Last week, I wrote about the transitions we’re experiencing as the seasons change. While fall doesn’t officially begin for several weeks, its unofficial start has happened. You’re back from summer vacation, the kiddos have returned to school, and your plate is piled high with numerous projects, goals, and activities. Your schedule is packed, and your daily patterns are changing. Do you feel calm and prepared, or anxious and not ready?

Transitions can be tricky and uncomfortable. However, intregrating mindfulness into the mix can bring calm and confidence to this next phase.

There are six ways to feel ready as you prepare for your busy season. You can use these strategies for any shift you’re experiencing, such as starting a new day, month, season, year, project, or life change.

6 Ways to Mindfully Prepare for Your New Season

1. Prepare Emotionally

Your emotional state benefits greatly when you prioritize your self-care. To fortify your energy reserves and to create a positive emotional state:

• Get enough sleep

• Eat healthfully

• Hydrate

• Move your body

• Make time for just you

• Engage in nourishing activities

2. Prepare Environment

Clutter can cause blockages in your thinking, well-being, creativity, daily flow, and routines. Make time to let go of the physical things you no longer need, want, are in your way, or are no longer relevant for this new phase. Clear the path for your new season. What can you declutter now?

3. Clarify Goals & Why

Did you create an ambitious list of goals at the start of this year? This change of seasons presents an excellent time to revisit and reset. Ask:

• What one or two things do you want to accomplish this season?

• What will success look or feel like when you accomplish those?

• What is driving you to get there?

• What is your why?

Taking the time to clarify will be valuable. The clarity will help with more effortless and less stressful decision-making when your choices align with your goals and overarching why.

“Integrate mindfulness to bring calm and confidence to this next phase.”

— Linda Samuels, CPO-CD®, CVOP™

4. Gather Your Team

The busy season makes it a terrific time to gather more support. Collect your go-to peeps- family, friends, colleagues, and professionals. There is no reason to go it alone. Who will be on your team? They can help you:

• Succeed

• Provide accountability

• Brainstorm and discuss ideas

• Navigate frustrations and challenges

• Cheer you on

5. Gather Your Resources

Aside from your ‘team,’ what else will help you prepare for this season? What physical supplies or products will be beneficial? What about finding resources for ideas or referrals?

As we’re in the back-to-school mode, images of sharpened pencils, blank notebooks, and boxes of new, colorful crayons fill my thoughts. While our kiddos are adults now and not in that stage, I remember when they were. Returning to school meant gathering the essential supplies, which helped them feel prepared and ready to learn. What do you need to feel prepared?

6. Schedule Downtime
During the fullness of this new season, plan time to stop. We aren’t designed to be constantly doing. We also need time to just be. Whether you make time daily, every week, or once a month, build breaks from the busyness. Each of us has different refueling needs. My daily mindfulness meditation practice and walks in nature keep me grounded and calm. They give me a quiet space to practice mindfulness, restore my energy, and prepare me to engage more fully after I pause.

New Podcast: Helping You Reset for the New Season

A few weeks ago, I enjoyed talking with the engaging, delightful podcast host, writer, and my new friend Kara Cutruzzula on her “Do It Today” podcast. Our conversation covered many topics, including ways to get ready for the new season. Listen to our conversation below:

If you are gathering your team and would like support from me as your Virtual Professional Organizer, let’s talk. I’d love to help as you travel on this next part of your journey. Call 914-271-5673, email me at linda@ohsoorganized.com, or click here to contact me through this site.

What helps you mindfully prepare for change? How do transition times affect you? I’d love to hear your thoughts. I invite you to join the conversation.

Do you know Jonathan Larson’s iconic “Seasons of Love” song from the musical “Rent”? It begins with “five-hundred, twenty-five thousand, six-hundred minutes,” the number of minutes a year. He asks, “How do you measure, measure a year?” Jonathan continues with questions about how to measure a year in the life and the life of a woman or a man. Every time I hear it, this beautiful ballad reminds me of how precious time is. It brings me to tears.

