I'm OK, You're OK!

By Ronit Baras | Published: October 28, 2008

“We always do the best we can with what we have”
- Ronit Baras

A very common human expression is “I wish I could go back in time and change something.Then my life would be different. I wish I could have a second chance”. Let’s explore this a bit, shall we?

Pick an event in your life, which you would give anything to go back to and change. Being unfair to someone close, breaking a leg because you weren’t careful enough, getting caught doing something you shouldn’t have done or anything else you wish hadn’t happened. Think of what this events caused in your life – pain, embarrassment, failure, etc, and make sure you’ve chosen an event you feel very strongly about.

Now, roll back your life to the point in time just before that event. But here’s the catch: you can’t take with you any of the knowledge and skills you’ve accumulated since the event. You must go back to being exactly the same you from before the event took place.

Now, ask yourself this question:

Given a second chance, but being exactly who you were then, with the same fears, same understanding, same beliefs, same knowledge, same mindset, could you really change anything?

If your answer is “yes”, then ask yourself this:

Why didn’t you do it differently the first time?

It’s OK. Take a deep breath, think about it, and the answer will come … you couldn’t, because you didn’t know better, or didn’t have the required skills and missed by a second, or whatever the reason. If the same you was put in the very same situation exactly, you would get the exact same results as you did the first time. In fact, you could go back there a million times and still get the exact same results.

How frustrating! Or is it?

When we’ve done this little exercise, and when our clients have done it, we’ve found that, strangely enough, this thought provides total liberation from any guilt feelings we may have had. The reason we did stupid, cruel, painful or boring things was that they were the only things we could do at the time. Sure, now we know better, but then, we didn’t!

But why stop at a single event? If this is true for one event, isn’t it true for every event? Isn’t it true for every decision in our life? Isn’t it true for every single second we live? Sure it is.

So does this mean that we never ever make mistakes, because we always do the only thing we can do? Absolutely! We always do the one and only thing we can do, and it’s always what we consider at the time to be the best thing to do (from our point of view).

Conclusion #1: I’m OK

Let’s expand this to other people now.

First, we can start with the people we like, because it’s easiest to forgive them. You’ll quickly agree that the people you like, much like you, always do the best they can, because they are such good people. Even when they make mistakes, it’s simply because they couldn’t do any better. Therefore, they are OK too.

The next step is a bit harder, especially when we think of people who do seriously bad things, like rape or murder, but it’s as inevitable as all the previous steps. No matter how we may judge another person’s actions, the person himself is doing the best he can under the circumstances. No matter how “bad” the other person is, their genetics, background and experiences have gotten them to do what we consider to be bad, but it was still what they thought best for them.

Conclusion #2: Everyone else is OK

All this is fine and good, but what do we do with it?

Well, accepting yourself (conclusion #1) will help you relax a great deal and increase your self-confidence. It will eliminate guilt, which is a destructive feeling, from your life forever. You will be free to focus on getting the best outcomes without worrying about things too much. This will, in turn, improve the results you see in your life.

Accepting others (conclusion #2) will help your relationships tremendously, because you will no longer judge other people’s actions and words. You will become very helpful to others, being able to support them in whatever they do. You will be forgiving, because you don’t take anyone else’s actions personally. After all, they are doing the best they can. Forgiveness will help you eliminate anger. This will, in turn, improve the results you see in your life, because people around you will return your kindness and help you too.

“If I could tell the world just one thing, it would be that we’re all OK”
- Jewel

Jewel said it the best way. Yes, If I could, It would be that we’re all OK, no matter what. I have chosen to dedicate my life to teaching acceptance. I want to live you with words of hope.

“Everything will be OK in the end. If it’s not OK, it’s not the end”
- Ronit Baras

Love and blessings of happiness and acceptance,
Ronit

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Make This World a Better Place

By Ronit Baras | Published: October 27, 2008

“There are two ways of spreading light – to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it”
- Edith Wharton

It’s looking around the world, at what is happening with starving people and violence, which makes me feel small and helpless sometimes. I can remember thinking about it ever since I was 15 years old, like Atlas, carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. I wrote poetry, listened to Joan Baez and wrote John Lennon’s words of “Imagine” on my notebooks.

