2. Logic is pure thinking
3. Advantages and disadvantages
4. Frustrated fortuneteller
5. Allergic to mediocrity
6. Motives and reasons

Fairness

Mel thought there was such a thing as Ultimate Justice that all people must follow. She had a very strict concept of Right and Wrong. Fairness was always examined from her point of view and her point of view was the center of the universe. Mel never thought fairness was relative and influenced by culture or upbringing.

When I described to her how the Thai people charged tourists and locals differently at temples or for food, she could not understand how that could be fair. When I gave her an example of a clash between different people's definition of fairness, she had a "system failure" in her mind.

I remember myself writing protest poems at the age of 14. My notion of fairness was very clear and naïve then. When I was 27, my youngest sister came back from a trip to India and showed me her journal, where she had written, "Is it fair to make your child blind so he can be a better beggar and bring home more money to feed the whole family?" I experience that same "system failure" about fairness at the age of 27, when I tried to answer that question. My immediate reply was, "No, of course it's not fair!"

But as I thought about it some more, I realized it is not that simple and there is no single right way of doing things. I was already a mother and I was pregnant, which made this realization more difficult, but I understood one big lesson about acceptance: what is fair for one is not necessary fair for another . There is no ultimate fairness. Fairness is totally subjective and we cannot judge others for having a different definition of fairness to ours.

Logic is pure thinking

That is the definition of faith - acceptance of that which we imagine to be true, that which we cannot prove
- Dan Brown

For Mel, everything in life had to make sense . She thought "emotion" was a dirty word and emotional only cluttered the mind. Logic was her weapon against life's turmoil. She was very puzzled when I told her that I based most of my decisions on gut feelings and that according to the theory of Emotional Intelligence, success in life depends mostly on our ability to recognize and manage our feelings.

When Mel talked about feelings, she talked about them from a scientific point of view. When I asked her, "What do you feel towards your husband and your kids?" she said, "I love them", but whereas my definition of love was a vague feeling of warmth and happiness, she had a clear scientific definition, saying, "I know it is love when I want to be with them, when I want to do things for them, when I think that..."

For Mel, everything had conditions. Whenever I needed to explain a feeling, I would find an example and say, "It's like when you..." Mel always sounded as if her descriptions had come out of a dictionary.

I do not think I know what pure thinking is, but there is nothing pure in precise definitions and putting conditions on every action. Logic is no cure for heartache and pain, because there are many things around us without logic and Mel refused to accept them.

When I asked her to imagine a great future that made sense to her, she said, "There is no logic in bringing images into the mind, because imagining them does not make them reality". I told her how Gal had come up with an image of the kids coming home after school and everyone having a great afternoon together, and how it had happened exactly the way he had imagined it on the same day. She stood there confused and nodded as if telling me, "I know you are telling me the truth, Ronit, but it still makes no sense". Until the end of our coaching, dreaming of a happy future was not a technique that worked for Mel.

Advantages and disadvantages

Mel thought that making every decision could only happen after a thorough analytical thinking process of weighing advantages and disadvantages. At first, I thought it was a good idea.

I once saw a movie about a relationship coach who took all his female clients on a date and sat in a restaurant facilitated their process of weighing the pros and cons of leaving their husbands on a napkin. He helped all of them go back to their husbands. In our family, we call this method "The Napkin Technique".

But it was not as simple with Mel, because she did not settle for just listing advantages and disadvantages. She also had to weigh each of them differently. This was still manageable, because I used KT Analysis for assigning a weight to each item and adding them all up, but then Mel added short term, medium term and long term considerations and that really messed up the napkin.

"What about doing things because you want to or feel like doing them?" I asked her.

She seriously did not know what that meant.

"You know, just like kids do, without too much thought. Where do these things come from?" I kept asking.

I thought that being so self-conscious about everything meant not accepting the fact that we are human - we cannot plan everything we do and cannot weigh every choice and decision. To herself and to everyone else, Mel looked like a procrastinator, because instead of living life, she was contemplating every little movement as if she was searching for an exact number that meant it was going to make her happy. Mel could argue about everything for so long there was no point when she could decide what to do about it.