Our time is limited, so what we choose to do with it and how we acknowledge and appreciate it matters.

In Happier Hour, Cassie Holmes shares several “time crafting strategies” which encourage focusing on positive experiences. She proposes that making time to do this will bring you more clarity, satisfaction, and happiness.

One strategy she learned from her friend who practices it with her kids on their car rides home from school. I encourage you to try it with your kids, partner, friends, or colleagues. You can also do this as a solo practice. I slightly modified the concept for our purpose and am sharing the three-part practice with you.

Effective Time Crafting Strategy

1. The Rose – Something Good

Share something good that happened. This immediately focuses your thoughts on the positive and encourages gratitude for the time you are in now.

2. The Thorn – Something Bad

Share something crummy that happened. This helps develop problem-solving skills and acknowledges that life isn’t only rosey. Challenges are part of life.

3. The Bud – Something Exciting

Share something you are excited about. While it’s terrific to be mindful and in the present moment, looking to the future with happy anticipation extends your joy quotient and enhances your time.

“Time passes in the blink of an eye.”

— Linda Samuels, CPO-CD®, CVOP™

Here is an example of my rose, thorn, and bud.

• Rose – I had a productive virtual organizing session with a new client and loved helping her accomplish her session goal.

• Thorn – I couldn’t make it through the yoga class because I wasn’t feeling well.

• Bud – I’m so excited we’re going to Turks & Caicos to celebrate our 40th Anniversary!

Time passes in the blink of an eye. Acknowledging what you are grateful for and learning from the challenges can enhance and bring clarity to your days.

Are you making time to reflect? What are your rose, thorn, and bud? I’d love to hear your thoughts and invite you to join the conversation.

Seasons of Love - RENT (2008 Broadway Cast)

Having a long holiday weekend is a wonderful way to temporarily change the pace of life. That extra time allows you to engage in fun activities, recharge, and break from your usual schedule. It also presents an array of opportunities to calm your mind clutter.

Perhaps your thoughts aren’t intrusive, and you don’t have unproductive worries and thought loops. However, if you experience these challenges regularly or occasionally, I have some ideas to help.

Reflecting at the end of this long leisurely weekend, I realized how my experiences decreasing mind clutter could be valuable solutions for you.

3 Ways to Calm Your Mind Clutter

1. Observing

One of the things I enjoy doing is taking photographs of nature. I love framing images that capture the larger landscape. I also enjoy taking details, like a bee pollinating a flower. Over the weekend, I felt inspired to take pictures with so many gorgeous flowers in bloom. While these photos only take a moment, intently looking helped me focus like the camera lens I look through. In an instant, I see the vibrant colors nature offers or notice details of leaf veins, flower filaments, or light sparkling on the water’s surface.

And guess what? My mind isn’t racing or cluttered with thoughts when I'm present and observing. Maybe taking photos isn’t your thing. That’s absolutely OK. Activate the skill of observing to calm your mind clutter. What do you see in front of you at this very moment? What details are present?

2. Sensing

I am sensitive to the physicality of how things feel. For instance, I will only wear clothes with smooth, not itchy textures. I love the feel of velvet, velour, and other soft fabrics. I also enjoy the feeling of the sun or a cool, gentle breeze on my skin. If I’m in a store ‘window shopping,’ I like to touch things. It helps me see and interpret them in another way.

This weekend, my husband and I visited Field + Supply’s spring makers' market in Kingston, NY. Our daughter, Allison, had a booth for her Level Up Project with a cohort of eight small businesses. We enjoyed walking around, seeing beautifully crafted pieces, and meeting the makers.

We needed a break from the visual and auditory input at one point, so we sat on the lawn to snack and relax. I took off my sandals, and my feet enjoyed the feeling of the cool grass beneath them. Noticing, touching the grass, and acknowledging that pleasant sensation, helped me be in the moment. My mind clutter disappeared.