Have you ever been asked about the teachers that influenced your life? Well, it’s happened to me quite a few times, and I’ve always given the same answer. Reuben.

It was in grade 11. I was on the school council and headed the newsletter committee. One day, five of us were sitting in the principal’s office, accompanied by the teacher who had supported us for the entire year. This teacher, Reuben, had a family of his own, yet he spent hours with us, during breaks and after school, something no other teacher ever did. He sat on “our” side, facing the principal, and moved our chairs into a circle, breaking the authoritative seating arrangement.

Later on that evening, I asked, “Reuben, why are you doing this? Why are you spending all this time with us?” and he said something that changed my life forever. “If I make a difference in the life of the five of you and each of you will make a difference in the life of some other five, it’ll spread, and together we will make this world a better place”.

I think that, inside of me, I came up with the belief that his words were the answer to easing the load of the world. Each of us will make Heaven on Earth with the people around us, and together we will make this world a better place.

You see, he never said anything about the pace, about how long we’ll have to live until this starts affecting others. He didn’t even say anything about how to do it.

It was only 5 years later, when I studied Special Education, that I learned the 7% rule, which made another change in my life (except for the other million changes that happened every second in my life up until then). I figured out how to do it. I came to study Special Education with his words inside of me and was a bit surprised to find out that words make up only 7% of our communication.

You probably understand how devastating it can be for a writer, who treats words as colors in the hand of an artist, to find out that words don’t have that affect because they represent only 7% of communication. I wondered about his words numerous times and realized that what he gave us was his passion, his time, his love, his smile and his faith. He gave us encouragement and the belief in our ability to make a difference. You see, his words were just a summary of a whole year of communicating his belief. He was the candle and we were the mirrors to reflect it.

It changed my life because I realized that what matters is the things I believe in and the things I pass on. I realized that in order to change the world, I needed to change myself. I know that, no matter what I do, I’m a candle, and if I want my mirrors to reflect beautiful light, I have to shine that light. During that time, I dived deeper into the journey of self-discovery, brightening my candle, or the way we now say it at home, “bettering myself”.

Coaching, or personal development, existed since the beginning of humanity. The desire to “better ourselves” is probably carved inside of us and learning is the greatest tool to achieve this.

Brian Tracy, in his books and talks, presents this concept of success as a measurement of the drive to get better and better at things that are important to us. Technically, if every day we get just a tiny bit better, the effect is compounded. This results in faster and faster growth, which is then reflected by all the people around us. Together, we can spread the light.

It’s funny that people typically start the journey of self-discovery at a late stage in their life, when they are fed up with the compromises they’ve made and they want to make changes. Funny, because they had it when they were born, they believed they could do and have anything they wanted, but life gradually strangled that belief.

The most important five people that I chose to spread my light with are Gal and the kids. In our house, we’ve introduced the “bettering myself” concept to our teenage daughter, our 9-year-old son and our 4-year-old daughter. It helped us change life from an unconscious existence of doing things “because Mum told me to”, or “because everyone does it”, into a sequence of purposeful actions.

We ask questions like “What can I do today to better myself?” or “Is what I’m doing now going to help me better myself?” When a kid is bettering himself, because he is so young, can you imagine what he can achieve in a lifetime? Purposeful children never get to be fed up, because they ask themselves these question every day and learn to be responsible for their life.

The bad news: time flies. The good news: you are the pilot

When you are an adult, you might see the bad news, but children are born to embrace the good news. It is amazingly powerful to be in full control, to be the pilot.

I think Reuben was a “kid” who realized not only that he is the pilot of his own life, but also that he is somehow a pilot of the life of all the people he’s in contact with. I think he changed our life and made this world a better place by believing and spreading this belief, by making sure that the other 93% of communication will come out shiny and enlightening.

