Keeping my office desk clear is a constant challenge. Ideally it should be cleared every evening when I shut down. Sometimes, I feel so used up that I just walk away from it. I do make a real effort to clear it on Friday before I leave the office but even then, once in a great while I am just too exhausted. Where does the clutter come from? It is important for me to understand how I let this happen. When I look at the desk, I see a lot of items that were taken out of my rolling work…
When I think about balance the first thing that comes to mind is a seesaw. When two people are on the seesaw, the lighter one goes up in the air faster and the heavier one stays down on the ground longer. They are never completely level, unless they work to get there. If we are talking about creating balance in your life, we are never talking about just two things. Demands on your time There are always lots of different things demanding your attention. Even if you are a single person, you have your home, your work life, your extended…
The holidays have come and gone and now it’s time to put all the lovely holiday décor away and make a clean sweep for the new year. While it would lovely if we could just say “Alexa, un-trim my tree!”, it is not going to happen. This is our task, and we want to do it right. Take your time with this effort. Carefully put each item away in its storage container where it belongs. The next year you will thank the now you for doing it correctly this year. I have seven tried and true tips to make this process…
There’s a lot that goes into making a celebratory meal. These big event meals don’t just happen. You plan a menu, figure out how to make the different dishes (if you haven’t made them before), shop, prepare, cook, set the table and the list goes on. Wow! I’m exhausted just writing about it! This list of things to do to prepare the meal for others is endless. The one thing not on the list is that you want to be able to enjoy the meal just as much as everyone else! The key to making a celebratory meal and enjoying…
Does this ever happen to you? You look at your dining room table. It looks like a small bomb went off. Maybe you wonder how this happened? Well, my dining room table looks this way because it has been a hectic week for me. Let’s look at what happened during my week. How things landed on my dining room table I came home from a client who gave me some coffee. I dropped the coffee bags on the table, made a run for the bathroom, and then started lunch. On my way home from my client I stopped and picked…
Do you feel stuck? Picture this: you have a list of things to do, you know how to do everything on your list, but you can’t get yourself to do anything. Are you frustrated by this feeling? Maybe your list of things to do is so long that you feel overwhelmed by all you have to do. I took a class last week presented by Dr. Sasha Heinz. She calls this being consciously stuck. Dr. Heinz says there’s a divide between good intentions and action. You can want to do lots and lots of things but until you create a…
Basically, I am a minimalist when it comes to decorating my home. But when the Christmas holidays come around, I tend to go all out. However, each person is unique. And how we feel each year about decorating our home for the holiday can be different. It’s important to listen to yourself and decorate as much or as little as feels good. How much is enough? The year after my husband died, I was not going to mess with the tree and decorating for the holidays. Fortunately, others intervened, and that tree went up. I have one client who is…
When your children grow up and move into their own homes, they need to have the skills to take care of their home. Teach your children to be self-reliant by giving them chores to do around the house. You may think you are doing them a favor as they get older by taking over the chores, helping them solve their problems, and making sure their lives run smoothly but you are not. When young adults, living on their own are not self-reliant they run into all sorts of roadblocks. Homes become messy, laundry piles up, and things get lost in…
Gift season is almost upon us. It is hard to imagine the holidays without giving and receiving gifts. Giving gifts makes us feel good as we imagine our loved ones opening our gift with delighted smiles or squeals of joy. As a fairly new grandmother, I want to find the perfect gift for my grandson. I also want to shower his parents with thoughtful presents. Besides family, we also like to give gifts to friends and to people who have gone out of their way for us. But before we pull out our credit card and start scrolling through items to…
When something goes wrong there is often a silver lining within the problem – something that either didn’t go wrong or that worked out despite the problem. We call these things small blessings. If you can always keep a weather eye out for small blessings and then celebrate them then things may not appear so grim. Here are some tricks to help you find the silver lining in almost any situation. What else could have happened? A couple of weeks ago there was a big storm that swept through Atlanta. I had some HUGE (I do mean HUGE) branches come…
