Tag Archives: critical

Don’t Take It Personally

What happens to you when your child behaves less than perfectly? When he ignores you or she screams, “I don’t have to listen to you.” Some of you can respond effectively by changing your behavior and addressing whatever the situation is from a different or calmer place, with a different attitude, tone or posture. But probably many of you get your button pushed, think your child is out to get you and yell back behaving just the way you don’t want your child to behave.

The difference is the parent who takes it personally and the parent who doesn’t. So what makes the difference?

When I’m working with parents on this, I often describe the cartoon in my book “When Your Kids Push Your Buttons” on p.86. The mother is trying her hardest to deflect those oncoming critical remarks with a shield, but the onslaught catches her off guard, and she doesn’t get her shield up in time, so the remarks hit her hard. This perfectly illustrates taking it personally. Once those remarks, attitudes, behaviors are allowed to

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Self-Acceptance Must Come Before Change

Sick of making New Year’s resolutions only to forget what they were a month down the road? Why is it that we start the year with all good intentions to get organized, lose weight, be a better parent, relax more, join that gym, etc. only to once again fail so we can beat ourselves up and tell self-deprecating jokes about that resolution that never came to pass?

The reason is because we set ourselves goals rather than taking a hard look below to see what we need in order to do what we want. Goals are external motives and work only as long as our internal intentions are connected to the goals. As the saying goes, our hearts must be in it. But it’s not really our hearts that drive our follow-through. It’s what lies in our unconscious—what we really believe about ourselves, and what accomplishing that goal would really mean.

Dr. Michael Bader of the Institute for Change said in his article on Huffington Post, “The reason that New Year’s resolutions don’t work is that we have unconscious

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