Making decisions was not her strongest ability and she felt she was not controlling her life, because things kept happening to her while she was trying to make her mind up.

Frustrated fortuneteller

Mel really believed that logic, a strong sense of fairness and her ability to analyze things could make her come up with the "right" decision. She repeatedly said, "He should have done that", "It should have worked", "It was supposed to be..." Accidents and mistakes were not part of her vocabulary. Every future was supposed to be perfect, exactly the way she expected it to be. That way, she sentenced herself to life in the prison of frustration.

To all my clients, I say that when you play Solitaire, you need to look a few steps ahead in order to predict the future outcome of your actions. I can go in my mind 5-6 steps ahead, but I cannot cover all the possibilities. Life it is a very big Solitaire game and there no chance in Hell we can predict every step of the way.

To help me survive my inability to "play God" and predict the future, I often read the Serenity Prayer:

God, grant me the courage to change the things I can,
the serenity to accept the things I cannot change
and the wisdom to know the difference

Mel had never experienced serenity, because she thought there was nothing in the world she could not change.

I told her that on a wonderful day, a day that was supposed to be one of the happiest days of my life with the birth of my son, turned out to be one of the saddest days of my life, because he died from a heart defect. Mel looked at me with teary eyes. I could see in her eyes the endless loop of examining the options. I remembered myself in that loop. I had never thought there was nothing I could not change, because I had figured out by then I could not change my height, my parents or the past.

I think that story hit her hard. "Couldn't they find he had a heart defect in an ultrasound?" she asked desperately.

"I had done 4 ultrasounds and they hadn't", I told her.

"Maybe it's the person who had done the ultrasounds?" she pleaded.

"I'd had a total of 6 ultrasounds done by 6 different people in 2 different countries", I replied.

"Maybe if you had done one closer to the delivery, the heart would have been big enough to notice the defect", she kept going.

"2 of the ultrasounds were done the week before he was born", I said.

"Isn't there a special ultrasound that can find such things?" she could not let go.

"There is, but you can only get it if you've had a baby with a heart defect already, but my daughter was perfectly healthy and my pregnancies were great", I explained.

"Well, that's good, right? Because it meant that with the next child, you could do that special ultrasound", she said.

"I could and I did. I had a baby girl with a perfect heart, but she had a cord accident and died inside me on the 32 nd week", I told her.

"No!" Mel said in anguish, but I knew she had finally gotten it, the hard way.

We cannot control everything that happens to us, but we can control how to respond. Trying to predict everything that will happen and being frustrated it does not happen the way we have predicted it is like being a bad fortuneteller that cannot come to terms with their inability to tell the future.

Allergic to mediocrity

Mel could not settle for less than the best. She wanted to be the best mom, the best wife, the best daughter and teacher and expected the same from others. She talked a lot about her students being lazy, stupid and slow. She was very surprised when I told her I was kicked out of school in 10 th Grade because I had no idea what the teachers were talking about in Physics, Biology and Chemistry.

"Why would you tell me you're not good at something?" she asked, surprised. For her, being good at everything was the ultimate desire and she was convinced it was the same for everyone.

"Because I'm not", I said, "Are you good at everything?"

She thought about it for a while and said, "Well, eventually I will be! If I'm not good at it now, I will become good".

"Great, so eventually you'll be a great mother, wife and lecturer", I said.

She looked at me and smiled with understanding. Nobody is good at everything all the time. Not even Mel. And that is OK.

Mel had no understanding of different abilities. When I taught her about communication styles and how we each learn differently, she was shocked. "Do you mean that when I explain something to my students, not everyone understands the same?" she asked and looked like she was in pain when I said it was true.

Mel was one of those rare digital people who could learn things in a flash and memorize many details. From time to time, when I explained things, she would say to me, "Ronit, you've said that already". I explain things from different angles to make sure things are clear, but she only had to hear everything once and could not imagine other people might need more than one example.

