… Newness generates inspiration, energy, motivation, momentum, new heights… How do you keep things Fresh in your life? How do you inspire and motivate yourself? How do you strive for new heights?
Building on our current Spring Renewal Theme, when we declutter, detox, spring clean and reenergize the outcome is a phenomenal spaciousness, surge, and drive… This generates a new perspective from which anything is possible…There is so much opportunity and beauty in this…
Spaciousness – When we don’t run around like a chicken without a head. When we don’t triple schedule ourselves. When we generously create transition, buffer, down/lazy, unscheduled/open, leisure time. When we allow for time to think, process, plan. We engage our creative juices, problem solving, healing, and other inherent human gifts.
Surge – When we refresh, replenish, and reset, we generate more and better energy. This allows us to connect with our desires and fuel our dreams, our vision, our Journey. This keeps us engaged, interested, curious. This keeps us joyfully in the game.
Drive – When we are properly resourced, we can effortlessly put in what it takes to make what we desire happen… Too often people are not properly resourced and quit midgame… Or, hey, they might not even get in the game. When we are resourced, the fuel allows us to leverage, to pick up momentum, to take off effortlessly.
Some of us operate from this state much more consistently than others, and boy, what a difference it makes. I’m sure you can pick out your colleagues, friends and families that operate from a resourced state vs not… These are the people in your life that are doing well, that seem to have it all together, that seem very lucky, that are effortlessly high producers, that seem to be creating and living the life they want, and more.
When we are resourced, we are able to have a better perspective and approach life differently… This is where the magic happens… Let’s apply this to our relationship:
When we are resourced, we can be the Partner we want to be… When we are resourced, we can show up better and interact with our partner more lovingly and meaningfully… When we are resourced, we can give more grace, be more openminded and more resilient (less easily triggered…). When we are resourced, we can appropriately meet our and our partner’s needs with ease.
Your Assignment this week: Play with the Spring Renewal Theme (see related links below) to resource yourself to the max, and keep playing with this for ongoing benefits… Keep tabs on how you feel, how you are able to show up differently, and how exchanges and outcomes turn out much better than usual…
Why go through your Journey on fumes, sputtering as you go, and potentially running out of gas?! What a terrible way to live. Start resourcing yourself better now and enjoy the ride!
Share your insights and impact by leaving a comment below! I’d love to learn what you are able to accomplish and create when you are resourced.
Copyright (c) 2019 Emma K. Viglucci. All rights reserved.
Want to Use this Article in Your Own Website or Publication?
Be our guest! Here is how, you MUST include: Emma K. Viglucci, LMFT is the Founder and Director of Metropolitan Marriage & Family Therapy, PLLC, a private practice that specializes in working with couples, she is the creator of the MetroRelationship™ philosophy and a variety of Successful Couple™ content that assist couples succeed at their relationship and their life. Stay Connected™ with Emma and receive weekly Connection Notes in your inbox with Personal Growth and Relationship Enrichment insights and strategies, visit: www.metrorelationship.com.
Life is full of little wonderful surprises if we allow ourselves to see them and let them in… When was the last time you were delighted by the unexpected? Are you being flexible with your approach to life, work, schedule, perspectives? Are you letting your energy flow freely? Do you allow your life approach to energize you, sustain you, elevate you? This is how the magic happens…
Embracing the new season, we know that Spring is all about what I call:
The FiveRs – Recharging, Restoring, Renewing, Reinvigorating and Rejuvenating.
After the push of the new year, the grind and the stagnation of winter, it’s time to shake things up to refresh and reenergize ourselves and our world.
How do you keep yourself fresh and going? How do you generate your personal energy? How do you stay motivated and inspired? How do you stay productive, efficient, effective? How do you make a difference? I find these concepts so fascinating as some people rock and others totally struggle with these and their lives.
I’m forever researching, exploring and playing with these to continue to evolve myself and do my own humanness better, but also to bring more awesomeness to you. I integrate my learnings in different ways for easier consumption, assimilation and results. Hence the 5Rs’ flavor in this writing.
