VN October 2021

Vetnuus | Oktober 2021 30 I hope my latest column finds you and your families well and safe!!! I literally cannot believe that three quarters of this year have passed already. Life has been busy and challenging as always and some of us have been broken along the way. I have recently started reading a new book and the concept of Kintsugi was mentioned which gave me an idea. Kintsugi, also referred to as Kintsukuroi, is an ancient Japanese art of fixing broken pottery. The technique does not employ camouflaged adhesives to rejoin ceramic pieces, but rather employs a special tree sap lacquer that is dusted with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. The result is a “repaired” (broken on purpose to be reassembled in this way) ceramic with beautiful seams of gold in the obvious cracks, creating a unique appearance to the pottery. Human psychology seeks out and expects order, but life and all things natural seem to tend towards the opposite. We want the pottery we completed to be perfect and stay that way. We want our life to have a significant amount of certainty and be perfect. However, many unpleasant things can happen to us in a day: from the little things like spilt coffee, unexpected traffic, lost keys, forgetting stuff at home through to the bigger blows like a car crash, the end of a relationship, loss of our job, loss of a loved one. It is the latter few that cause the obvious cracks and can make life significantly more challenging. The reality of it is that change is inevitable, we must just develop a way of dealing with it in a way that works for us. The concept of Kintsugi reminds me very much of the work I do in helping people eliminate or change limiting beliefs in their lives. I use a concept called the table-top method. Picture a regular table in your mind. The top, the flat surface represents the belief you hold (positive or negative), while the legs (reference legs) represent the reasons we give ourselves for holding onto that belief. Example of a negative belief: Source: https://transformationacademy.com/ The simplicity of it is that we can deconstruct a limiting belief the same way we constructed it in the past, by using facts to discredit the reference legs. Failing two tests will most likely not stop you from passing the year and progressing. The same applies to getting an answer wrong in class. In my personal experience, I got 0% for my very first test in Zoology in my 1 st year of BSc at university. I can make all the excuses in the book as to why that happened, but the result was that I passed the year. When I went to my mentor crying that I failed the test, he waved his hand at me and said there will be many other tests (opportunities) for me to pass and that I will be fine. He was right!!!! Influential Life Coaching KINTSUGI Dr Mats Abatzidis B.Sc. B.V.Sc. New Insights Certified VIP Life Coach mats.abatzidis@yahoo.co.za Founder of Influential Life Coaching http://www.matsaba.wix.com/drmatscoach Author of the published book“Life outside your comfort zone. Better and beyond all expectations”. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref =nb_sb_noss?url=search- alias%3Ddigital-text&field-keywords=Abatzidis Blog: https://drmatslifecoaching.wordpress.com/ http://www.life-coach-directory.co.za/mats-abatzidis The reasons we use to keep or justify the belief often have an emotional component to them (“emotional glue”) which makes them more likely to stick and more difficult to shake off. The strategy to get rid of this limiting belief is one of two options: 1. Replace with “I am good at math” if it is appropriate (supports a goal you are currently in pursuit of and is backed by facts) OR 2. Eliminate it altogether by discrediting every reference leg