Start Fresh with Spring

Maybe it’s something about March, the start of spring and all the new life peeking up around us, but I’ve been getting a lot of reminders that sometimes success can only be achieved or taken to the next level when we let go of the past and what hasn’t been done and just move on. As someone who likes to-do lists it really pains me to leave things undone, especially when I know that they still hold value or could do good and they’re things I want to do on some level. But sometimes unless you really push there’s no way you’ll ever get ahead and catch up on everything. So a choice has to be made: are you going to try to finish the past or move into the future?

If you’re a gardener you know that some seasons are such that you get abundant and visible growth which often means you’re so busy managing the growth that other things fall to the wayside, while other seasons are good and you’re able to be productive and on top of everything too, and still other seasons are mostly rebuilding ones where you’re planting new plants, trying new things and gathering a new crew. Unfortunately when it comes to growth, and often success, we don’t get to say that we want the seasons that are good but productive, we have to take the seasons as they come. Which means that sometimes we have to decide when enough is enough and get done what has to be done (like getting the tractor repaired or doing our taxes) and let the rest be off the to-do list either forever or until the season is over and you have time to catch up.

With March being just 3 days old I encourage you to step into this new month with a renewed commitment to rest, hard work, growth, creativity, teamwork and honesty. I know, some of those things don’t sound like they belong in the same sentence, and sometimes they don’t work together as well as they do other times, but that can be because we’re shortsighted or so focused on the here and now that we don’t take in the big picture as well as we should. As much as spring seems like an explosion of life, things still happen throughout the season at different paces, and our growth and work do as well which means that if we’re willing to look and learn we’ll be able to pick up on at least some of those cycles and keep things in both daily and big picture perspectives. What are you planning for March?

Relationship Spring

Today I’m thinking spring! It’s a great time to start something new, refresh something old or just enjoy doing again! If you’ve been stuck in the house for the winter and your kids don’t enjoy snow, you’re probably relieved to be getting back out into nature and playing. Spring is a great time to do a refresh for your relationship too.

Sometimes the issue in relationships isn’t that you don’t still love or care for each other, but that you’ve let time and busyness come between you. If that’s the case in your relationship, one thing you can do to breathe new life into it is to spend more time together doing things and just being together. If you’re not feeling that closeness that you used to feel, you can change that as long as you’re both committed to bringing the relationship to similar levels of fulfillment and joy as you used to experience.

Maybe it’s an evening walk most nights, trip to the grocery store or farmer’s market each week, date night every week with different plans each week, home upkeep/updating projects that you’ve got planned to do with the arrival spring, or just a beverage every morning or night together. These regular times spent together are not only something to look forward to, but an opportunity to help deepen and strengthen your relationship.

What do you have planned with your partner to build on your relationship this spring?

Spring Cleaning and Growing Your Business

As you know I find it important as a business owner to pay attention to seasons and holidays because they are things that affect a large percentage of everyone’s customers. The season we’re definitely, finally in is spring in the US, with warmer temperatures, nicer weather, and lots and lots of green growth everywhere, not to mention all the new animal life springing up too. But spring often means more than just a change in the world of nature, we also talk about “spring cleaning,” growing in our personal lives, and holidays like Easter/Passover and Mother’s Day that mean a lot to many people. Today let’s talk about two aspects of spring as they relate to our businesses.

Spring is a time for growth, and one of the things that can help our businesses stay growing and successful is to plant many seeds. What does this mean? It means being willing to say “yes” to new opportunities, continually making an effort to build relationships, participating in social groups, investing in new marketing opportunities or giving some that we’ve had success with in the past another try, adding new products or services to our offerings, sponsoring new local teams or non-profits, venturing into new industries or niches, adding new employees, and providing new training opportunities for employees, just to name a few.

The thing is, of the plants that have all started growing now, some will need pruning and some will need removing in the near future, which means spring is also a time for pruning or cleaning. Yes, as I remind every year it’s time to refresh your website if you haven’t yet this year. It’s time to remove outdated products, services or marketing that isn’t working for you. It’s time to make changes to your employees and leadership team. Pruning or cleaning doesn’t mean that they weren’t once effective or that you didn’t have a reason for them when they were started, it just means that it’s time for a change.