The 5Rs help us keep things moving in our desired direction with ease and gusto. They can be applied as we wish to whatever we wish, but here is to getting you started:
Recharge – Tweak your routine to refuel yourself. It is common for our routines to get stale or played out, or for us quit a good one soon into the new year. Spring is a wonderful time to reset ourselves with a touched-up routine that captures our current needs and the new season. This is a great time to start transitioning to warmer weather activities to reawaken us from the slumber or hibernation of winter.
Restore – Address a thorn in your back to restore flow. There are always things in our lives that are annoying, bug us, deplete us or obstruct our way. Our job is to be on an ongoing lookout to prevent allowing these things from embedding themselves and wreaking havoc, and to proactively remove any old ones in our midst. Find your current thorn and pull that sucker out!
Renew – Recommit to a good habit or investment. By definition a habit is something ingrained and not easy to get rid of. Unfortunately, we do get side tracked from good habits regardless. Renew your commitment to a good habit you desire in your life that you know supports your Journey.
Reinvigorate – Refocus on a priority. Gosh, life gets so hectic and we take on more than we should in our attempt to live the Successful life we want… Take this opportunity to refocus on your values and your priorities. Keep in mind your desire to feel Peace, Joy and Love… Put your focus on One Thing at a time to Thrive…
Rejuvenate – Think longevity, add a new health/wellness habit. This never gets old for me! I believe I shared with you that one of my life goals is to live to 120… This means I better live a VERY healthy life. LOL I’m working on it. My self-care and wellness routine and the habits within are so amazing.
I’m in love with all the different aspects, tools, products, etc. By no means do I do my extraordinary routine to perfection. But, doing the most and best I can with it makes a huge difference in and of itself. I implore you to take this tactic seriously. It’s literally “life saving”…
I find the human condition so very interesting, with our given uniqueness, set of circumstances and what we do with them… I’m sure every single person reading this resonated with something different, took something different and will apply whatever grabbed them differently…
Our experience being the writer/creator and the reader/consumer is so varied and rich. As we are with each other in shared mediums, we are cocreating our reality… As you take what serves you from this writing and apply it to enhance and enrich your life, you are adding to our collective experience. You doing you better actually serve me as well! Heh?
This is the beauty of our experience, reality and coexistence. We are all in it together. So, let’s make it a real good one! Let’s Energize our Journey…
Share your experience by leaving a comment below! I’d love to learn which R you’ll be playing with.
Copyright (c) 2019 Emma K. Viglucci. All rights reserved.
Want to Use this Article in Your Own Website or Publication?
Be our guest! Here is how, you MUST include: Emma K. Viglucci, LMFT is the Founder and Director of Metropolitan Marriage & Family Therapy, PLLC, a private practice that specializes in working with couples, she is the creator of the MetroRelationship™ philosophy and a variety of Successful Couple™ content that assist couples succeed at their relationship and their life. Stay Connected™ with Emma and receive weekly Connection Notes in your inbox with Personal Growth and Relationship Enrichment insights and strategies, visit: www.metrorelationship.com.
In last week’s issue we covered Detox. Another Springtime favorite is of course – Spring Cleaning. I like to cover the usual topics from a different angle that include a personal growth/wellness and relational enrichment component…
Personal – There is tons to clean out in our personal domain. I’m sure you’ve heard of Marie Kondo, author of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Her philosophy is of only keeping things that Spark Joy… This concept is a great addition to the Minimalism and Essentialism Themes I like to play with for not everything needs to be functional, have utility or a purpose. The purpose can be purely to Spark Joy. Isn’t that a marvelous concept?
Yes, it’s great to Spring Clean in the usual sense – declutter, clear out any build ups, make everything fresh and sparkling. But I like to take this concept to the next level, that of getting rid of accumulation and what doesn’t serve us.This is when the Minimalist/Essentialist lens comes in very handy…
And, I like to apply this concept not just to physical/tangible items, I actually like to apply this concept primarily to non-physical/tangible items… This is why I find the concept of only keeping things that Spark Joy so wonderful.