I know now that my writing to you represents only 7% of my belief and that you all know the other 93%. So if you do feel sometimes that there are bad things in the world, that we have too many wars, fear or hunger, think of the light that is fading and brighten your light by looking at the mirror.

Until next time, have a safe journey of “bettering yourself”.

May the force be with you!
Ronit

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Avoid penalties

By Gal Baras | Published: May 15, 2008

Motivation, as you may know, has two sides: pain and pleasure. Unfortunately, pain is a stronger motivator. At the same time, being inundated by threats creates an atmosphere of fear and stress. Who wants to live like this?

One day, I was standing at the post office, waiting to be served, and in front of me in life were a few people, who cam to pay their bills there. While I was waiting, I looked around, and noticed a rather large sign behind the counter, which said in red, bold letter, “Avoid Penalties!”

The people who come to the post office to pay their bills are usually (and I’m not saying always) the kind of people who get a short paycheck and calculate every cent of their expenses, while being unaware of, or unable to use, automatic payment means, credit cards, etc. Many of them have bills hanging over their heads anyway, they’re afraid of losing their job, not making mortgage payments, disconnections and other threats, and now they are being warned of penalties?

Often, when I drive on the highway, I see a sign saying “Wear a seatbelt or wear a fine”, another one saying “Speed cameras are operated in this area” or even one asking “Which one would you rather ride tonight?” and showing a taxi and a police car (that one’s for people thinking of driving drunk).

Obviously, we want drivers to behave on the road and to drive safely, but what happens when the incentive given is to avoid being caught? I know I keep my eyes on the speedometer, which is really not where I should be looking when I drive. I should be looking at the road. I know that drivers, especially young ones, see these signs as a challenge and do their best to drive too fast or while intoxicated and not get caught.

Now, I can’t do much about the sign at the post office, but I did write to the government department in charge of the highway and said, “How about writing on the sign something like ‘Thank you for driving safely’?”

Well, after quite a long time, I got a call from a man, who said he was really sorry, but he couldn’t approve such a change. When I asked him why, he said “Because I don’t have the authority to approve sign changes”. I asked him, “In that case, why did you ring me? Go ahead and escalate my suggestion to the person with the proper authority”.

“Oh, no, I can’t do that”, he said. Go figure.

A few months later, I saw a sign that said “Good morning”, which was a nice start, but not quite there yet.

Anyway, my point is that threats send the wrong message to people, a disempowering message, telling them to conform to other people’s rules. Instead, it would be better to use positive reasons, even provide a “what’s in it for me” description to motivate people to do things.

My other point is that you can help change this motivation style in your immediate environment (with your employees, suppliers, kids, etc) and you can also contact the appropriate authorities and ask them if they wouldn’t mind creating a positive world through their messages to the public.

Good luck! Let me know how you go through the comment box below.

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Charity vs. Life Coaching

By Gal Baras | Published: May 14, 2008

I have a feeling this post will get some responses, so by all means, if you have something to say, post a comment below.

As a life coach, my role is to empower people. From my point of view, every person has all the power in the world to achieve great and wonderful things, but that’s not the way most people are brought up, so I help my clients find the power inside them and become independent in their thinking, feelings and actions.

Now, if you’re living in suburbia like me, and especially if you’re working from home like me, you have heard the knock on the door, gone to see who it was and found someone collecting donations for charity. They range from extremely nice to disabled (and sometimes both), and use their charm and rehearsed pitch to get you to part with some money. Sometimes it’s a raffle ticket, sometimes it’s a poor child in some third world country and sometimes it’s a local community organization. All good and noble causes.

Call me cruel, but I always feel that charity money ends up prolonging the problems it is collected for. For instance, children in third world countries are poor because their parents feel helpless and cannot see a way out of their situation. Another example is a person with some disability, who comes up to my door and asks for my donation, because they cannot go to work, which makes me thing they could actually work as a door-to-door salesperson just as well.

