Leadership

Keep the Change: How to create sustainable transformation in your life

By ChantalPosted in Commitment / Courage / In the muck / Inspiration / Leadership / Life / Meaning / Mindset / Perspective / Thriving / Transformation

We live in a world where the word change comes up often. Things are always changing. And it is even said that if you can’t keep up with change, you will become stagnant, irrelevant, redundant. There is so much change that most of us feel like we simply can’t keep up. The pace of change is so staggering that it leaves our heads spinning. And yet, have you ever stopped to consider what the word “change” actually means and how it is not all that helpful to our personal growth and development? […]

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I AM: The two most powerful words in the world

By ChantalPosted in Authenticity / Bias for action / Commitment / Compassion / Connection / Courage / Decision-Making / Goals / Gratitude / Grit / Happiness / Inspiration / Leadership / Life1 Comment

My commitment to changing the level at which I live my life, deepened about four years ago when I decided to embark on the biggest personal transformation of my life. And the most important thing about personal growth and transformation, is that you never arrive. There is never a point of completion. The deeper you go, the more you start to value and appreciate the journey. You fall in love with the process, because you realise that’s all there is.

So, as I write this, I’ve renewed my commitment to being 100% committed to the process and 0% committed to the outcome. I cannot control the outcome. So, there is no point on focusing my energy and attention there. I won’t get me what I yearn for most anyway. So, instead, I fall in love with the process of learning and growing, and I stay on the path towards mastery. I choose to be a student of life and I accept and embrace never arriving. For the rest of my days here on earth, I am a student of life, and I am here to soak up as much love, learning, joy, growth, awe, and inspiration as is available to me.

These renewed commitments stem directly from my attendance at a Game Changer Event with the ultimate mindset coach, Devon Bandison… […]

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Larger Than Life

By ChantalPosted in Authenticity / Courage / Happiness / Inspiration / Leadership / Life / Meaning / Perspective / Thinking / Values

One of my favourite TED Talks is a talk by Caroline McHugh on The Art of Being Yourself. I share it with all my clients at some point, because of the power of her message, which is essentially an invitation to take up the space the universe intended for you.

What does it even mean to take up space? Most of us play small. We hold on to limiting beliefs that has us playing out the same patterns over and over, and we allow fear to stop us from stepping out of those patterns. We tell ourselves stories about what we are capable of and what we are not, and we believe our own stories. We let other people tell us what should matter to us, what our priorities should be, and we spend our lives in fear of the question, “What will people think?” And very often that thought stops us from taking action on the things we value. […]

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Heart-Centred Listening: It’s not a skill. It’s a mindset.

By ChantalPosted in Authenticity / Coaching / Compassion / Connection / Happiness / Leadership / Life / Listening / Love / Meaning / Mindfulness / Mindset / Perspective / Slow down / Story Matters

ly listening to another human being feels like a lost art these days. My great-grandmother used to say that we have one mouth and two ears so that we can listen twice as much as we speak. And she was a great listener. She seldomly spoke, so when she did, I always listened, because I knew that what she had to share would be valuable…

Today I want to talk about far more than simply listening for learning or for our own personal understanding. I want to talk about what it means to listen deeply to another in a way that has you both feeling seen, heard, and deeply connected. […]

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Morning Routines

By ChantalPosted in Commitment / Goals / Happiness / Leadership / Life / Mindfulness / Mindset / Perspective / Planning / Purpose / Self-care / Thriving / Time management

I recently read an interesting article by Sarah K. Peck, a fellow coach and mompreneur, where she questioned the value of morning routines. She highlighted how morning routines have become very popular. These days many famous and successful people attribute their success to a solid morning routine. However, does your morning routine really support you in who you want to become? […]

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Redefining Compassion

By ChantalPosted in Authenticity / Compassion / Courage / Emotional Agility / In the muck / Leadership / Life / Love / Meaning / Mindfulness / Values

During a specific phase of my PhD research, I conducted interviews with participants. One of the questions I would ask interviewees was, “What does compassion mean to you?” I would then follow up that question with a second question, “How do you demonstrate compassion in your own life?”

The aim was to get a sense of what compassion really means to people and how they live compassion in their daily lives. The Oxford Dictionary defines compassion as, “sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others.”

For me personally, that definition feels too narrow. It invites us to feel pity or concern for someone. It evokes within us this sense of feeling sorry for someone about what they are going through. And yet, pity falls short of what is needed. It simply levels compassion akin to sympathy, when my sense is that what is really needed is far more than just feeling sorry for someone. […]

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Dreams are for losers

By ChantalPosted in Authenticity / Bias for action / Commitment / Courage / Decision-Making / Goals / In the muck / Inspiration / Leadership / Life / Meaning / Mindset / Perspective / Thriving

I want to speak to you about a commencement speech Shonda Rhimes gave at her alma mater Dartmouth College in 2014, where she said this simple yet striking line: “Dreams are for losers”. Yes, you heard that right, she said dreams are for losers. She goes on to explain why. At almost every commencement speech someone will tell the graduates to go follow their dreams, or to never stop dreaming. And what Shonda says is that isn’t helpful advice. It won’t actually help you succeed, because dreamers aren’t successful… […]

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Drop abundance

By ChantalPosted in Gratitude / Happiness / Leadership / Life / Meaning / Mindset / Perspective / Thriving / Transformation

If asked, many of us might argue that the opposite of scarcity is abundance, but that’s not accurate. Abundance is not the opposite of scarcity. In his book, Right Now, Steve Chandler challenges the whole notion of striving for abundance and he has changed the way I think about abundance. So today, I want share with you what I’ve learnt. […]

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Of puzzle pieces and postage stamps

By ChantalPosted in Authenticity / Inspiration / Leadership / Life / Love / Meaning / Perspective / Rejection

How many times have you heard the cliché, “you’re unique” and just rolled your eyes? From my perspective, it seems as if people have taken this idea of uniqueness to such an extreme that it has lost its true meaning. The truth is that you are unique. However, how that is often interpreted, is that you are special or different from others in a way that is meant to have you stand out from others. And that is not entirely accurate.

You see we all share certain common traits as human beings. We are all mammals. We are all social animals seeking belonging. We are all meaning seekers and meaning makers. We all experience emotions. We are all capable of critical thought and of creativity. There are certain things that we have in common with other people because we are all human.

That being said, you are still unique in the sense that there is only ONE human like YOU. […]

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