Latest / Overwhelmed Working Woman: Boost Productivity, Master Time Management, Overcome Overwhelm & Stop People Pleasing / #130| How to Spring Clean Your Life For a Fresh Start & Increased Productivity
Transcript
- 0:00Michelle Gauthier: So this is what I'm asking you to do is just to look at each one of your habits and ask yourself do I wanna keep this?
- 0:06Michelle Gauthier: You're listening to Overwhelmed Working Woman, the podcast that helps you be more calm and more productive by doing less.
- 0:19Michelle Gauthier: I'm your host, Michelle Gauthier, a former Overwhelmed Working Woman and current life coach.
- 0:22Michelle Gauthier: On this show, we unpack the stress and pressure that former overwhelmed working woman and current life coach.
- 0:24Michelle Gauthier: On this show, we unpack the stress and pressure that today's working woman experiences, and in each episode, you'll get a strategy to bring more calm, ease and relaxation to your life.
- 0:38Michelle Gauthier: Hi, friend, I don't know about you, but I have been in such a mood for spring cleaning.
- 0:43Michelle Gauthier: We had such a cold and dirty winter in terms of we had a bunch of snow and you know, when you have snow, all kinds of stuff gets tracked into your house by your dog and your children and whatever, and so I've just been craving a fresh start for the spring.
- 1:00Michelle Gauthier: Today, I'm going to give you a fun and easy way to do a little spring cleaning, and it's going to be spring cleaning your own habits, just going to take a quick look at what your habits are, what you're doing during the day good, bad and otherwise and think about doing a spring cleaning refresh, just a quick audit on your daily habits so that you can keep the ones that serve you, delete the ones that drain you and change or maybe add new habits that increase your productivity and your well-being.
- 1:31Michelle Gauthier: In order to do this, we're going to make a list of your current daily habits.
- 1:35Michelle Gauthier: You're going to evaluate them and decide which ones you want to keep, delete or add, change, and then you're going to make those changes.
- 1:44Michelle Gauthier: So by the end of the episode, you'll know exactly how to spring clean your habits.
- 1:48Michelle Gauthier: How funny is that?
- 1:49Michelle Gauthier: I love this concept like sweeping out the door all the habits that aren't working for you.
- 1:53Michelle Gauthier: So to start, the first thing that you do is either write down or think through all the habits that you do daily, start from the time when you wake up and go all the way to the time that you go to bed.
- 2:05Michelle Gauthier: As you're listening to this podcast, you can be thinking about what are some of the habits that I have.
- 2:10Michelle Gauthier: So I know for me, on the days that I work out, I set my alarm for five o'clock in the morning and my class starts at 530, which means I lead need to leave my house at 515.
- 2:20Michelle Gauthier: So I have a habit of planning ahead when I'm going to go to those classes, setting my alarm for five o'clock and getting up.
- 2:27Michelle Gauthier: Good habit, check, check, check.
- 2:29Michelle Gauthier: Bad habit is I tend to leave around 520, maybe even 523 sometimes, which makes me borderline late or straight up late to the class.
- 2:39Michelle Gauthier: Nobody gives me any trouble and in terms of working out it's fine.
- 2:42Michelle Gauthier: I always make it before the warmup is over, but it just makes me feel rushed and slightly overwhelmed.
- 2:49Michelle Gauthier: So that's a habit that I'm going to put on my delete list.
- 2:53Michelle Gauthier: That would be really an easy one to fix.
- 2:55Michelle Gauthier: I can't even say why I'm late, but I do know I'm much more likely not to do that if I lay out my workout clothes the night before.
- 3:01Michelle Gauthier: So maybe that's the key.
- 3:11Michelle Gauthier: I'm going to have to investigate this one a little bit more.
- 3:12Michelle Gauthier: And when I come back home from working out, I have a habit of drinking my athletic greens, having a cup of coffee, journaling, doing a little bit of a morning routine, making my kids breakfast.
- 3:18Michelle Gauthier: All those things are good habits that I'll plan to keep.
- 3:22Michelle Gauthier: And then there's a sticky one for me, which is cleaning up the kitchen.
- 3:27Michelle Gauthier: So I love to clean up the kitchen.
- 3:29Michelle Gauthier: No, I hate to clean up the kitchen, but I love the results of cleaning up the kitchen.
- 3:32Michelle Gauthier: And some days I will tell myself I have too much to do.
- 3:36Michelle Gauthier: I'll get to it later.
- 3:37Michelle Gauthier: And what I know about myself is that if I get to it later, first of all it's going to be like right before I go to bed.
- 3:43Michelle Gauthier: It's not really going to happen during the day, because once I get to working, I'm just working and then I have my kids home and all that stuff.
- 3:48Michelle Gauthier: So I think that it's definitely worth my time and it makes my day so much better if I just have that habit as an everyday habit.
- 3:56Michelle Gauthier: So that's another example.
- 3:58Michelle Gauthier: For me, work habits feel really good.
- 4:01Michelle Gauthier: I am in a practice of planning out my week and executing my week as I plan it, so I feel pretty good about that part.
- 4:07Michelle Gauthier: My lunches for the most part I plan ahead of time.
- 4:12Michelle Gauthier: I get the food.
- 4:13Michelle Gauthier: I know exactly what I'm going to eat for lunch every day.
- 4:15Michelle Gauthier: I make this easy on myself.
- 4:16Michelle Gauthier: I just eat the same thing every day for the week.
- 4:19Michelle Gauthier: So sometimes I might switch it up for a week, but I just make five of the same thing.
- 4:23Michelle Gauthier: So I feel pretty good about that habit.