If you think about some of the woods you may drive past or homes that aren’t well landscaped, you know how Mother Nature can easily and totally conquer an area with whatever plants will grow and thrive. So yes, growth can happen even if you don’t initiate changes or prune things, but there is often wasted space or effort or resources when you aren’t intentional about your growth. There’s nothing wrong with being sentimental even as a business owner, but if your goal really is to be successful and have a profitable business, usually there has to be some intentional action taken and sometimes tough choices made to let go of what’s underperforming or not really a necessary based on how the world has changed. So this spring what areas of your business are you investing in to help them grow, and what areas are you changing or cutting back?

Spring Forward with Success

This time of year is all about new beginnings. Living where I do means I get to see four seasons, so there’s a really clear visible death of much of life in the winter which means that when spring arrives the world seems like it springs back to life. As much as I dislike the allergies, it’s really something incredible to witness each year. But spring just builds on how plants have grown in previous years, or shows the damage of a tough winter with dead branches and plants that aren’t coming back to life.

New life doesn’t always mean a completely clean slate, just like the change of the calendar to the new year doesn’t erase what happened over the past year. You may not love what happened in the past, and you absolutely can change from who you were in the past, but just like the names of kings and generals from hundreds of years ago are still shared in history class (however insignificant to the present they may seem), your past still exists. You can show that you’ve made progress and changed from that past, or you can show you didn’t learn anything from the past and that you don’t believe those experiences weren’t negative or wrong or harmful.

Your success story doesn’t have to begin at the time you were born, it can begin today. But you do have to choose if you’re going to make decisions and take actions that will give you a better chance of having success, or if they’re going to be things that will set you back from any goals or dreams you may have. Sometimes you’ll have to do some pruning and let go of things that aren’t going to support you going forward, and other times you’ll have to step up with courage and hope that the research you’ve done will hold true as you take action. What life are you bringing forward this spring?

Spring-ing to Success

Spring has officially arrived in my corner of the world and with it always comes one thing: change. Change happens with every season, where I live I experience 4 seasons with 4 transitions, some people tend to experience only really two seasons, but regardless of how many seasons you have, there’s something different about each that means you can’t just call it one season and be done with it. I’m thankful we don’t go from summer to winter because of how drastic the change would be, and there’s something special about that transition time as well, even the one from autumn to winter.

One of the reasons I was thinking about this was because a couple of friends were applying for jobs and neither of them got them. While no one ever knows all the reasons they’re not hired, two of the most common reasons are because the applicant wasn’t willing to make changes necessary to work the job and the organization wasn’t willing to make changes that would have advanced them in good ways and the applicant would have fit with. From the perspective of a coach and consultant, there’s nothing more frustrating than known the potential of someone or an organization and being told flat out that there’s no possibility that changes will be made in order for growth to happen.

I understand the fear that often presents when you’re faced with a change, but you have to also consider what the likely future holds, and if the best thing for you/the organization is to stick with the status quo and try to push along for another season, or if you’ll be better off down the road if you are more proactive. There’s nothing wrong with using your resources to the fullest or looking for a least expensive option, and sometimes the best answer is to hold off on change because your fears and concerns are reasonable. But success is often achieved only when we change and work beyond/through our fears, and rarely will we achieve success without having someone share disbelief or unhappiness in us or what we’re working on.

What is best for your future? Which activities, relationships and successes will help you build a better foundation for your future? What fears are holding you back or limiting you from achieving the levels of success you have the potential to achieve? What creative ways or different avenues can you pursue to achieve your goals? What changes will you invite into your life this spring?

Spring is Here

Spring officially arrived today and I’m so excited. My favorite season is summer, but I love spring because it means summer is just a few short months away. And if I’m honest, spring isn’t so bad because we do have all of the life springing up around us and even though there are days (and weeks) of rain there’s something in the air that encourages us to be positive, to reach out, to make new friends, to get connected and live life more fully.

One of the reasons I love spring so much, and loved it as a kid, was because of the abundance that was appearing all around. You could pick a flower off a bush or plant and there would be tons more for others to enjoy. You could spend time outside after school and homework was done and it wouldn’t be cold and dark. And both as a kid and an adult I appreciate that we can go to the store and start to see more fresh foods appearing at better prices because the growing cycles were coming back into abundance.

