Thinking Archives - Page 4 of 6 - Chantal Breytenbach Coaching

What’s your relationship to wanting and dreaming?

Whenever I’m in conversation with a new person, I invite them to dream. I invite them to consider what they want. For some peole, it’s easy to know what they want. They find it easy to dream. And for others, knowing what they want, knowing the longing of their own heart, feels unreachable or impossible. The experiences of their past are so painful, or they have fallen into pleasing others and morphing themselves into whatever they think others want them to be, so much so, that they lose their sense of who they are and what they want.

I remember a time in my life when I was so busy adapting who I was being to try and be more loveable or acceptable to others, that I had no sense of who I was. During those times, I found it hard to dream. I found it hard to even begin to know what I wanted outside of asking others’ opinions about what they thought I should want.

Recently, my coach Amber Krzys, shared an email with the title What’s your relationship to wanting? And that got me thinking… […]

Heart and Mind Goals

Posted on January 17, 2023By ChantalPosted in Bias for action / Commitment / Completions / Goals / Inspiration / Leadership / Life / Mindset / Planning / Purpose / Slow down / Thinking / Thriving / Time management

Today, I want to say a little more about setting goals. As I’ve shared before, I’m not a big fan of traditional New Year’s resolutions. I believe that when we are setting goals, these goals should come from our highest most authentic self, our Inner Wisdom or Inner Leader. When our goals come from this place, they are aligned with who we want to be in the world and what we feel called to create and bring into the world. When our goals come from our Ego, or from our sense of how we see ourselves falling short when we compare ourselves with others, then our goals are essentially SHOULDS and not WANTS. […]

Slow down and turn around: Honouring Completions

Posted on December 28, 2022By ChantalPosted in Celebrations / Completions / Decision-Making / Failure / Goals / Life / Meaning / Planning / Purpose / Slow down / Thinking1 Comment

The New Year often evokes within most of us the need to set new year’s resolutions. It’s an invitation to start anew with a clean slate. And it’s been my experience that so often people are so eager to move forward, that they don’t take the time to slow down, turn around, and look back to where they had come from.

At the end of last year, I wrote about the value of celebrations and why I think it’s important to choose to celebrate our successes and milestones. My thoughts here are an extension of the discussion on celebrations because I also believe there is value in truly honouring completions… […]

Larger Than Life

Posted on October 11, 2022By 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. […]

The secret to becoming an adult is to embrace your inner child

Posted on May 31, 2022By ChantalPosted in Decision-Making / Happiness / In the muck / Life / Meaning / Mindset / Perspective / Thinking / Transformation

Recently, I wrote about how most of us are beating up on ourselves for not knowing how to be adults. I shared that life doesn’t come with an instruction manual, so none of us really know what it means to be an adult. We are all trying to figure it out. In Elizabeth Benton’s incredible book, Chasing Cupcakes, she talks about how to take responsibility and create the life that you want, and she essentially shares two rules for adulting. […]

What if fear is not a bad thing?

Posted on April 18, 2022By ChantalPosted in Courage / Emotional Agility / Goals / In the muck / Leadership / Life / Mindset / Perspective / Planning / Resilience / Thinking / Thriving

The other day I was helping a client work through a lot of fear and anxiety she was feeling. The way she was relating to fear was that it was a bad thing and that she shouldn’t feel so scared. And so often we do that, right? We resist the fear, telling ourselves that we shouldn’t be fearful. Yet, what we resist persists. So, the more we try and ignore our fear, the bigger it seems to get. Eventually it’s like this dark looming cloud.

Susan David says, “real courage is not fearlessness, it’s fear walking”. And she has a point. However, have you ever considered WHY you experience fear in the first place? […]

Why it serves you to do a year-end review

Posted on December 13, 2021By ChantalPosted in Decision-Making / Failure / Gratitude / Happiness / Life / Meaning / Perspective / Planning / Purpose / Self-care / Slow down / Story Matters / Thinking / Values

Most businesses are familiar with year-end reviews. However, I’m also an advocate for a personal year-end review. I first learned about the idea of a personal year-end review from Sarah Peck. And what I appreciate about her approach is that it is not simply about going through your list of goals to identify which ones you hit and which ones you failed to hit. No, rather a year-end review is a slowed down, deep reflection about your year. It’s an invitation to identify what you celebrate about this year, what you are most proud of, what you’ve learnt, and how you’ve grown over the last year.

Looking back over your year also helps you put into perspective the year ahead and where you want to focus your energy in the year ahead. I will share two methods here with you for doing your personal year-end review. […]

Two ways of being with disappointment

Posted on December 12, 2021By ChantalPosted in Decision-Making / Emotional Agility / Failure / Happiness / In the muck / Life / Meaning / Mindset / Perspective / Resilience / Thinking / Transformation / Values1 Comment

How we respond to disappointment is often influenced by our upbringing and the beliefs we’ve internalised about how much control we have in life. According to Manfred Kets de Vries, the way we choose to handle disappointment is strongly related to our developmental history — our relationship with our parents and other early, formative experiences. What I want to share here today, is two different ways of being in the world and how they affect how we deal with disappointment when others let us down.

The two ways of being in the world and in relationship with others is either being an underachiever (i.e., having low or no expectations), or being an overachiever (i.e., having unreasonably high expectations). […]

Using disappointment as a catalyst for inspiration

Posted on December 12, 2021By ChantalPosted in Decision-Making / Emotional Agility / Failure / Grit / Happiness / In the muck / Life / Meaning / Mindset / Perspective / Resilience / Thinking / Transformation / Values1 Comment

In life, disappointments are inevitable, because of the simple fact that we don’t control everything that happens in life. How you choose to deal with disappointments in your life, can become a defining moment for you.

In his thought-provoking article on Dealing with Disappointment, Manfred Kets de Vries postulates that expectations lie at the root of all heartache and disappointment. Think about it, would you be disappointment about something if you didn’t have any expectations about how it was supposed to be? Your disappointment stems from the fact that what you had imagined or hoped would happen, did not align with what transpired in reality. It’s like Brad Warner says, disappointment is what you feel “when your brain is trying to readjust itself to reality after discovering that things are not the way you thought they were”.

Some disappointments are insignificant in the larger view of your life. They are easily filtered out by asking yourself the question, “will this matter a year from now?” If the answer is no, simply let it go.

However, some disappointments can change the course of your life. They can become character defining moments. You see, it doesn’t matter that you feel disappointment. It only matters how you choose to deal with your disappointment as you take the next step forward. […]

Gratitude can rewire your brain

Posted on November 29, 2021By ChantalPosted in Emotional Agility / Gratitude / Happiness / In the muck / Life / Mindset / Perspective / Thinking / Thriving

I’m an advocate for living a life of gratitude. I truly believe gratitude creates the foundation of a joyful life. When we can truly appreciate that which is beautiful and good in our lives, it will multiply. And starting from a place of gratitude offers a strong springboard for creating more of what we want and appreciate in our lives.

No-one can create from a space of negativity, pessimism, or complacency. But a space of gratitude offers deep joy, deep awareness of what’s here, and the inspiration to think creatively about what’s possible. It doesn’t mean we ignore the pain and frustration; it simply helps us to put the pain into perspective.

Recently I read an article by Jessica Stillman, on three unexpected habits of exceptionally grateful people where she shares that there is a difference between merely giving thanks for the obvious things in your life, or occasionally reflecting on what you are grateful for, versus practicing deep gratitude regularly. When you live from a place of deep gratitude, you literally rewire your brain to start thinking in a different way. This can be deeply transformational, because you show up differently in your life as a result of it. […]