When a person is given handouts, they build an identity of need. When the handouts stop, the person cannot survive without them. The alternative is to support organizations that develop infrastructure and teach people how to take care of themselves. There are such organizations, but they seem to be few and far between.

A very big issue in Australia is the money given to Aboriginal people, which they end up using to buy beer and get drunk. This is also the case with many Native American in reservations. Both of these situations arise from giving money to people who want something else – the feeling that they have power over their own life. These examples are extreme, but they illustrate the issue well.

Don’t get me wrong, from the point of view of the person donating, this is great. It’s an act of kindness and sharing and it feels really good. However, from the point of view of the recipient, more often than not it develops a dependence on others and takes their power away.

I would like to encourage you to donate to organizations that build and empower individuals and communities, rather than giving money to people.  If you can, instead of giving money, volunteer your time and support the needy by teaching them skills and encouraging them to be self-sufficient as much as possible.

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Is your computer (or your TV) controlling your life?

By Gal Baras | Published: May 13, 2008

image Some time ago, I attended a seminar, which wasn’t supposed to be about personal growth (it was meant to be rather technical), but ended up having more personal growth content than anything else. Unlike others in the room, I was pretty happy about it.

This seminar took place in a big room and each participant had to bring a laptop in order to do the various technical exercises, so in front of every person, there was a bright screen, glowing in the overall darkness of the room. During presentations, people couldn’t keep from using their computers – they checked their emails, chatted with friends (some even in the same room), typed their notes and various other things.

But, like I said, much of the presentation content was about personal growth, particularly with respect to operating a business. Obviously, no computers were needed for that. At some point, one of the presenters even asked everyone to close their laptops and interact, make lists and so on. Yet, some laptops stayed open, and over time, more and more were opened and their owners went back to their email checking, document editing and God knows what else.

Eventually, the main speaker came on stage and said to everyone, “You know, the presenters here today are giving you information you cannot find anywhere else on the planet. Some of you have flown here from other cities and paid for hotel accommodations, flights and other things. One of the key messages of this seminar is ‘focus’, and you are letting your laptops control your life”.

There was a very unpleasant silence in the room. He went on, “If you think about it, everything you have on this laptop can wait. You can configure your email to send and receive only when you choose, and you can choose not to do it. You can log out of your chat program and Messenger and IP telephone. You can close the cover of your laptop and it will stop showing you pictures and making sounds at you.”

“More than this”, he continued, “You can turn off you mobile phones, which some of you have been using in the middle of presentations to send SMS messages on. And when you go back home, you can turn the TV off and you can turn your stereo system off and you can even close the door, if that’s what you need in order to FOCUS on getting what you want out of life.”

Because having a laptop computer or a blackberry or a mobile phone can make you feel really important. A TV or a computer can keep you interested and even busy for hours and hours. But if you want to finish the important things in life and get RESULTS, you need to control all of these devices, rather than letting them control you.

All of your software, your computer, you mobile phone and your TV have an “off” button, so you can turn them off when you want. Having them on and paying attention to them is YOUR CHOICE, so remember that every minute away from what’s important is also your choice, and you are free to choose differently!

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Get a life coach

By Gal Baras | Published: May 8, 2008

In recent years, there is a booming industry of self-proclaimed personal growth gurus, who claim to be able to unparalleled impart wisdom on the masses without leaving the comfort of their home, through the Internet or the telephone or maybe from the stage. To a certain extent, this works, because many more people get information and knowledge they could not afford or technically access otherwise.

But here’s the problem: much of what we need to discover in life is PERSONAL, and no matter how good a public program is, personal growth is, well, personal. So these programs do a great job of awakening people and giving them a taste of something good. You don’t know what you don’t know, right? So sampling some personal growth goodies, getting an overview of this, that and the other, and even spending some serious time following somebody’s program are all good things, but they are only the beginning.

