Living Spaces

Kathleen Shannon 0:00
Hello and welcome to being boss minisode number 14.

Kathleen Shannon 0:09
This minisode is brought to you by our sponsor fresh books cloud accounting. Fresh books is the easy to use invoicing software designed to help creative entrepreneurs get organized, save time invoicing, and get paid faster. Now I know most of us did not become creatives and become our own bosses, just to deal with accounting and billing all day. And that's why I love freshbooks. It's so easy to use, you save time billing, you get organized, and you get paid fast, and you can grow your business without having to have a degree in business. And some of the things I love most about freshbooks is invoicing and billing, capturing my expenses and tracking my expenses as I go. And creating estimates and quotes and then turning those into invoices, generating reports. I love being able to generate a profit and loss report and just see really quickly where I'm at in my business. And freshbooks also has amazing customer support. You can call or email and get a real person and I love that so much. They also have mobile apps for iPhone, iPad, and Android. Stay on top of your business with a clear picture of its financial health. Try fresh books for free today. Go to freshbooks.com/beingboss and enter being boss in the How did you hear about us section.

Kathleen Shannon 1:31
All right onto today's minisode. In today's minisode, I'm going to share with you how your environment can impact your work and life. And what you can do to pinpoint areas of strength and areas of weakness just by looking at where you live and work. So this started last week, whenever we were chatting with chalene Johnson in Episode Number 20 of being boss, and you can find our interview with her at lovebeingboss.com. So chalene was teaching us how to do some goal setting. And one of the things that she had us do is rank the different areas of our life, like physical, emotional romance, careers, and one of them was environment. And she had us rank each area from one to 10. One being the least satisfactory, and 10 being totally satisfied.

Kathleen Shannon 2:21
Now, I didn't think too hard as I was ranking the areas of my life. And I was really surprised when I found that my environment, the place where I spend most of my time ranked the lowest on my list. Now I work from home and I love my house. So I was really confused as to why I had such a low ranking there. After the show, I began to examine what was really going on in my space. And to do that I actually use the tool that I was taught when I was going through life coach training with Martha Beck. So this tool is called living spaces. And I want to share it with you today here. The idea is to imagine that you're giving someone a tour of your home or even your office if that's where you spend most of your time. walk them through your house room by room and you can literally pretend and walk through your home and do this or you can just take a mental picture. Now look at the details in each room. And take note about what you love or don't love in each room of your house or office or space that you spend most of your time. Take note of how the different spaces make you feel.

Kathleen Shannon 3:27
Now once you go through this tour, I want you to write down what your favorite area or room or space is. What do you love about it? And then I want you to take note of your least favorite area. What do you not like about it. And this can be as big or little as an entire room, or even a surface in your house, or even a drawer or your closet. Whenever I did this exercise with Martha Martha Beck, the space that I liked the least was this weird bedroom in my house that was basically a place where I put everything that didn't have a home. So it was filled filled with weird boxes. My husband's drum said that he never played it was collecting dust and a few pieces of just random furniture that didn't have a space in my house. Now, I didn't know if this room should be a guest room or an office or maybe a studio or maybe even a nursery for a baby. And that's when I right clicked. I was feeling really unsettled about whether or not I should start a family and the awkwardness of this room completely revealed that unsettled feeling. So like the room actually manifested the fact that I didn't know if I had room for a baby. Because I was filling this space of junk. I clean up the room and the decision to start a family felt a little bit more clear. Now whenever I've coached creatives through this exercise, I found that a lot of them have cluttered or unorganized offices or some of than don't even have a designated office space, and then they wonder why they feel so disorganized in business or aren't making any income. And on the more personal side, for example, if your bedroom feels a little off, you might take a deeper look into how you could give more attention to your partner or the romance in your life.

Kathleen Shannon 5:19
When I went through this exercise again, we're recently after that episode that we aired earlier this week, I was surprised to find that my closet was my least favorite space. And it really made me reflect on my personal style and how I could invest some time and energy into my wardrobe. So the living spaces tool, it kind of becomes a chicken egg scenario. Once you give us some attention to your physical space, like for example, you give some love to organize your closet, or decluttering your surfaces, or decorating a space that maybe needs a little bit more attention, you may find some mental clarity follows. And on the flip side, you can use this tool as a way to identify what areas may need some more mental, emotional or spiritual work around it. Then you can dig deep and see how that physical space is manifesting some of the mental baggage going on in your head. And then as you give attention to those issues, you can see how the spaces evolve as you begin to put your heart on the issues that it reveals. Alright, that's all I've got for you today. If you like this minisode Be sure to check out our secret episode on cultivating confidence available only at love being boss calm. And don't forget to hashtag being boss podcast on Instagram to show us how you're being boss in work in life. Thank you for giving us a little bit of your time today. Feel free to continue the discussion on our Facebook group. Just search being boss and request to join. I think we also have a link to it in most of our show notes at love being boss calm. And if you haven't already, please be sure to check out all of our full episodes on our website at lovebeingboss.com on iTunes and SoundCloud and even Stitcher. We're also on YouTube. You all have been leaving us amazing reviews on iTunes and it really does make a difference. So thank you for that. Do the work be boss and we'll see you next week.