Do you ever find yourself wanting to start fresh? Clean out any negative or stressful energy from your life, refresh yourself and declutter? Well, trust me, you would NOT be alone! I remember getting this feeling when I was pregnant with my first born, going into full on nesting mode. Wanting to prepare and do everything I could to be ready for anything that could go wrong, anywhere from cleaning up around the house to restructuring things at work. When major life changes happen in our lives, it’s totally normal to feel this way, one example of this occurrence in life happens to be retirement!
Retirement, being something I happen to know quite a lot about, is a scary, stressful time in a woman’s life, but it doesn’t have to be! At some of my events in the past, I asked the women to write down their “refinement goals.” What is refinement you might ask? Well, one place you can find more about it and its beauty is my book Time To Refine!! But if you want the boring description, it’s our own term for retirement. It’s about refining your life, not sticking with the old notions of retirement, but finding a better way to live.
One of the women simply said one of their goals was to declutter her house. Like I said, something as simple as cleaning up around the house could entirely change the way you feel and look at life changes around you. So we came up with an idea, an epiphany, a new way to look at the clutters in our lives.
Before you enter any change in your life, you should declutter your life! What do I mean by this you ask? Well, do a checkup on yourself, get rid of the negative thoughts, the worthless junk, the stuff that just takes up too much damn space in your life, and chuck it! Make more room for the new adventures, lessons and changes to come in your stage of refinement.
Look at it in layers, starting at your home life and ending with your business life. Stop and assess each aspect of your life. Start with a house assessment, go through the rooms and see what you can get rid of, what needs to be organized and refresh it! Remove anything taking up unnecessary space! That pair of shoes you bought for that party in 2006, yes I’m talking about those, let them go! It’s 2022, make room for a brand new pair of heels, baby!
Next, do a business deep dive! Reflect on your strengths and weaknesses, what worked well for you the past year and what didn’t. Focus on what makes you profitable and feel good at the end of the day. Your power is in your boundaries!! So set them, passion and profit are a lethal combo, trust me! Then, take a look at your relationships. When you think of happy, inspiring, and positive people, who do you picture? Keep those people around! When you think of anger, resentment, and negativity, who do you think of? Time to get rid of those people or put boundaries around them.
Finally, the most time consuming relationship of all, money. Have you been carrying around money baggage? A woman’s relationship with money is a slippery slope, constantly fearing not having enough money and then overspending when we do, but who’s to say how much money you can spend? Most of the time, we’re not mad that we overspent, we’re mad that we let a boundary go of how much we were planning on leaving in savings, I’ve been there. Write down your strengths with money and write down what you want to run and hide from your money.
When decluttering your life, in any aspect of it, simply ask yourself: What am I done tolerating? Make room for new opportunities in your own life, dare I say BETTER opportunities. But if you continue doing the same things, with the same people, you aren’t leaving any room for change. Clear out your house, business, relationships, money, and even time to allow for new and better. Are you with me?