How many commitments, tasks, projects, people, routines and such are currently in your life that don’t Spark Joy for you? If you’ve been reading me for a while, you probably noticed a weaved-in theme of consistently clearing our environment… A way of keeping up with our lives so we don’t drown in it. Our lives are too full, and a lot of times not of the good stuff… Or the stuff that serves us, enriches our life, Spark Joy for us… So,
H.W. number 1 – do the usual-plus Spring Cleaning, and then super-size it! Organize, freshen up, clear out, and polish your physical environments and systems…
This can range from things like getting a facial and exfoliating your whole body to backing up your significant email from the past 10 years and deleting it from your machine… We did this recently. I kept my email going back only 5 years, and stored everything else back to when I started the Practice… So liberating!
Another example is shredding legal and financial paper documents (if older than 7 years and no longer relevant), converting anything remaining to electronic format as long as it has relevancy and value, and no longer accumulating paper… This was hard for me, I love paper… I’m still making my way out of it. But, I’m making a dent and it makes me super happy to have better systems that really support how I work and play.
As you can see, it’s not just about mopping floors and dusting shelves. It’s about getting rid of stuff from dead cells, to superfluous clothing, to old email, to clunky systems. You with me?
H.W. number 2 – do the deluxe Spring Cleaning! Now, this is where the fun comes in. This is actually a process for enriching and upgrading your life beyond what resulted from the above … The above flows from the Minimalist/Essentialist approach. Now we fine tune with the whatSparks Joy approach.
Step back and take a look at your life. After you cleaned it from the noise, clutter, build-up and extras, it’s time to remove any lingering negativity producing items. Or better yet, anything that doesn’t Spark Joy!
This ranges from what you eat, how you exercise, the music you listen to, what you wear, how you commute, the plants you have (hence the addition of Peonies to my garden!), the pictures on your wall, the subscriptions you allow, the social media you partake in, the groups you belong to, people you spend time with, the daily tasks you perform, everything is up for question… Why have anything in your life you don’t like?
This might feel a bit radical to you (Radical begets change…). Specially if you subscribe to the mindset that life is a struggle, that you should endure suffering, that you become a better person by overcoming challenges, and such…
I believe there is value in those beliefs, but I’m also becoming a stronger proponent of making life as simple, enjoyable and meaningful as possible. There is no need to get stuck in the struggle… We can take what we are meant to have from it when faced with it, and then move on to the next best thing…
Review everything with this new lens. Make it a mission to start removing things that don’t Spark Joy, and to only allow things in your life that Spark Joy…
Relational – And, speaking of which, what better source of Joy than our loved ones? Specially our Partner?
Believe me I know that our loved ones, including our Partner, are not always a source of Joy… Sometimes it’s actually quite the opposite. But it doesn’t have to be. The same concept as above can be applied to relationships…
You say, What? Yes, I’m not kidding. Translate H.W.1 and H.W.2 to relational terms…
Relational HW1 – Clean the basics and then some…
Context/Mindset – Clean your negative, blaming, assuming, reactive thinking
Communication/Alignment – Clean your verbal and non-verbal communication from interruptions, poor eye-contact, distracted listening, raising your voice, name calling
Clarity/Dynamics – Clean your predictable response, let go of the script, the chip on the shoulder, the defenses
Connection/Intimacy – Clean/close your exits, remove activities and things that take away from connection, intimacy, and fun
Collaboration/Partnership – Clean your systems, routines, plans, calendars, to-dos
Relational HW2 – do the deluxe cleaning…
This means that after you remove all the junk you put in your interactions and contribute to your dissatisfying dynamics (which is no easy feat to begin with…), that you step it up a notch. The next level is to clean out responses, tendencies, habits, and idiosyncrasies that don’t serve you nor your loved one. These are subtle but still carry negativity and have a corrosive impact on the relationship.
These might include things like talking too loud, driving too fast, taking long showers, leaving stuff all over the place, keeping a pristine environment at whatever cost, burping and other unseemly behaviors, digging into a meal before the other joins, having poor manners, being noisy while the other sleeps, being on your device while the other is talking, etc. etc. Being inconsiderate… These definitely don’t Spark Joy!
Sometimes relationships get so flooded with these types of behaviors that the partners stop liking each other. It’s so silly! To disrupt this pattern, I have been known to tell partners to treat their partner as if they are roommates… for they’d actually be nicer and more considerate!
