Thinking Archives - Page 5 of 5 - Chantal Breytenbach Coaching

Our backpack of boulders: The agreements we make with ourselves

In conversation with my coach the other day, she likened our spiritual journey here on earth to that of hiking with a backpack full of boulders on your back.

Starting in childhood, and continuing through adolescence and adulthood, we accumulate beliefs, assumptions, fears, and anxieties triggered by both positive experiences, and hardships and challenges we face. These beliefs, assumptions, fears, and anxieties – like “I’m not good enough”, “I’m not smart enough”, “Losing wait is hard”, “People who have money are greedy”, “Trust no-one. People will always hurt you”, “Only some people get to be creative”, “I will never be successful”, “I’m attractive. My appearance is the only thing that makes me likeable”, etc. – are like rocks that we pick up and carry around in a backpack, with some rocks being bigger and heavier than others. Each of us has a bag of rocks that we have accumulated over the course of our lives and now carry around on our backs. Some rocks are small and can easily be discarded. Others are much bigger and more difficult to discard. […]

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. […]

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. […]

Chasing Dandelions

Posted on June 27, 2020By ChantalPosted in Gratitude / In the muck / Mindset / Perspective / Resilience / Slow down / Thinking

It’s so easy to look at a situation and see the problem. In fact, we are conditioned to look for problems and people are often also paid handsomely to solve problems. There are psychologists who reason that problem-solving is a critical survival skill. We anticipate problems, so we can deal with them before they threaten our survival. Problem-solving is at the core of human evolution. It is how we understand what is happening in our environment, identify things we want to change, and then figure out the things that need to be done to create the desired outcome. It could also be argued that problem-solving is the source of all new inventions, and the basis for market-based economies.

However, always looking for a problem, could also detract from our ability to see what’s good about a situation. It could rob us of our present-moment awareness and detract from our overall level of joy. I’m not saying we should let go of our desire to solve problems. However, I am advocating for a different perspective when we are looking for solutions. It’s as if we have been conditioned into problem-solving mode so much, that we now see everything as a problem – even people. […]

Off the Beaten Path

Posted on April 11, 2020By ChantalPosted in Courage / Gratitude / Happiness / In the muck / Life / Mindset / Thinking

As a Six on the Enneagram (i.e. Loyal Sceptic, Devil’s Advocate and Protector-Warrior), I tend to stress easily. And I worry a lot. I’ve been a high-strung person for most of my life. Part of my hyper-vigilance is probably as a direct result of growing up in a violent and dangerous home as well as living in a violent and dangerous country. Finding ways to survive when your safety and security are often threatened, has a direct impact on how your personality evolves. As a child and young adult, I would often hide my anxiety, fear, concern, worry (and sometimes sheer dread and panic) under an exterior of bravado. I would jump into challenges and face them head-on, ignoring the gnawing fear in my gut. […]

The gift in slowing down: Reduce stress and access your innate mental health

Posted on March 27, 2020By ChantalPosted in Decision-Making / Happiness / In the muck / Mindset / Slow down / Thinking

Since reading Slowing Down to the Speed of Life: How to create a more peaceful, simpler life from the inside out, I have a different perspective on stress and mental health. As I explained in a previous post, Richard Carlson and Joseph Baily define true mental health as the ability to engage in free-flow thinking. They reason that we all have the capacity for positive mental health, but that as adults we are socialised into the busy mindsets of Western culture and then we become serious, analytical, stressed, depressed and unimaginative. Beginning at age five or six, and then steadily progressing into adulthood, our mental health keeps declining.

However, we have a natural ability to recover our mental health. It’s only because we lack the understanding of how our thinking works, that we feel unable to recover our mental health. Slowing down to the speed of life allows us to notice aspects of life that were previously hidden in the frenzy of a busy mind. Beneath the vicissitudes of thought, lies a spaciousness, a peacefulness of being that is incomprehensible to a mind caught in analytical thinking. When our minds aren’t racing from one thing to the next, we can gain access to our innate mental health. It’s always there. We can’t actually lose it. We just need to be willing to let go of our insistence on spinning our wheels in analytical thinking mode. […]

Slowing down to the speed of life

Posted on March 24, 2020By ChantalPosted in Happiness / Slow down / Thinking

I recently read Slowing Down to the Speed of Life: How to create a more peaceful, simpler life from the inside out and became acquainted with the idea of slowing down your thinking to the pace of life with the intention of reducing stress and experiencing more joy in your life. For the most striking example of living naturally in the moment, just look at young children. They are full of life, running around and playing with their friends. They turn from one activity to the next with endless enthusiasm. Games of hide-and-seek become an opportunity for unlimited imagination, exploration and curiosity. They don’t get bored or tired of being in the moment. Most children have enormous amounts of energy and are unconditionally loving. They make adults envy their innocent and uncontaminated approach to life. […]