It was a challenge for Mel to be surrounded by so many "stupid" people who need so much time and so many examples to understand something. So we spent a long time questioning Mel's definition of stupidity. The best way I could do this was by giving myself as an example. For Mel, giving myself as an example was a brave act of admitting my "stupidity". Accepting we were "wired" differently gave Mel a key to understanding herself and others. Later on, she changed her teaching methods and even the way she interacted with her kids. She then started to say that "maybe they aren't that stupid".

Accept everything about yourself. I mean everything.
You are you and that is the beginning and end - no apologies, no regrets
- Clark Moustakas

Motives and reasons

For Mel, everything had a reason and every person had a motive, but she could not figure the reason or the motive. When we talked about the unfairness of the world, people had reasons to be mean to her and motives to fight with her. She was always on guard. For the whole year that we met on my balcony and in our emails, Mel kept torturing herself by assuming people have bad motives and wanted to harm her.

I told her that in her mind, the world was not safe and she needed to trust that people are good and the things they do are not against her. People do everything because they believe that, in some way, they will benefit from doing it.

One day, when we discussed motives, I told Mel about our experience of giving free hugs at the Queen Street Mall in Brisbane. We went out 4 times and each time, many people stood there and asked suspiciously, "Why do you do this?"

Mel immediately said, "I would've asked exactly the same question. Why on Earth would you go and hug total strangers on the street?"

"We wanted to make people feel good", I said.

"How do you feel good by giving people hugs?" she asked.

It was very funny. That happened on the street too. Some people said to me, "OK, I'll give you a hug" and others said, "Sure, I'll have a hug". People like Mel thought they were giving me a hug and doing me a favor, whereas I thought hugs were a two-way street - you give and receive at the same time.

"It's a wonderful feeling to hug and be hugged by hundreds of people", I told Mel.

"Even if you don't know them?" she asked, really curios to know my motives, "Didn't you take some advertising flyers?"

"No".

"Why not?"

"Because we wanted to advertise hugging, not Be Happy in LIFE", I said.

"What did you tell people?" she asked.

"That they needed 12 hugs a day to keep the doctor away", I told her.

When we talked about motives, she wanted to know why I did the things I did and my answer, "To feel good", just did not sink in. When I talked to her about drawing, she could not understand why I would bother to draw or paint if I was not a professional artist, my art would not be displayed anywhere and I would not be paid for it. Doing things for fun was not a valid motive for Mel.

Some of the sessions seemed like she was conducting a research on me. She asked me questions and I answered them. She wanted to know how I thought and why I did the things I did. I sometimes said I did not really know why I had chosen to do something. I sometimes do things just because I have a feeling they will be the right things to do. Mel said feelings could not be measured, so they were not a good tool to measure motives and reasons.

Acceptance is not submission.
It is acknowledgment of the facts of a situation,
then deciding what you are going to do about it
- Kathleen Casey Theisen

Three stages of acceptance

Now, I would like to introduce a solution, a cure, a way out of this endless search for the right and only-sensible thing to do, to think or to be. If you are like Mel in some way, I hope this will help you find peace, just as she did. If you know others like Mel, I hope you will share this page with them so they may find their own peace.

The first step toward change is awareness.
The second step is acceptance
- Nathaniel Branden

Every time Mel left, I wrote my reflections on the session, as I always do after a session. In the Strategies section, I wrote, "Teach acceptance". For me, acceptance was a peaceful place, where I acknowledge things around me without resistance (every time I think of the word "resistance", I remember The Borg from Star Trek saying, "Resistance is futile". Sometimes it is useless and ends only in sorrow).

Mel thought acceptance was a form of giving up. "Do you accept wars?" she asked me (she knew how to press my buttons).

I said, "I do. I acknowledge the fact that there are wars. It does not mean I am happy about them, but they are part of life".

We cannot change anything until we accept it.
Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses
- Carl Jung

Although the idea of acceptance seems simple, it has more than one meaning. I find a common thread between them, which is "without resistance".

The three meanings I could think of were:

1. Acknowledgment or act of belief - "I accept the facts" (I believe they are true, "I believe in God" (I accept the idea or concept of God)
2. Willingness to receive - "I accept this award", "Thank you for your gift"
3. Agreement or approval of someone or something - "I accept the terms of the contract", "I accept him into the club" (team, company, etc)

I believe that acceptance is a process going through all the three meanings. I call them The Three Stages of Acceptance.

