131: What Is Zapping My Energy? Spring Clean To Re-Energize Your Life and Business

Welcome to the Time to Level Up Podcast. I'm your host, Andrea Liebross. Each week, I focus on the systems, strategy, and big thinking you need to CEO your business and life to the next level. Are you ready? Let's go.

Hello, my friends, and welcome back to the podcast. I'm recording today I think my first podcast from my beautiful apartment. We are in transition as a family. We have sold our house that we've lived in for 21 years. We are living in an apartment just between that house and the new house that we're building. The new house that we're building is not going to be ready until October probably. Here we are in this three-bedroom apartment. I've got both kids home now. There are four of us.

I have to say the flow of the day is a little different because we are all right here together. I'm recording this actually in a room that my son is sleeping in for the next couple of weeks while he's home in between his semester abroad and his internship in Boston. It's serving as my office in his bedroom. I need to do my recording when he is not in here. That's taken some communication as to when that time might be but I'm here and I finally got my microphone re-setup. It hasn't been set up in a while. It's packed away in the move. I'm feeling good. I'm feeling good.

Today what we're going to talk about is what's zapping your energy as an entrepreneur and how to do a little spring cleaning that might help you recapture some of that energy or be re-energized. Often I hear clients feel like things are a heavy lift like they are taking up space literally or figuratively.

A lot of times, it's more figuratively if they're taking up space in their brain because they're like things that are weighing on them, things that they wanted to start, projects that they know that if they actually tackled, it would make a huge difference in their business, people that they “tackled,” whether they tackle them to help them more or they tackle them and get rid of them.

But sometimes we need to do some cleaning or assessing in order to figure out what's really zapping our energy and what's going to make the difference. If we address it, what will energize us? You with me? Things that are weighing on us, things that we're probably delaying making decisions on often are zapping our energy. But yet if we addressed it, it would create energy.

Right now if you're listening to this in real-time, I'm enrolling for my Runway to Freedom Mastermind. It's named that very deliberately, Runway to Freedom, because as entrepreneurs, we are wanting more freedom of time, more freedom of money, more freedom of brainpower, we want to think about things we want to think about, and relationships, with who we want to be with. This is an exercise that happens in Runway to Freedom Mastermind when we do our bi-annual and quarterly, to be honest, business planning.

This is a higher-level type of thinking that needs to take place. It usually needs to take place once you've gotten some things going but yet now things are starting to weigh you down. I'm looking out the window right now as I'm recording this and I see out there tons of flowers budding and birds chirping, and the temperature is a little warmer. This is oftentimes tpo a time of year when people purge their houses of all of the dirt and dust that has accumulated over the past few months, AKA spring cleaning.

But spring cleaning doesn't just apply to houses anymore. It can also apply to businesses. This is a wonderful time of year to get yourself together to get organized as we enter into the second half of the year. Can you believe it? Second half of the year. As you're listening to this too, think about do you need a Runway to Freedom? Are you interested in joining us in Runway to Freedom? This is a great time to join us because you will get to take advantage of what we're doing in July which is a bonus planning day for Q3 and Q4.

If the first half of the year hasn't really gone not as well as you planned but you know you could be better, and we really do want to accomplish those goals that you have for this year, I would consider joining us in Runway to Freedom to ensure that you do reach those goals and you get the support you need.

Let's think about strategies for small businesses to spring clean to figure out where their energy is being sucked away and where they want to gain back some energy. I think I'm going to give you some ideas, and the lists can be endless, but here are a few ideas that I think are really powerful.

Number one, let's talk about the people. Are the people in your life, and this is me personally and professionally, energizing you or zapping your energy? Are they helping you move forward? Are they serving you? Are they useful or not? If the answer is not, then it's okay to say, “Okay, this relationship is complete. I love you. But I don't think it's a good idea for us to continue to work together.”

I have a whole episode on hiring and firing with Jacqueline Martinez. Go find that one. But it may be time to take a harder look at who you're working with in your business and who you're hanging out with on a weekend and assess whether or not they're meeting your needs or what are your needs. What would you like this person to do?

Think about this in terms of friendships. We have different friends for different things. There are friends that you can call at any moment and complain. There are friends that you only call to go for a walk with. There are friends that you only see once a year but when you do, you get right back in the groove.

Well, there can be different people in our businesses too that serve different purposes. I want you to assess who are the people that you are with and are they serving you. Take a good hard look at that. That's number one. People. This follows, I want to want you to know right off of our Business Audit to Create Business Awesome series, this is part of you doing the work to audit your business to create an awesome business. You've got to look at the people.