What sensations are you experiencing now? When you focus on physical sensations, does it distance you from your thoughts and calm your mind clutter?

“Activate the skill of observing to calm your mind clutter. ”

— Linda Samuels, CPO-CD®, CVOP™

3. Watering

I’m not talking about watering plants or hydrating yourself. Instead, I use ‘watering’ about being near or in the water. I love doing anything water-related, and kayaking is one of my favorites. There is something so grounding about being on the water, sitting low, and in a boat. I can float and drift or actively paddle to locomote from one part of the river to the next. All the while, I’m surrounded by the ambient nature sounds- water whooshing, birds singing, and the breeze blowing.

Paddling through the water becomes a kind of mindfulness meditation. At the same time, it makes me feel strong and calm. My arms pulling the paddle through the river brings me to the present. My thoughts are focused on precisely what I’m doing. There’s no mind clutter, no mind wandering, just pure enjoyment in the kayak on the water.

Does water have a mind-decluttering effect on you? Maybe kayaking isn’t your thing. How about swimming, jumping waves in the ocean, or taking a bubble bath? Can you use water to calm your mind clutter?

There are many ways to reduce your mental clutter. What resonates with you? Are there other strategies you prefer? I’d love to hear your thoughts and invite you to join the conversation.

One of my favorite authors and creative thinkers, Todd Henry, regularly introduces me to new concepts. I admire how he connects ideas from different places to offer fresh perspectives and understanding. Recently, he wrote about the “noise floor,” an audio production term. I equated it to the ‘noise’ clutter makes in our lives.

Todd defined the noise floor as “…the amount of unwanted signal coming from any source other than the one you’re actually trying to record. Listening to someone speak in an environment with a high noise floor is like trying to have a conversation at the beach with a crashing ocean ten feet away. You can make out what they’re saying, but it’s not easy to do.”

He explained how we often “not only allow but invite a high noise floor into our lives.” These “signals” are inputs, requests, demands, and stimuli. If the noise floor in your life is too high, Todd says you might experience things like:

• Feeling overwhelmed without knowing why

• Having difficulty with short-term memory and confusing simple concepts

• Experiencing ongoing distractions and struggling to focus on one project

While you might be functioning with clutter in your life, it could be creating more stress, overwhelm, and challenges than you realize. Are you collecting clutter instead of editing, eliminating, and creating boundaries to keep it under control?

6 Types of Clutter

Think about the noise your clutter makes and how it affects your daily experience. There are different types of clutter, including:

• Mind clutter – Negative thoughts, thought loops, and disorganized thoughts make activating difficult.

• Physical clutter – Paper, clothing, toys, and items filling up your environment make it challenging to know what you have.

• Space clutter – Overfilled rooms, closets, and drawers, make it challenging to move about and locate things.

• Calendar clutter – Lack of time awareness, chronic lateness, overscheduling, inability to say “no,” and unnecessary meetings affect your stress levels and overall functioning.

• Digital clutter – Tech devices, email, social media, Internet surfing, dings, and pop-ups create continual distractions, decreasing focus and productivity.

• Someday clutter – Postponed decisions about things you “might need someday” prevent you from being fully present and available to enjoy now.

Refer to 10 Top Clutter Areas & Solutions That Will Help for clutter-reducing strategies.

“Clutter can create more stress and overwhelm than you realize.”

— Linda Samuels, CPO-CD®, CVOP™

What becomes possible when you lower your clutter noise floor? What will a less cluttered mind, home, or calendar look and feel like for you? Which area needs your time and attention?

Do you want help eliminating the clutter in your life? I’m here for you. Reach out anytime by emailing linda@ohsoorganized.com, calling 914-271-5673, or contacting me with this form. Virtual organizing is a beneficial path forward. Let’s talk. I’m ready to help.