Letting go does not mean giving up, but rather
accepting that there are things that cannot be
- Unknown

Acknowledgment

Acceptance starts by acknowledging what is inside of me and what is outside of me. The first level of the emotional intelligence is "Recognizing my own feelings". The first level requires no action, just awareness and acknowledgment of the feeling - "I'm sad", "I'm happy" or "I'm frustrated". It may be surprising for you, but most people do not know how they feel, because they have never learned to recognize their feelings.

Recognizing our feelings is an important skill and in our stressful lifestyle, it is even more important. It is very important to distinguish between expressing feelings and recognizing them, because they do not necessary go together. Kids, for example, find it easy to express their feelings, but hard to recognize them, because of a limited vocabulary and few life experiences. They can be angry, joyful or excited, but when you ask them how they feel, they may not really understand what you are saying.

Unfortunately, if kids are not taught to recognize their feelings, they grow up to be adults who do not know how they feel and therefore cannot manage their emotions.

A big obstacle to acknowledgment of hard thoughts, feelings or facts is called denial . Denial is a chemical reaction in the brain that functions as a defense mechanism. It pushes a way thoughts and feelings that we may not be able to handle.

I remember the first time I realized this defense mechanism was taking over my thoughts. I was a special education student and I asked for a six-month practice assignment at a school for autistic children. The first day I came for a visit was a shocking experience. The kids at that school were severely autistic and the teachers in the kindergarten where I worked monitored every word they said. I was there for a full day and the kids only said about 50 words. Those kids were so beautiful and so "not there".

Two days later, Gal asked me about something I did and I remembered I had been there. In my mind, that day had disappeared, as if I had been unconscious the whole time I was there. My memory was still fuzzy and I only had flashes of what had happened there, but slowly they became clear. I forgot the day, erased it as if it had never happened and I do not think I did it consciously at all. My brain was taken over.

Denial is a natural reaction to hard things, but it is an act of resistance. Acknowledgment is the cure.

When we lived in Thailand, I bought Gal a meditation book he read on his way to work (his driver was driving). One of the exercises was to sit while being hungry, feel the hunger and not resist it. The theory behind it was that hunger was a "small Panic attack", a survival instinct, which we do a lot to resist. Yet, if we acknowledge the feeling, experience it and embrace it, the panic disappears.

Many times, when we accept the facts and do not argue with them, we find peace. In her book "Love what is" (highly recommended!), Byron Katie uses the technique of acknowledgment as a cure. She takes people through the process of examining their expectations and shows them that the more they focus on the expectation, the less accepting they are of the facts.

The wonderful process of acceptance or "loving what is" shows people that their attachment to a particular outcome is the source of their misery. In the same way, if your partner, child or boss is doing something you are unhappy about, you have proof he is doing it. The problem is not his behavior but your expectation that he will behave differently.

"If your students cannot understand, then you have proof they do not understand. Why do you fight reality?" I asked Mel, "Would it not more useful to change your assumptions and help them where they are?"

Resistance is futile. Acceptance is the cure!

Willingness to receive

When we acknowledge the fact and the feelings, we can progress to the willingness to receive . As you probably understand, the opposite of receiving is rejecting, which is a form of resistance. When we are given something, we have the power to receive or reject it. Our mind, much like with acknowledgment, rejects ideas, facts and people that seem to be a threat.

The challenge is that often the perception of threat is not clear enough. While in the distant past, the flight and fight response was very effective and helped humans survive, today, a word someone says can be as threatening as a lion and a gesture can create the same reaction as a thunderstorm. Most people are in a constant state of stress, which means their body thinks it is under some kind of a threat all the time.

Mel was under a constant threat. Everything she did not understand seemed like a threat to her and took her into the prehistoric jungle of life - fearing predators, thunderstorms and fire. Yet, under threat, she could not recognize good intentions and her mind was too busy to see a way out.

One form of resistance to receiving is avoidance and its source is the perception of threat. Mel avoided making decisions, because in her mind, doing something, saying something or thinking something might lead her to compromise and that was a threat - it triggered her allergy to mediocrity.

