Spring Clean your Mind and Home

 

Spring is a time of growth and beginnings. It’s also a time to purge the old to welcome the new. The term “spring cleaning” is no longer used just to describe a season when women clean baseboards, take out cobwebs that have become a winter resident in the home, or clean out the leftover refrigerator grime from Thanksgiving dinner. Spring is a great time to clean out your mind. 

A woman’s home is a good measure of her life. The home has the ability to tell thousands of little secrets that a woman herself would never reveal, even to her closest friends. However, the evidence can be found on her walls, in her closets and cabinets, on the shelves of her fridge and pantry, and any other crevice of her abode. I’ve seen this correlation over and over in my own life and in every person that I have coached. Do you know what your home says about you and are you ready for it to tell a new story?

Let’s take a look at Julie, a 38 year woman who seems to juggle it all. She is a rising executive for a big name corporation, a mother of two small boys, the wife of an hard working attorney, and she currently sits on a couple of boards that demands a lot of her time. Her home, however, tells her story much better than I do. Superficially, you would think that she is a domestic goddess – marble floors are immaculate, beautiful draperies adorn palatial windows, and it is obvious that her taste is superb….just don’t open her closets or drawers or anything behind a door. If you do, you will be shocked to find that Julie has a lot of hidden clutter in her home, just like her mind. 

I can totally relate to someone like Julie. When my closets are mayhem, I can guarantee you that there is some mental thinking to match it. For years, I was scared to decorate my home, afraid I was going to make a bad decision. Well, now I’m not surprised to have realized that I was also just as scared to decorate my life. What if I didn’t choose the right thing? or person? or peanut butter? Yes, even choosing what brand of peanut butter to buy would cause me a bit of anxiety.

What I’ve noticed in my life, as well as in the life of my clients, is that once they begin to clear the mind clutter, the house clutter almost always follows effortlessly, and as the household clutter begins to clear, the mind follows suit. It is an inverse relationship, one directly affecting the other.

So, what do you need to clean up this spring? If you are like many people, you don’t even know where to start. Try the following to give you an idea of where your home and life might need a bit of spring cleaning:

Choose a room that you are most dissatisfied with and describe it in detail.
For example, one of my clients wrote: “My office is small with papers everywhere. It is completely disorganized. I have very little space to work. The walls need to be painted. The computer needs to be updated. I need to organize the filing cabinets so that I can find what I’m looking for. I need to get rid of old papers and stuff.” 

Define how you would like for this space to look. 
For example, “I want the room to have clean, simple lines with bright colors. The desk will be clear with lots of working space. The filing cabinet will have specific folders for everything. I will fill the space with nice candles and create a space that I love to work in.”

Substitute “I” and “my life” in the place of objects.
For example, “My life is small with thoughts everywhere. It is completely disorganized. I have very little space for me. My life needs to be painted. My mind needs to be updated. I need to organize my life so that I can find what I’m looking for. I need to get rid of the old mental clutter.”

Substitute “I” and “my life” for how you want the room to look.
For example, “I want to have a clean, simple life with lots of color. My life will be clear with lots of space for me. My life will be organized with priorities identified. I will fill my life with brightness that smells sweet. I will create a life that I love to live.” 

This exercise is so cathartic for some of my clients that they find themselves rushing home to tackle a project in hopes of cleaning up their life. However, I always suggest that they tackle the mental clutter first, because this is what caused the physical manifestation of crammed closets and stinky fridges in the first place.