Hi, I’m Rebecca, the owner and founder of Mind Cultivation, a coaching and facilitation practice based in Meanjin (Brisbane).
My philosophy in a nutshell: The way you talk to yourself sets the tone for every other conversation in your life. And if you want to understand, get on with, or lead others (formally or informally), you first need to understand, get on with, and lead yourself!
The challenge is that most of the time, we are not aware we have this internal conversation at all. We may become so used to our automatic thoughts that we become oblivious of its impact on our behaviour and the decisions we make, both big and small.
Cultivating self-awareness, practising growth-oriented self-compassion, and refining a toolkit of sustainable self-management strategies will not only enable you to live a happier, more productive life; but it also creates a positive ripple effect through your interactions with others – at work, at home, and in your broader community.
I have a degree in Business Psychology, and my approaches are firmly based on Positive Psychology principles: I see and treat people as fundamentally whole, capable, and resourced to live full lives. Rather than looking at what’s wrong, lacking, or deficient, the focus is on identifying and leveraging your unique inner resources, e.g. your core values and personal strengths.
Further lenses and approaches that shape and inform my style include:
- Acceptance & Commitment therapy (ACT) – Building the psychological flexibility to accept what is out of your control, and commit to meaningful, values-aligned steps that bring positive change to your life. A key point in ACT is that behaviour does not get labelled as good or bad, right or wrong, positive or negative per se. Rather, the more meaningful question is whether it helps you build the life you want to lead, and become the person you want to be!
- Systemic Coaching – Acknowledging that human beings don’t live in a vacuum. We are all part of different social systems, e.g. family systems, workplace systems, friendship groups and communities. Systemic coaching looks at both the individual in the system, and the system in the individual - exploring, uncovering and working with the invisible patterns and dynamics that develop in relationships and groups.
- Internal Family systems (IFS) – Taking the systemic approach even further, IFS understands our psyche as a coherent system of individual self-parts, too. Instead of seeing our minds and inner experiences as one solid unity, the idea of self-multiplicity speaks to the very human experience that we don’t always decide and behave consistently, agree with ourselves, or completely understand the forces within ourselves. This is completely normal and fascinating to explore. Problems can arise when some self-parts are in conflict with each other or get stuck in painful and exhausting inner power dynamics.