What else do you need to look at? You need to look at your plan. You need to look at your business plan. You need to look at your life plan. I know some of you are guilty of creating a business plan and setting it on a shelf. If you're really guilty of this, now is the perfect time to dust off your business plan and revisit it because it's probably zapping your energy.

You know there are things on there that you want to be working on, but you've lost sight of them or you've lost track. Our businesses are constantly developing and changing and you're constantly developing and changing. You need to be looking at that business plan regularly to make sure that you are focusing on the things you want to focus on.

Again, that's what we do in our deep dive into business planning for Q3 and Q4 in that Runway to Freedom Mastermind. So you need to set aside time each year to spring-clean your business plan. When you're a business owner, lots of things on that plan can, I call it go stale like the bread crumbs go stale, and your goals, your operational procedures, or, like we talked about, relationships, so your marketing or product ideas, all of that. Are those goals still relevant? Are you on track to reach them?

Remember, as entrepreneurs, that business plan is the foundation for your business. You need to take time to revisit it. Life plan, let's talk about life plan, is how you're spending your time aligning with your priorities. Have you designed your life in a way that makes sense for you? Last week I did a masterclass workshop called Design Your Ideal Summer. It was a huge hit and we spent a whole day talking about designing your life.

If you want access to that, I am not sure if the replays are still up, but you can email support@andrealiebross.com if you want access to that Design Your Ideal Summer workshop. It was well received. So we've talked about the people in your life. We've talked about your plan. Those are two places that you could have your energy zapped that you really have to assess in order to regain some energy.

Here's another place: processes. Are there things at home and at work that maybe just aren't working for you anymore? Are your routines at home, for example, efficient? Do you have a routine? Is this something you'd like to create? Because when we don't have a routine, we're recreating our steps every single day. That can zap our energy. Are there things that you can do each night to get ready for each morning?

I like to fill up my hot water kettle the night before and get that ready. Sometimes I even prep my water bottles for the next day. I try to fill up two water bottles every day and drink all 32 ounces in each. If you want a great water bottle, look at the Favofit Water Bottle on Amazon. They help motivate you to keep drinking water all day. A lot of times I will even prep my breakfast or lunch the night before and that's a routine that I try to stick with and it helps me get ready for the next day.

If I don't do that, it feels like a burden to feed myself and hydrate myself. Take a peek. What are your home processes or routines? Are they zapping your energy? Do they need a little cleanup so that you can become energized by them?

Business processes. I'm going to give you a couple of examples. What's your process for looking at your monthly expenditures? Do you have processes in place for operational processes like marketing automation, sales automation, onboarding automation, offboarding automation? Every broken process leads you to lost time, money, and energy so you need to look at all of those processes.

That's a great place to do some spring cleaning. We've got spring cleaning around the people, spring cleaning around our vision and plan, spring cleaning around our processes and systems. Here's the next place. Now this probably really only pertains to business but it can have a home slant as well. Let's talk about marketing. There is no better time than spring to take a step back and look at your marketing strategies.

Like your business, your marketing tactics are probably constantly developing, changing, and morphing, and each day something changes in the marketing arena. What if you spent some time sprucing up those strategies? You can think about what does your website look like? Your website is one of your biggest marketing tools. This is something that can zap our energy because we keep saying to ourselves, “Oh, I really need to go look at that.”

Does your website align with your business's current brand? Does something need to be rewritten on there to reflect where you are right now? Do you need to create different calls to action? Fixing little details like a header or footer can make a huge, huge impact. Take a deeper look at the call to action, at the text and the copy. Do the photos still look like you?

In marketing, what are you putting out there on social media? Is it who you really are? Could you be more engaging? Your email marketing funnel, do you have one? How could you make better use of that? Those are marketing things within your business. Now at home, you might giggle at this, but who are you marketing to? You are marketing to your family. You want to get them on board with things.

What are they not on board with that if they were on board with, it would be super amazing and it would energize you? What are you having to keep explaining to them? What do you have to keep nagging them about? How could you sell them on the idea that putting dishes in the dishwasher immediately and not just laying them in the sink is a fabulous way to conserve energy? How can you sell them on that? How can you market to them the idea of cleaning up the kitchen after they make nachos at 10:00 PM? Think about your marketing processes and strategies at home too.

So people, vision, plan, processes and systems, and marketing, I want you to think about those things. Next, this is basic, but your inbox. Is your inbox zapping your energy? Yesterday in I've Got This Coaching Group, we talked about managing our inbox. If this is something that really irks you, you need to go take my Productivity Quiz and figure out why this is happening. You can go to andreaslinks.com and go take the Productivity Quiz. While you're there, you could also take the Business Freedom Finder Quiz, because that's going to help you figure out also places in your business that could use some cleanup.