To really get your life in gear, you have to deal with your own baggage and make sense of it – remove limiting beliefs, change focus, set goals, build relationship skills – based on who you are and what YOU want.

To do this, I highly recommend working with a life coach.

A life coach is a professional friend. It’s someone who cares for you and guides you with a method. It’s someone who has collected ideas and possible solutions from working with many people and can gently direct you towards finding your own best way forward.

I’ve personally been coached 3 times already. Each time, I grew tremendously as a person. Each time, I opened up and became happier than ever before. Each time, I learned new things and acquired new skills to handle my time, my business, my relationships and my emotions. It was brilliant!

The nicest thing for me about coaching was that it transferred the power in my life into my hands. I had not realized how powerful I was until I sat down and faced my mental blocks head on, took ownership of my feelings and let go of what other people felt and did. Many of the concepts were strange to me at first, but ultimately, I learned to focus on what works.

In the past, people wanted to be respected, to be wealthy, to be famous or to have “a good job”. Nowadays, most people just want to be happy. In essence, life coaching is an excellent way to work on a personal level with another human being and learn how to be happy YOUR WAY.

For more on life coaching, see this life coaching page.

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What do you think of yourself?

By Gal Baras | Published: May 6, 2008

As a life coach, one of the things I present to people are beliefs. This word is related to religion for most people, but in life coaching, it simply means “what you consider to be true”. For example, you may have a belief that anybody taking their clothes off during a soccer game must be nuts. They might dispute this belief, but you still think it’s true.

The thing with beliefs is that we make decisions based on them. So you might expect people to confirm their beliefs and validate them before using them to decide what to do, especially in matters of importance. Well, as scary as this may seem, they don’t. Oh, and neither do you.

You see, our beliefs are very dear to us, so we protect them. They are dear to us because they make our world more predictable and understandable and thus safer. So when we were born, we hurried up and absorbed beliefs from our environment – from our parents, from TV, from school and pretty much everywhere else – and, in many cases, we absorbed beliefs that have nothing to do with reality and everything to do with what our parents thought, but that was fine for us, because we didn’t know any better.

So far, what I’ve described is natural and happens to everyone. What happens next is that our beliefs determine our behavior and therefore the results we get. If we were told as kids “You’re no good at sports”, we stay away from sports, and then we put on weight. If we were told as kids “Wow, you do math so easily”, we do more math, so we become even better at it, until we become accountants.

Yet, as we grow up, most of us get a feeling that life could be better. There’s got to be more to life than working 8-6 (anyone still remember 9-5?), facing a computer all day long and trying to have a life during weekends and annual leave. So we read books on change and we go to seminars and we listen to audio programs and some of us even see a life coach (they’re the ones that get the best results, by the way), and we do our best to change.

So here’s a great exercise for you, which you can do as often as you like, whenever you have some time to yourself.

  1. Find a quiet spot (sorry, all my “do it yourself” tips start with this bit)
  2. Take a few deep, long breathes
  3. On a piece of paper, write down the question “What kind of a person am I?”
  4. As fast as you can, without picking up the pen from the paper, write down as many answers as you can. If you get stuck, scribble. Keep at it for 3 minutes
  5. Each of the statements you have written is a belief. For each belief
    1. Ask yourself “Is this helping me to think of myself like this?”
    2. If your answer is “no”, find exceptions to the statement, i.e. examples of when it is not true
    3. Ask yourself “What would be a better (more empowering) way to think of myself?”
    4. Write an alternative statement and feel its power

If you need some help sorting out your beliefs, seek the help of a life coach. This is what life coaches do for a living and you’ll be happy you did.

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Leap of Faith – How to Become Great

By Gal Baras | Published: May 2, 2008

Our modern culture is full of “get <something> quick” books, seminars, presentations, advertising and so on – get rich quick, get personal growth quick, get instant cash, get instant hair growth – we’ve all seen them everywhere. In many of them, the source presents the argument “If I can do it, so can you!”Moreover, the presenter, author or advertiser tells us “I will show you how to do it step by step”.

