My clients cite overwhelm as one of their most frequent challenge and say they have too many important and complex things crowding their life and brain.  If you are feeling bogged down right now, it may well be that you need to look at simplifying your life.  Simplicity is a concept that will help you get back to “being” present in the moment to give your life more joy, colour and connection.

Let’s start very simply with holding one power question as you go about your life this week.  Observe the focus and clarity shift when you ask yourself:  “How can I simplify this?”  

4 Ways Simplify Your Life

1/ Simplify your Activities  

Complexity is not better. More is not better.  Busyness is not better.  We know that we can be more effective and efficient by keeping things simple.  The KISS principle (Keep It Simple Stupid!)  has been bandied around for as long as I can remember as a way to avoid the dizzying complexities that can sometimes stall or delay project completion

Somehow we have been sucked into believing that more activity/more complexity/more busyness connects to more value.  But complexity is not success, and busyness is not our purpose. Author Neale Donald Walsch reminds us that: “We are human beings, not human doings.”  True success and inner harmony comes from who we are being rather than what we are doing.  So what might happen if we switched our way of thinking to simplify things and revisited the value in the concept of single-tasking ?  Doing one thing at a time.   And then BEING in each and every moment.  “Being” gives us space for creative thought and will makes us healthier, happier and paradoxically, even more productive!   Being time is as important as your Doing time. Do Less and Be More

2/ Simplify your Business

Simplicity brings clarity and focus.   What is your business’ main thing?  Do you focus on that main thing consistently and let your strategic planning and actions connect to that main thing? Or, have you gotten off track by adding layers of complexity or perhaps expanding or doing too much?

The Heath Brothers in their best-selling book Made to Stick , list “simplicity” as the first principle if trying to make an idea memorable or “sticky”.  By drilling down to the essential core of our ideas, the message is crystal clear

Exercise:

Write down one sentence that simply describes why your business is in existence. Read it. Keeping that core purpose in mind, what one thing will you focus on and complete today?

Hold that core purpose in your thoughts as you go about your business that day. What shifts for you?

3/ Simplify your Thoughts

Re-learning how to relax, enjoy and appreciate the simple things is a lifelong quest for most of us.  It is said that adults have up to 50,000 thoughts per day!  An easy way to defrag the myriad of random thoughts in your head and give yourself some mental space is to hold an  intention. We can apply the power of intention to any activity in our day, or, even better, to the whole day in its entirety.

The (less than) 30 second Intention Exercise:

For your day: As you are lying in bed take 30 seconds to choose and focus on an intention (purpose) for that day. This purpose is not your “to do” list.  Instead think – “How will I be today?”  What’s the day going to be about for you?  Maybe it’s about joy, or fun, or peace, or clarity.  Remind yourself of your “being” intention throughout the day and observe how that intention informs, focuses, clarifies, and enhances your activity.

For any activity:  Before you embark on any activity, consider your intention or purpose for that activity. As you walk into your staff meeting, think about what that meeting will be about?  Community? Completion? Transparency?   As you have that important conversation with your partner consider your intention: Is it harmony? Caring?

The simple holding of an intention  clarifies and focuses our energy and puts that energy in motion, whether you are conscious of it or not.

4/ Simplify Your Environment

Do you really need 6 kinds of mustard in your fridge? A 10-step pre-bedtime skin regimen?  100 pair of shoes?  3 vegetable peelers? A bookcase of read/or unread books that you don’t plan to pick up again?  After reading Marie Condo’s book – The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up  – which asks you to simplify and declutter your world based on what brings you joy, I have been on a continuous path of simplifying my physical world.  In the process, I discovered much to my amazement, that I owned 4 cribbage boards – why did I need 4?  I gave 3 away and feel lighter already.

Exercise: Look at your physical surroundings – what do you need? If your office is cluttered, your brain will be cluttered.  If your fridge is cluttered, your brain will be cluttered. Simplify everything. Abandoning the non-essentials leaves space for something else.  And that something else might simply be You!

               “Simply the thing that I am shall make me live” – William Shakespeare