life Archives - Page 4 of 7 - Chantal Breytenbach Coaching

Your Future Self wants you to love yourself NOW

We have always lived in a world that is characterised by change and uncertainty. We have never lived in a world that wasn’t changing…

No-one has it all figured out, because what would be the fun in being alive if there is nothing to learn? Until the day you release your last breath, you will continue to evolve. You will continue to change. When we remember our past selves, they seem quite different to who we are now. In some instances, your past self might seem like a completely different person to you, and it may even be hard to relate to who you used to be.

We know how much our personalities and tastes have changed over the years. However, for some reason, when we look ahead to the future, somehow, we expect that we will stay the same as we are NOW. We assume that we will not change as much in the future as we have changed to get to this present moment… […]

What’s your relationship to wanting and dreaming?

Posted on January 30, 2023By ChantalPosted in Bias for action / Decision-Making / Dreaming / Goals / Happiness / Inspiration / Leadership / Life / Meaning / Mindset / Planning / Purpose / Thinking / Thriving

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… […]

Will you be inviting the P Twins over for dinner this holiday?

Posted on December 21, 2022By ChantalPosted in Celebrations / Life / Mindfulness / Mindset / Perfection Detox / Perspective / Planning / Purpose / Slow down

Recently a client shared with me how stressful she finds the holidays. I invited her to tell me more and she shared that she tends to go into overdrive during the holidays. She wants everything to be perfect, and that usually means that she refuses to accept any help. She also finds that she turns into a control freak and people tend to avoid being around her when she is preparing for the holidays.

We slowed it down and I asked her what has her feeling so stressed and pushing so hard. She said, “unrealistic expectations of perfection”. I asked her who is placing these expectations upon her. My client is very self-aware, so she immediately recognised that she was placing these expectations on herself. No-one else was asking her to do all the things she commits herself to doing during the holiday season. She was doing this to herself… […]

What does it mean to celebrate?

Posted on December 10, 2022By ChantalPosted in Gratitude / Happiness / Inspiration / Leadership / Life / Meaning / Mindset / Perfection Detox / Slow down / Thriving / Values1 Comment

As the holiday season approaches, life has brought me some interesting experiences that has me contemplating the value of celebration. The dictionary defines a celebration as “the action of marking one’s pleasure at an important event or occasion by engaging in enjoyable, typically social, activity.” And this time of year, tends to open people up to celebration for various reasons. Whether you are celebrating Christmas, Hanukkah, New Year’s, or anything in between, this time of year is mostly an invitation to celebrate.

And that got me thinking about my relationship to celebration… […]

Living Large: A tribute to Jeremy Mansfield

Posted on November 28, 2022By ChantalPosted in Authenticity / Bias for action / Commitment / Compassion / Courage / In the muck / Inspiration / Leadership / Life / Meaning / Mindset / Passion / Purpose

A few weeks ago, I wrote about taking up more space and what that might look like. Today I want to talk about a real-life example of that. Back home in South Africa, Jeremy Mansfield was a radio announcer and television presenter. He passed away recently from cancer. To me he was a living example of what it looks like when someone takes up more space. […]

I AM: The two most powerful words in the world

Posted on October 24, 2022By 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… […]

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. […]

Morning Routines

Posted on September 6, 2022By 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? […]