Life Archives - Page 10 of 11 - Chantal Breytenbach Coaching

Permission to drop some balls

In a conversation about resilience the other day, the topic of balancing priorities came up again, and I was reminded of the metaphor shared by Bryan Dyson, erstwhile President and CEO of Coca-Cola Enterprises…

“Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling some five balls in the air. You name them – work, family, health, friends, and spirit – and you’re keeping all of these in the air. You will soon understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. But the other four balls – family, health, friends, and spirit – are made of glass. If you drop one of these, they will be irrevocably scuffed, marked, nicked, damaged, or even shattered. They will never be the same. You must understand that and strive for balance in your life.” […]

Partnering with you Calendar: Schedule your Big Rocks first

Posted on October 21, 2020By ChantalPosted in Decision-Making / Happiness / In the muck / Life / Meaning / Mindset / Perspective / Slow down / Thinking / Time management / Transformation

A feature of our modern lifestyles is busyness. It’s become a marker of how successful and productive we are. If you aren’t busy, then you are obviously not productive and possibly also not very successful. We’ve bought into this false belief that success requires us to be busy all the time. Consequently, I have clients who tell my they feel guilty when they slow down, take a break, or don’t have something to do. And I must admit that I myself have at times felt that I need to be busy. I’m a dynamic person. I like to stay busy and I find it hard to relax, slow down, or do nothing.

I am productive and I do get a lot done, but it’s not because I stay busy just for the sake of being busy. It’s because I discovered a secret of time management years ago that servers me to this day. Once I started applying this secret to my life, I could never go back. It has freed me from a need to overschedule or overburden myself. When I schedule my time, I do it with conscious intention and clarity about what truly matters and what I WANT to be spending my time on. […]

How to turn a limestone quarry into a lush garden

Posted on August 20, 2020By ChantalPosted in Courage / Failure / Grit / Happiness / In the muck / Life / Meaning / Mindset / Passion / Perspective / Resilience / Transformation

Last Summer, I took a trip with my family to Vancouver Island, British Columbia and we paid a visit to The Butchart Gardens. As stated on their website: “The Butchart Gardens is a must-see oasis over 100 years in the making”. And what a privilege it was to take in the beauty of this place that stands as a testament to what is possible when one has a grand vision. The story of The Butchart Gardens has some hidden life lessons and it is also one of the most interesting family business success stories rarely told… […]

Getting to Know your Inner Critic

Posted on August 7, 2020By ChantalPosted in Decision-Making / Failure / Life / Mindfulness / Mindset / Perspective / Resilience / Thinking

Imagine for a moment that you are a landlord, and you have a tenant who has been living on the upstairs floor of your house for as long as you can remember. The tenant is loud and opinionated, and has, on many occasions, kept you up at night. You’ve considered evicting them, but you always avoid confrontation instead. Besides, maybe the tenant is right. Maybe your demands are too much, or you are being unreasonable and inflexible. The tenant doesn’t contribute anything to the environment you share, and criticizes you anytime you try to make an improvement in your living conditions. They don’t even pay rent! In fact, it costs YOU to have them stay in your home. And yet you let them stay.

Now you might be thinking, “no way! I would never put up with that!” And yet you do! Sometimes for decades… […]

Expanding your definition of Mindfulness

Posted on July 25, 2020By ChantalPosted in Happiness / Life / Meaning / Mindfulness / Mindset / Perspective / Slow down / Thinking

I recently read an article on Medium by Chloé Milne, where she shared how on a flight from Melbourne to Hong Kong, she lost faith in the practice of formal meditation to manage her anxiety. After trying to practice meditation and mindfulness for a couple of hours with simply no effect on how much anxiety she was experiencing during the flight, she replaced her meditation practice with a form of laughter therapy by watching a funny movie instead. In her article she shares the consequent insights she gained since that experience on the value of laughter as a way to quiet the incessant fear and anxiety she was experiencing, and to return to mindfulness.

Milne’s story got me thinking about the practice of mindfulness. It has been a buzzword for the last two decades, and although many people are actively seeking to be more mindful, or trying out different mindfulness practices, it’s almost as if we don’t really have a clear understanding of what mindfulness actually is. We tend to cling to very narrow definitions of the concept that lead us to believe that mindfulness can only be achieved through meditation, deep breathing exercises, practicing yoga, or journaling.