So a lot of people attend the seminars, buy the books or audio visual programs and do their best to follow the advice of the mostly-self-proclaimed “guru”. However, only few succeed.

Why is this? Why do so many people fail to get the money, the personal growth or the fitness, even when presented with a bullet-proof, step-by-step method, coming from a live example of success?

Good question.  I’m glad you asked.

In all the personal growth and wealth creation material I’ve heard and read, invariably there is the bit where you must let go of your current thinking and adopt the thinking proposed by the new system. “All you have to do is buy <this, that and the other>, learn <some skills>, spend some time every day <doing what I tell you to do> and voilà, your life will change forever”, says your guide-of-the-day, but, try as you might, you cannot see yourself spending that initial amount of money or that initial amount of time.

Another recommendation we find hard to follow is “Delegate. Don’t do everything yourself. Pay others to do the routine tasks for you and focus on strategy”. This means (oh, my God) having to spend money on an ongoing basis, which is even harder than a one-time amount.

“Well, that’s natural”, you say, “How do I know I won’t just lose that money and time I’ve spent and get nothing in return?” In fact, that’s what most people say, and it’s exactly why they don’t make it big like their mentors say they can.

The missing ingredient is a leap of faith. If you got anything out of “What the Bleep Do We Know” and “The Secret”, it should have been that our beliefs and focus change our universe. The people who fail or get limited success do not have the belief that THEY can do it. Their focus is therefore on justifying this belief by finding reasons for their lack of success and then ways to actually not succeed. They subconsciously ask the question “Why can I not do this?”.

The successful people, on the other hand, have faith in their ability to follow through and in their ability to judge good advice. They immediately start focusing on “How will I do this?”

My life coaching instructor told us time and time again “‘Why’ is a past-facing question. If you ask your coaching clients ‘why’, they will look to their past for the answers. ‘How’ is a future-facing question. This question you should ask your coaching clients often”.

So here’s your chance to coach yourself to riches, fitness or personal growth success. Find a quiet place to sit, close your eyes, take a deep breath and relax. First, imagine your mentor’s success and see yourself with them, having achieved your goals and succeeded. Then, go over all the successes you’ve had in the past, reliving the awesome feeling of completion and achievement. Finally, walk yourself through how YOU will carry out each of the steps in the new method. As you do this, make a note of the challenges you may face along the way, and recall how you’ve overcome similar challenges in your life.

When you open your eyes, for each of the remaining challenges, write down the question “How will I <get the desired result>?” and keep the list in your pocket. Your subconscious will know it’s there and will keep finding solutions for you until it finds them all.

[Solution ideas: save, borrow, plan, network, ask, partner, use the Internet, use the 80/20 rule, breathe deeply, smile]

Repeat this self-coaching session with yourself daily (oh, yes you can!) , until you get all the answers and achieve success, because YOU CAN.

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Personal Growth vs. Financial Success

By Gal Baras | Published: April 30, 2008

Let’s face it, most of the people we know measure themselves and others by the perception of their “net worth”. They may not know what others are “worth”, but that doesn’t stop them from making wild guesses, based on external appearances, like clothes, cars and house, and decide whether a person is successful in life or not.

This influence gets many people stuck in life. They look at their own bank account and think “Oh, my God, I am such a failure”, while there is much in their life they could see as success. There are others who sacrifice many important things in their life, but their bank balance is large, so they think “Gee, I am so successful, why am I so miserable?”.

Now, I don’t contest the importance of financial comfort, because our world is a lot nicer when we have money. What I am saying is that the link between the amount of money you have and how successful in life is not 1:1. In fact, anyone can see themselves as a success in some areas, sometimes even more so than compared with “the rich people”.