Resistance and rejection take a lot of energy and can be very exhausting. It is like the difference between wrestling and dancing - you need a partner in both, but in wrestling, you need to make sure not to get hurt, while in dancing you focus on having fun.

Receiving works great without judgment. Acceptance without judgment is like getting a wrapped gift and not knowing what it is. Basically, you accept the idea of the gift - the intention - and take it willingly and without judgment.

Life is the same. When things happen to us, they wrapped gifts. Some wraps look beautiful on the outside, but when you open them, you find little value inside. Other wraps look dull on the outside, but their value is high. Still, we need to receive both kinds in order to find out what they are.

If the first stage (acknowledgment) is the statement "I'm aware this is what is happening to me", the second stage (willingness to receive) is allowing what happens to enter my life without grading it.

For Mel, reaching this second stage meant accepting that people were different without judging whether it was good or not, which meant she could no longer hold her definitions of "fairness" or "mediocrity". She accepted that there were many possible definitions and perceptions and that hers were subjective. The biggest thing she got from reaching this stage was peace. She no longer had to put a label on whatever she did, thought or felt and on what others did, thought or felt. It was just "the way things are", "reality", "life".

At that stage, she asked me if that was the reason we had "Be" in "Be Happy in LIFE", because accepting things as they are, accepting myself as I am, was moving to a state of "being".

Agreement or approval

Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to
overcoming the consequences of any misfortune
- William James

Reaching the second stage of acceptance can bring most people great peace. When you reach it, you feel like you have just finished a serious workout. Things are easy and light.

I remember having this feeling when we moved to Singapore after a year and half in Thailand. There was air conditioning everywhere, the streets were clean, the system was effective, the roads were free from traffic jams and I could order food in English. I had loved Thailand, but after about 4 weeks in Singapore, I discovered Thailand had been hard work (in some respects).

If you want, you can settle on this stage and be happy for the rest of your life, but as you might have guessed, Mel could not settle for it, which made me go with her to the third stage of acceptance - agreement or approval .

The third stage of accepting happens after opening the gift when you look at whatever is under the wraps and believe it is good for you somehow. It is this "All good" attitude.

Usually, when things happen around us, we do not have a problem if we immediately perceive them as beneficial for us. The problem is always when we first open the gift and find something that seems like a threat. Initially, it feels like an insult to accept things without judgment and then discover they are going to hurt us in some way.

Mel said to me, "If I accept something without judgment and then find out it was painful, I will doubt my ability to judge in the future. I can't trust my judgment anymore".

"You only need judgment to be able to predict the future, but we have already concluded you were not a fortuneteller, so why fight it?" I asked her.

We must accept life for what is actually is - a challenge to our quality,
without which we should never know of what stuff we are made
or grow to our full stature
- Ida R. Wylie

Various religions manage this level in a great way. They have solved the problem of dealing with seemingly painful things by accepting our inability to make sense of things because of our limited understanding. These religions explain things as part of a greater plan that is beyond our capacity to comprehend, so whenever things hit hard, believers accept that a mighty power has everything figured out and this power always chooses what is best for us.

When we open a gift and its value is low or negative, we need to find the good intention or purpose behind it by asking, "How can I benefit from this pain?" This is the reason religious people deal with difficulties and grief better. Jewish mysticism is called "Kabala", which literally means "Acceptance" or "Receiving", and I think it is called that because acceptance is considered the highest form of existence.

Other life philosophies do not accept a universal power, but they still promote the belief that things are painful or threatening only when we cannot found a way to turn them into strengths and realize their benefits.

When I told Mel that one of the gifts I had received was the loss of my two children, she looked at me with anger at first. I offered her something that seemed like a huge threat - no good could possibly come out of losing two kids. Yet, there I was and when I stopped fighting and resisting and accepted my loss, I was able to ask myself that question until the answer came.

When things hit you hard, accept the belief that you have the power to find some good that will come out of them, agree to search for it and when you find the answer, there will be no more pain. There will only be good.

I hope you will learn from Mel as much as I have.

I wish you a happy and fulfilling life with lots of acceptance.

Hugs,

 

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