The problem with this narrow way of defining the practice of mindfulness, is that we can limit our range of experience or sometimes completely exclude ourselves from experiencing what mindfulness is. […]

In pursuit of happiness

Posted on July 24, 2020By ChantalPosted in Decision-Making / Gratitude / Happiness / Life / Meaning / Mindset / Passion / Perspective / Thinking

In his 2016 book Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari speculates about the different projects that humanity will be pursuing in the future, which will inevitably lead to the creation or evolution of the next genus homo, which he calls Homo Deus. Harari paints an accurate picture of future trends to come of which we are already seeing signs everywhere. Future projects of humanity include: overcoming death, creating artificial life and finding the answer to happiness. Thus, the pursuit of happiness is on most people’s agendas.

Given that the newest research findings by Martin Seligman, Peter Railton, Roy Baumeister and Chandra Sripada indicate that human beings are hard-wired to anticipate and plan for the future, we can understand why it is so difficult for people to focus only on the present, and why millions of people buy books on meditation and mindfulness in attempts to learn how to stay present and find that ever-elusive thing called happiness.

But have you ever wondered why happiness feels so elusive? And why we are hard-wired to keep looking for it? In fact, most people try to actively avoid anything that will detract from their happiness. We have difficulty being with difficult emotions and we often pursue various forms of stimulation and entertainment in our desperate search for happiness… […]

Contemplating Death

Posted on July 14, 2020By ChantalPosted in Gratitude / Happiness / Life / Meaning / Perspective / Thinking

I recently read The Untethered Soul by Michael A. Singer, and in the penultimate chapter he encourages the reader to contemplate death. I found this suggested practice aligned with the Stoic practice of negative visualisation which involves imagining what life would be like without the people or things you love in an attempt to help you appreciate what you have more. We tend to take the people closest to us for granted, and we tend to ignore the simple yet profound things in our life that actually make our lives worth living. […]

Let go of finding your passion: Rather aim to develop your interests

Posted on July 1, 2020By ChantalPosted in Decision-Making / Grit / Happiness / In the muck / Life / Meaning / Passion / Perspective

When it comes to choosing a career or making a career transition, many career experts and graduation commencement speakers offer the advice that you should “find your passion”. Most people today find themselves stuck in lives and careers not of their own making. Sometimes out of desperation, and perhaps also with some hope for something better, they absorb messages proclaimed by books like the 4-hour work week. They then believe that if they could only discover their passion and find the right formula for living and working, they could live happy and productive lives and pursue meaningful jobs that ignite a fire in their bellies. However, once they start down that path, they soon discover that the Utopia that was promised is not within their reach. Thought-provoking articles like the one by Penelope Trunk entitled “5 Time management tricks I learned from years of hating Tim Ferriss” forces us to think again about the “truths” espoused by all these promises of passion and productivity. […]

Our Search for Meaning

Posted on June 4, 2020By ChantalPosted in Happiness / Life / Meaning

Ever wonder why you have that constant urge for something more in your life and career? That elusive job, that something bigger than yourself, or that special relationship that will give your life more meaning? Something that will motivate you to greater heights and make you a happier person? What drives these urges?

Perhaps a real-life story will provide some insight into this intriguing question. One of my heroes, is a man called Viktor Frankl. Given my background in psychology and organisational behaviour, I’m deeply familiar with theories of motivation that try to explain behaviour and motivation through the idea that we are striving to get different needs satisfied. However, Frankl convinced me that we have overlooked one of the most powerful needs that it at the core of all human behaviour – the need for meaning. […]

If you must fail, make sure you fail spectacularly

Posted on May 17, 2020By ChantalPosted in Failure / In the muck / Life

I think we can all agree that we live in unprecedented times. Almost daily, we are being challenged to show up differently and do things differently. Individuals and organisations are being challenged to find new ways of moving forward during this pandemic.

It might not look like it, but you do have a few choices here. You can “wait it out”, i.e. hide away or stay low and wait for all of this to pass and things to get back to normal. The problem you have with this choice is that you are putting your life on hold indefinitely, since there is no precise timeline for when exactly we will resume our “normal” lives – if ever. There are also no guarantees that we will ever go back to the way things were before this pandemic started. And then of course you are also choosing to press the pause button on your life and remain in limbo, which can become frustrating and leave you feeling trapped, isolated, alone, even desperate. Not my favourite option, I must admit. […]