Like many others, we often use the start of spring for what has become known as ‘spring cleaning’ or as most people lovingly refer to it as throwing away stuff I have not used in a year. Why do we do it in Spring? Why not during the ides of Summer or the fresh crispness of autumn?
Easy.
Spring means new growth. The cold winter weather is warming up to brighter and warmer days. The sun makes its way into the sky earlier and begins to stay longer. It makes sense that as we warm up into the new, we desire to get rid of the old.
Now…
How do I know you have not finished your spring cleaning (if you have even started it)? Simple. This year has been in such flux that most of us are still a little off, waiting for places life to give us some type of known normalcy (whatever that really means). Regardless, now is the time to take some action and put your spring cleaning into full on go mode.
Here are six (6) fresh approaches to make spring cleaning one of the greatest joys in your life.
First, we must Speak about it. Like anything in life, speaking about it will create a universal alignment around it. Speaking into it giving it life shifts our mindset from seeing it as a task to seeing it as an adventure. There are many levels of learning that can come out of spring cleaning. As we will see (or recognize) in a bit, spring cleaning is not just getting old stuff out of your garage or old broken items to the dump, it is about overhauling your entire life in a way that allows for fresh breath and clear thinking.
Secondly, begin to Prepare for it. Put a date on the calendar. Make it feel like a party. In fact, make it a party. Grab some pizza, your favorite drink, maybe even a few of your friends and make it the most fun you’ve had yet this year. Too often spring cleaning doesn’t happen because it becomes that ‘thing’ we ‘must’ do rather than something we take pleasure in doing.
Thirdly (and this is where the shift comes in), we should Recognize the importance of doing it. On the surface this is the classic ‘out with the old in with the new’ kind of thought. However, when we take a deeper dive into the importance of cleaning, we will begin to see other benefits. What we can rid ourselves of is space that it currently being taken up with things that don’t serve us anymore. Nothing can hold us back more than stuff we do not need. Beyond recognizing the importance of what cleaning can accomplish for us, we must also take it to the next level.
Fourth, we should Insist on doing spring cleaning across all areas of our life. Certainly, there are benefits to organizing our garage, our closets, our homes, however that is not where we should stop. This is a good time to look across our social profiles, clean up the apps that we don’t use, remove connections that are not serving us (but be open to welcoming them back – and without creating a post that starts by saying “I’m clearing out my friend lists….”). This can be done inside of our relationships by creating new goals or crafting vision for the future.
Fifth, allow yourself to Notice how you feel when going through the process. Feel your feels. This brings all the feelings into play. Having a hard time letting go of something or someone? Perhaps there is something deep there that needs exploring. Simply removing stuff from our lives makes us feel lighter. Our shoulders will come up more. We will physically posture ourselves better.
Lastly, after we complete this, we need to Go celebrate it. Treat yourself, your family, your team, whoever was involved in the process to something. Make it grand. Go on a retreat for a night, head out for fancy dinner or stay in and order take out. The point is to acknowledge the process.
Now…
For the expert spring cleaner, make this a quarterly thing you do. The process will find its own path. The more we do this, the easier and quicker it becomes. Soon, we will be able to see things coming into our lives that we know will not serve us so rather than store them away, we can stop it before it consumes us.
Share your favorite Spring cleaning story below.