But let's go back to inbox. We like to pile things up in our inbox. My client yesterday was commenting that she leaves things in her inbox and marks them as unread to serve as a to-do list and it just isn't working. Maybe we need to create a different system around that to know what's going to work for her. People suggested the to-do app, certain email servers, you can drag emails into a to-do list to write in the server.

I said she needs to open every email and then pull out her Full Focus Planner and figure out a time when she's going to address each and every email if it's not something that she could address in 10 seconds. Use spring, use now as an opportunity to purge your inbox. It seems painful, but you will feel energized and organized, I guarantee it, after you clean out those emails that are hanging around. I tried to clean up my inbox once a month, for real like a deep clean.

I sort it by from, who the email is from. I usually can delete a whole bunch at one time because I might have gotten some promotional emails all from Amazon and I can delete them all in one swoop. Or I've got a project that's done and I can delete all the emails from that person in one swoop.

But figure out a plan moving forward on how you can clean out your inbox. Consider having specific folders in there. Maybe things that are called active and things that are called keep. I don't think you need 100 folders, but active and keep might be helpful and that way, you can easily access your work without having going through hundreds of emails.

Here's my last suggestion. I'm suggesting that you assess your relationships, I'm suggesting you assess your vision, your business plan, and life plan. I am suggesting you assess your processes and systems, your routines at home, and your systems within your business. I am suggesting you look at your marketing and does it represent who you are now and are you selling what you're wanting to sell? Are you selling ideas and concepts at home as well? I am suggesting that you organize your inbox.

The last piece of the puzzle here that I'm suggesting is that you do some decluttering of the stuff, the actual cleaning of your office, of your workspace, of your kitchen table, of your bedroom. If you want to literally figure out what's zapping your energy, you need to do a deep cleaning. What about those Amazon boxes that are piling up in the corner that need returns? Those are zapping your energy.

What about the dead plants on your windowsill? Those are zapping your energy. What about your kid's friend's sweatshirt that's been sitting in your foyer for three months, waiting for that friend to come over for the next time to claim the sweatshirt? It's time to either give it to Goodwill or drive it to their mailbox and put it in. All of those things are creating clutter and that is zapping your energy. So throw some things away.

If it's not useful anymore, if you wouldn't buy it again, if it's not serving you, if you haven't used it in two years, get rid of it. It's taking up space literally and it's taking up space figuratively in your brain. It's zapping your energy. When you spring clean your spaces, you really can feel refreshed and organized and that is going to help you feel a lot better about things. It is going to be empowering and energizing. It is not going to be burdensome, you're not going to be carrying those things around like I call a heavy Santa's sack.

Those Amazon boxes in the corner, they're zapping your energy, I am 100% sure. Those thousands of emails in your inbox, they are zapping your energy. The people that just aren't doing their job, they're zapping your energy. You not knowing what to do each morning, what to work on, what to focus on because you don't have a business plan or you haven't looked at it in a while, that's zapping your energy. All of those things are zapping your energy.

Now, my friends, is the perfect time to assess that, to do some spring cleaning, and to become re-energized. That's what I have for you today. Reminders, go to andreaslinks.com, take the Productivity Quiz, take the Business Freedom Finder Quiz. I think you'll find them both insightful. Consider, is now (I think it is) a great time to engage in some coaching? Come find out what Runway to Freedom Mastermind is all about. You can DM me on social media. You can set up a call by clicking on the book a call button on my website and we can talk about it. You can head to the Runway to Freedom Mastermind webpage.

If that's not for you, check out my other options. Maybe we should do a VIP day. Maybe if you don't have a business plan, a VIP day is a perfect thing. Maybe if you do have a business plan but it needs a little refresh, a VIP day is a perfect thing. Or come join us in I've Got This. If you just want to feel supported in whatever you're working on, wherever stage of business you're at, and have a whole library of resources and a community to support you and me as a coach there to hold your hand, come join us in I've Got This.

All of that you can find on my website, andrealiebross.com, or you can access it through andreaslinks.com. Okay, my friends, until next time. Remember, now is the best time to level up. It's coming. It's here, your time to level up. I will see you next week.

Hey, listening to podcasts is great. But you also have to do something to kick your business up a notch. You need to take some action, right? So go to andreaslinks.com and take the quiz. I guarantee you'll walk away knowing exactly what your next best step is to level up.