But there’s something about spring that just puts us in a better mood, something we definitely need after the last few months of not just being stuck indoors like usual but even more stuck because of the pandemic. It can be hard to temper the excitement of the kids who just want to be out and about, but have homework or chores to do. I think it mostly depends on the kid as far as when they go outside and for how long, because if you know the kid will go through their homework and chores quickly, it can be better to have them do that first, and then get to be outside for potentially a longer period of time. But if you know that it will take a kid forever to get through their work, letting them go out for a set time when they’re done with school is better so at least they get some outside time. And as the weather gets nicer of course doing homework outside makes it just a little bit better. I can remember some afternoons of doing homework outside, and it made it seem just a little bit less difficult or boring.

Spring is the opportunity for new life and a breath of fresh air, which I think we all need. Take advantage of the weather as a family and individually to relieve some of the stresses of the past year and enjoy the world coming back to life around us. What do you love most about spring?

Spring Cleaning your Business Top to Bottom

Spring is supposedly on the way, officially arriving here in the US on Saturday, so it’s a good time to talk about doing a little spring cleaning in our businesses. I know how busy we all are, even in this time of continued limitations and restrictions, but even if we don’t make time as frequently as we should to make updates, it’s important to do them at least every year, if not 2-3 times a year, or even more frequently. You may have made some updates and checked on things when the calendar year changed, so if that’s the case, hopefully you won’t have a ton to do now, but even if you do, know that the updates are worth it so that people don’t think you’re not qualified or capable of accepting their business.

Start with checking and updating as necessary the pictures and descriptions on your social accounts and any post scripts you may have on your email or newsletters. Then go through your website and make sure it’s up to date and communicates clearly about your business (and if you have more than one website or an older one that you’re still managing you should check that as well). Then you should review your newsletter subscriber list and clean that up so that you’re not wasting emails on people who don’t read them (and haven’t for a long time). Finally, take a look at the marketing you’re doing, make sure that the plan you’re currently following is working for you and is consistently bringing you new leads.

Second, check up on your physical space. Whether you’re working in a traditional office, selling in a retail store or you’ve set aside a space in your home, all of us have a physical workspace that needs to be tidied, dusted, and cleaned. Having a clean, tidy and organized space will help you be more productive and feel more confident about the work you’re doing, and people will feel good about your space if they visit you as well.

Third, do a check up on the products and services you offer. Are you happy with what you’re selling? Do people still want and need what you’re selling? Does what your selling need a facelift or better/different descriptions based on how the world has changed since you last updated them? Do you need new testimonials on your site and socials so that people get new perspective on what you’re offering and increase the trust they have with you?

Finally, check up on your people. Whether it’s just you or you’ve got a big crew that works with you, everyone has mental and physical needs that should not be ignored. It’s not easy to fit everything in a day, so making time at least yearly to check in with people is a step in the right direction especially if you don’t have dedicated health resources available. It’s also an opportunity to really look at your business and make sure that you’ve got the right people in the right places and that everyone is committed to, knowledgeable about the business and has at least some fulfillment from the work they do.

Yes, this could take a good couple hours of your time, but it’s always worth it to avoid the embarrassment of people calling you on things that aren’t right, or missing out on sales because people aren’t connecting with you. It’s worth the sacrifice of a few hours to make your business as fresh and ready for customers as it can be. Does your business need a little spring cleaning?

New This Spring

Spring seems to be taking its sweet time showing up where I am this year, which is a little frustrating. We’ve had a few tastes of it and then it goes back to being like winter. This week looks like we might more firmly move towards spring but I won’t hold my breath. Instead I’ll focus on the other things that spring brings, and that’s new life. Just like the New Year inspires us to make changes in our lives, spring inspires us to think new, fresh and alive. So today I thought I’d share a few thoughts on bringing new life to your family and relationship.