- 4:26Michelle Gauthier: I meditate every afternoon.
- 4:29Michelle Gauthier: I feel good about that habit, and then when it my dinnertime habit isn't great.
- 4:38Michelle Gauthier: I will definitely order some food and kind of plan a few meals, but it seems to be hit or miss with dinner.
- 4:44Michelle Gauthier: Sometimes I'll make dinner, sometimes I don't.
- 4:47Michelle Gauthier: Sometimes we all just spend for ourselves, or we'll just make ourselves whatever we want, or I'll make the kids random stuff and we'll just all sit down and eat, which is the most important part to me.
- 4:56Michelle Gauthier: But what feels best to me is if we all sit around the table together.
- 5:00Michelle Gauthier: So I would love to edit my habit of just saying, no matter what we do for dinner, we're just gonna all sit down and eat at the same time, even if we're having chick-fil-a or something like that.
- 5:13Michelle Gauthier: Another habit that I feel good about is that I go to bed early.
- 5:17Michelle Gauthier: A habit that I feel sort of okay about is my skincare routine and all the things I do before bed.
- 5:22Michelle Gauthier: I would say I'm like 65% on doing my skincare stuff.
- 5:27Michelle Gauthier: Sometimes I'm like I'm just too tired and I just use a makeup wipe and throw on some moisturizer and go to bed.
- 5:32Michelle Gauthier: So I'd like to edit that habit to make it better.
- 5:36Michelle Gauthier: So this is what I'm asking you to do is just to look at each one of your habits and ask yourself do I want to keep this?
- 5:43Michelle Gauthier: Does it help my productivity?
- 5:45Michelle Gauthier: Does it help my happiness?
- 5:46Michelle Gauthier: Does it help my well-being?
- 5:48Michelle Gauthier: Or does it drain my energy, waste my time, create more stress for me?
- 5:53Michelle Gauthier: Want to keep this?
- 6:01Michelle Gauthier: Nope, I want to get rid of this one and I want to edit this one.
- 6:03Michelle Gauthier: I feel like I'm more in the edit camp.
- 6:03Michelle Gauthier: I have three or four that I'd like to just make stronger habits.
- 6:07Michelle Gauthier: So I just listed out three or four different things that I'd like to change.
- 6:10Michelle Gauthier: But my third point in talking to you about this is to make small but powerful changes and just choose one thing at a time.
- 6:19Michelle Gauthier: And maybe you just choose one thing.
- 6:21Michelle Gauthier: So I just gave you a list of habits I'd like to change.
- 6:24Michelle Gauthier: The one that I feel like would have the biggest impact on me is if I just did my skincare routine every night.
- 6:29Michelle Gauthier: So I'm going to do everything I can do to make that easy for myself.
- 6:33Michelle Gauthier: I'm going to put everything in a little bin so that I can just get it all out, because what I'll do is I'll like take my medicine but not wash my face, or I'll wash my face but forget to do I don't know something else.
- 6:43Michelle Gauthier: So if I just have it all there for me and I make it a not rushed, enjoyable process, then I'm much more likely to do it.
- 6:52Michelle Gauthier: So here I am, committing to you that I'm going to do my skincare routine.
- 6:55Michelle Gauthier: What is your thing?
- 6:57Michelle Gauthier: What are you going to change?
- 6:59Michelle Gauthier: Or maybe there's something that you want to stop doing?
- 7:02Michelle Gauthier: For a while?
- 7:02Michelle Gauthier: There, especially when I was going through my divorce, I would stay up late at night after my kids went to bed because I just sort of needed a break, and when I was eating potato chips and having my second glass of wine, I'm like, what am I doing?
- 7:15Michelle Gauthier: This does not serve me at all.
- 7:17Michelle Gauthier: So maybe you've got a late night wine, potato chips habit, or maybe you've got a late night buy crap online that you really don't want habit.
- 7:25Michelle Gauthier: If you do, don't judge yourself, just decide does this work for me, or do I need to get rid of this one?
- 7:30Michelle Gauthier: So this is a quick and easy fix List out your daily habits, decide which ones to keep, delete or edit, and then make that one commitment, that one small shift and see how that works might inspire you to make a second one, but maybe not, doesn't matter.
- 7:46Michelle Gauthier: Spring clean your habits and just see how that turns out.
- 7:50Michelle Gauthier: If you found today's episode helpful or you just love the podcast which I really hope that you do, because that is my aim to make a podcast that is always practical and useful and helpful to you please do a review, write a review or leave a rating.
- 8:06Michelle Gauthier: That is so helpful to us and to get to my goal of getting to a top 1% podcast.
- 8:13Michelle Gauthier: What that means is that it would be top 1% of 3.5 million podcasts and that when people search for overwhelm or help me stop feeling overwhelmed or I'm a people pleaser that our podcast would come up as one of the top first solutions.
- 8:28Michelle Gauthier: I want to be able to help as many women as I can.
- 8:32Michelle Gauthier: Really all the overwhelmed women would be wonderful, and your rating and review will really help that process.
- 8:37Michelle Gauthier: Have a great week.
- 8:38Michelle Gauthier: See you next week.
- 8:38Michelle Gauthier: Writing and review will really help that process.
- 8:39Michelle Gauthier: Have a great week.
- 8:40Michelle Gauthier: See you next week.
- 8:45Michelle Gauthier: Thank you for listening to the Overwhelmed Working Woman podcast.
- 8:48Michelle Gauthier: If you want to learn more about my work, head over to my website at michellegauthiercom.
- 8:53Michelle Gauthier: See you next week.