Here are some “personal growth” things that will get you feeling successful in no time:

  1. No matter what decision you ever make, it always has a down side. The decision only has to do with what is more important to you. This means that you are always more successful than you could be, had you chosen differently, according to your own priorities. Whenever you make a decision, you choose the most successful option by your definition.
    So when you evaluate your life, remember that by your standards, you are as successful as you could be.
  2. The flip side, of course, is to look at what other people sacrifice in order to gain their financial success – time with their kids, broken marriage, lost friends, stress-induced medical conditions and lots more. When you look at their decisions, their down side may be your up side, and your time with your kids, your loving relationships and your health are your successes, even if you’ve had to give up money to have them.
    When you die, seeing the face of people who love you is a lot more comforting than knowing you have money in the bank…
  3. Brian Tracey, a truly remarkable man, says that success is a matter of focus and that one should focus on learning and growth, instead of achievements. It may take some time to hit a goal, so keeping motivated can be a challenge on days when nothing is finished. Brian Tracey suggests to focus on improvements instead. Every day, you can be successful at being a bit better than yesterday at something.
    Measure you skill levels at various things and set daily goals to improve them. The compounding of these improvements will take you a long way, but more importantly, you will feel like a success all the time.

[Just to be absolutely clear, many rich people also have friends and lead a good life outside of work. I sincerely hope no rich people have been hurt in the process of creating this post :D ]

What I’m saying is that the starting point of each one of us is different, so comparing people based on any single factor is ridiculous, let alone a perceived factor. Broaden your definition of success and make it your own. Decide what’s important for YOU, break it down to little bits, conquer them daily and feel successful all the time.

That should put a big smile on your face!

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Making Things Personal

By Gal Baras | Published: April 29, 2008

In over 4 decades of living, I’ve had the misfortune of getting into all kinds of arguments with people. I’m sure you have, too, at least to some extent. However, possibly the most common cause for these arguments was the other person’s insistence on making thing personal. Some time ago, I bumped into this phenomenon in a book on Rational Emotive Behavior Analysis, which even gave it a name: personalizing.

In the great all-time book “Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance”, humanity is split into those who are mostly concerned with the structure (or form) of things and those who only care about the function (or meaning) of things. I’m here to tell you that people can be as easily divided into those who are precise in the way they talk and those who take everything personally :D

Here’s an example.

Mr. Smith: Darling, you’ve left your socks on the bathroom floor.

Mrs. Smith: Are you saying I’m messy?

This sort of interpretation will get you into all kinds of strife and very quickly. Let’s keep going.

Mr. Smith: No, dear, I was just thinking you might have dropped them there.

Mrs. Smith: So now you’re saying I’m careless, too?

Mr. Smith: Of course not. I’m only trying to help you.

Mrs. Smith (starting to get edgy): I don’t need any help. I can manage on my own, thank you very much.

Mr. Smith: I’m going to go downstairs for a bit.

Mrs. Smith: You just don’t want to be with me anymore, is that it?

… and so on and so forth.

Of course, this conversation could start with other things, like “You’ve made a typo”, “Watch the speedometer, dear”, “Why don’t we ask for directions?” and pretty much anything else that can be even a slight suggestion of something bad in the listener.

My theory is that such responses originate from growing up with people who did not distinguish between action- or behavior-level comments (“You’ve left the light on”) and identity-level comments (“You’re so irresponsible”).

You see, identity-level statements cause the subject to raise shields and go into red alert, in an attempt to protect their self-image. Having a childhood full of those creates a fearful and defensive person, who is too quick to perceive emotional danger to let even behavior-level statements slide.

So what to do? Well, the best thing to do is to avoid criticizing such a person at all. Instead, wait until they exhibit the desired behavior and then comment loudly and proudly on their exceptional abilities at keeping the bathroom floor free of socks.

If you’re in a real hurry, you MAY get away with slipping your comment unnoticed as the 4th or 5th statement, as in “Darling, you look wonderful today! Your hair looks so nice, your shirt color matches your eyes and you seem like you’re all set to go. Could you just pick up those socks from the bathroom floor?”

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