Spring is a great time to get organized and purge your belongings. It’s a great time to work together as a family, especially on rainy spring days when you’re stuck inside anyway, and go through all of your clothes and get rid of those that are too worn or don’t fit anymore. You can also take this time to pack away clothes that you all don’t use for the warmer months if that’s something you do. It’s a great time to go through all the items in your kitchen and bathroom and get rid of things that are expired or you don’t use anymore. Finally, you can go through all the other stuff and gear you’ve got (sporting, books, toys, gear etc.), and get rid of what you don’t use any more. All of the stuff you’ve decided not to keep can be great for a spring or summer garage or yard sale, or are great to donate to charities (as long as they’re not broken or ripped and the food isn’t outdated).

Spring is also a great time to try a new hobby or try out some of the new stores, restaurants and venues that have set up shop over the late fall and winter. Lots of towns and cities have evening courses at local community schools and other locations that you can take to try something new or learn about something you’ve always been curious about from business to food to languages to arts and crafts. I don’t know about you but I don’t enjoy seeing the local stores empty, so if we want them to stay occupied we have to shop from them. As we get out of winter and are more interested in being outside and doing things, it’s a great time to visit some of those new places and at least check them out and recommend them to a friend who we know might have more interest in them than you do.

Why do something new or make room in your life? Because sometimes our lives get stagnant and there’s a reason why the statement ‘out with the old, in with the new’ is so popular. It’s not about old being bad (it’s not), or about trying every new thing (not possible), but about being open in life, being willing to try new things, and especially about accepting growth and new life in your journey. New can be good, especially as a tool to keep your family, relationships, work and health thriving. What new will you try this spring?

Spring Alive Together

There is nothing that says “alive” more than spring. The whole world bursts into life and color in the matter of a few short weeks. I don’t know about you, but I fully believe life is better when we live it with others. There’s so much we can learn from others, and I can’t imagine trying to do all that everyone else does around me while doing all of my stuff (like fixing cars, picking up trash, policing the area, and running hospitals). The good news is that there is plenty of life to go around.

The thing about spring that’s very evident in much of the new life is that it’s about multiplication and family. All of the new animal lives and seed growth are small representations of what should be happening in our lives too. Yet over and over we shy away from contact with other people, or at least the deep and full contact that is seen in the new life of spring.

I wonder what it will take for people to start building the relationships that it will take to make a difference in the lives of the next generation? How long it will take us to learn that together we are more than we ever could be apart? To learn that hatred and violence do not make the world go ‘round?

The more I see, read, learn and discover, the more I realize that we’re all connected whether we want to be or not. We’re connected to the earth by what we eat and use. We’re connected to each other through the thousands of invisible threads of the internet. We’re connected to the past and the future by the choices they have made and we will make. Even fully isolated from human contact we’re still connected to the earth by how we live and eat.

Maybe it’s time to stop fighting the connection and start working on how we can coexist together. Let’s work on making this spring a time of growth and health for all of us.

A Burst of Spring

The first day of spring is officially hours away. There’s a lot about spring to enjoy, one of my favorite things is how everything is so very clearly coming alive. There’s something magical about having everything burst into clear life from being seemingly dead and definitely drab over the winter. It’s one of the things I enjoy about living in this part of the US, that we do have clear seasonal changes throughout the year, and while I could do with less of the snow, it does make spring all the more appealing.

Sometimes what success needs from us is letting go of something big. Another thing some people are journeying through right now is the spiritual time of Lent which is leading up to Easter, and many people give something up for Lent. Other people give stuff up because they’re allergic to it or find they’re intolerant of it. But especially in that case it’s worth it to give it up, even if we miss what we had. Sacrifice and change are part of life, and I think we’re getting better at accepting that it happens and working through it.

But sometimes what success needs is not a sacrifice, but a big burst of effort, a big (positive) change. This big burst can reinvigorate what we’re doing, help renew our spirits, give us hope that it’s possible to achieve the victory and give us the energy to take a better look around and see the possibilities around us.

Spring hasn’t quite sprung here yet, but others have said that they’re seeing the signs slowly appearing, so I have hope that it will be here soon. If you’re struggling or feeling depressed or feeling stuck, maybe it’s time to let spring invigorate your life and success. Look for new life this week, new opportunities, new leaps of faith that you can take that will help you get closer to your goals.