Truly Inspired Mom

A mother was managing a group of kids outside the conference room. She told them ‘Don’t make any noise. No shouting. No laughing’. Her son showed all his teeth and imitated laughing. She then said, ‘You can laugh, but no shouting’. He immediately opened his mouth and said ‘Ahh’. And then she said, ‘Please keep quite, can you?’. They all said yes and stayed quite, even though only for a while. Atleast they obeyed.

Many people don’t understand why I wouldn’t say ‘no’ to Pappu. There are certain things children don’t obey anyway. I just avoid saying ‘no’ in those cases just to save up the value for the word for more appropriate instances and also to teach him that mommy doesn’t deny everything he does.

He runs away from me and I say ‘Baby, please stay close to mommy and be safe’ rather than ‘Don’t run away from me’. He touches the electrical socket and I tell him ‘It’s an electric socket. Only adults touch it when needed’ rather than ‘Don’t touch it.’ He rings the alarm bell in the lift and I tell him, ‘It’s an alarm bell. You use it only when in emergency’ rather than ‘No touching’ or ‘Police will come and get you if you rang the bell’.

It makes more sense to me considering that ‘no’ or ‘don’t’ get opposite results most of the time!

One day I came across a mother with a kid crying in the pram. The mother kept repeating ‘no crying’ to the kid while the child kept crying. What does this teach the child? Is she going to stop crying just because mom had issued a ‘no’? Will she have any value to the word and understand that when there is a ‘no’, she really ain’t going to do it?

One might argue that at the height of anger, it’s not possible to keep track of your words. But it’s also important that by carefully changing the words we speak, we get less angry. It changes the whole outlook we have on life. It’s nothing but changing the order of words in the sentence to deliver the same meaning but in a more positive way.

I used to argue that I’m very positive and that I just don’t believe in this whole ‘spoken words’ thing. But merely changing some of my words taught me how much I was missing even though I had a positive attitude. I just had to remember to say a positive self talk whenever I got angry. The way I handled anger was different.

People say things like Touchwood or Knock on wood. I had a hard time understanding it’s meaning. During my days of extreme disbelief and skepticism, I would argue “what’s in a word?”. Definitely I didn’t know the power of spoken words then. I said that the whole concept was wrong. How can a word affect anyone? But now I know the better.

Digging it a bit, well, words do have certain power and when one says ‘I haven’t been through tough situations like that’, tough times become the dominant thought in their mind and that’s not good. But what good is touching or knocking the wood? Is it meant that spoken words can be undone by this action? Words, once spoken cannot be undone. It can only be diluted.

Recently I read a wonderful example in a book. Let’s say you put a drop of blue ink in a glass of clear water. The water becomes blue. This action cannot be undone, just the way spoken words or thoughts cannot be removed. But if you drop this glass of blue water in a swimming pool, it gets mixed up with the large amount of water in the swimming pool. It is diluted to an extent that you cannot see the blue water anymore.

That’s exactly what I had been trying to do. Whenever possible, I avoid saying sentences in a negative way like the one said above. I try to put it in a positive way, “I have always been blessed with safe and manageable situations”.

If in some case, it came out, I dilute it by speaking positive things again and again. You really don’t have to speak it aloud. But positive self talk alone workds wonderfully.

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But in some cultures, including my own, it is believed that when you have something too good, it is not good to say it aloud or show it off. I have no idea from where the belief originated. May be it’s not right to brag or boast about self, but how can others harm someone by being jealous of them?

I do believe in negative feelings and all, but one can never harm anyone by hating them. Hatred is a strong emotional feeling which is very easily attracted, which might harm only someone who possess strong hatred for others.