We can be really annoying and even mean without even realizing it, or realizing it but not giving a hoot about it. This carelessness chips away at the bond and the beauty of the relationship, at the possibilities of the partnership… These suck the Joy out of the relationship…
So, what say you? Are you ready to Spring Clean your personal domain and your relationship? When you get to the Deluxe Cleaning, it’ll be like cleaning the windows of your Soul… You’ll be stepping it up, Aligning with Joy…
I covered a lot of territory to assist you in whatever area, way, and level is right for you… Note, you don’t have to do it all, and definitely not all at once… Start playing with one item from the Personal Domain and one from the Relational. That small investment will give you massive returns in and of itself. Keep targeting small bits at a time for a richer life and relationship…
Share your experience by leaving a comment below! I’d love to know what are your and your partner’s pet peeves – what would you target in your Deluxe Cleaning?
Copyright (c) 2019 Emma K. Viglucci. All rights reserved.
Want to Use this Article in Your Own Website or Publication?
Be our guest! Here is how, you MUST include: Emma K. Viglucci, LMFT is the Founder and Director of Metropolitan Marriage & Family Therapy, PLLC, a private practice that specializes in working with couples, she is the creator of the MetroRelationship™ philosophy and a variety of Successful Couple™ content that assist couples succeed at their relationship and their life. Stay Connected™ with Emma and receive weekly Connection Notes in your inbox with Personal Growth and Relationship Enrichment insights and strategies, visit: www.metrorelationship.com.
We are usually mindful of keeping a clean home, garage, car, office, etc. We make efforts at staying clutter free and squeaky clean. We trash, recycle, donate and put our stuff on eBay, bring to consignments shops, have garage sales or send to less fortunate countries.
We clean our bodies from within with different detox or cleanse programs. We even clean our minds with different forms of meditation. Some of us put more effort into this than others of course, but fewer of us put this or any effort into cleansing our Relationship!
Yes, cleansing our relationship. Your relationship and its vitality have a huge impact on your general health, productivity, life satisfaction and overall wellness.
Relationships can be filthy, cluttered and unhealthy with:
Bad Habits – Poor hygiene or self-care, cutting the other off when speaking or finishing their sentences, endlessly speaking about oneself and showing no interest in the other’s world, allowing distractions during meals or talks, taking other people’s sides in stories, running late, and not keeping promises.
Not making timely plans and keeping them, not cleaning up after oneself, not showing common courtesies (a call when running late, offering food when getting oneself something, saying thank you, not making noise when the other is sleeping, not leaving dishes in the sink, not leaving hair in the shower or wet towels on the bed, etc.).
Chaos – Not having a consistent place for things and putting things away, not having a consistent agreed upon routine, calling insistently and leaving disgruntled messages, reacting to petty things and blowing things out of proportion, not finishing tasks or conversations, juggling a lot of things simultaneously and operating with constant stress.
Not saying no and allowing multiple demands to tug at you, not setting clear expectations and limits, not having support, now working as a team, undermining each other, operating from own agendas.
Enmeshment – Doing everything together, not having own interests or personal time, telling each other how to be, behave, think, feel and having a running commentary in one’s mind about this, not allowing for individuality and uniqueness, putting own needs aside consistently for the other, not identifying own needs and being overly caring of the other.
Worrying about what the other is or is not doing, not having own voice, pushing for “We” at expense of “I”.
Disconnect – Having a limited repertoire of joint activities, not eating meals together, going to bed at different times, having only personal pursuits, having too much alone or with own group time, not sharing inner world (feelings, thoughts, wishes, dreams, concerns), not sharing one’s activities / world.
Having more separate plans than joint, not having joint goals, not sharing a calendar, paying bills separately.
Neglect – Lack of TLC, having a limited repertoire of intimate moves or approach to intimacy, having “sex” less than one time per week, not showing appreciation or acknowledgment, not checking in throughout the day, not greeting each other hello or goodbye and having that include touching.
Not sharing affection, not being on each other’s priority list, not being thoughtful with little things (getting partner a drink when getting oneself one, using all the hot water, doing only one’s laundry, not picking up the cleaners, not putting in gas in the car, eating the last of a favorite dish or dessert, etc.).
Toxic Interactions – Disrespect with yelling, cursing, interrupting, or digging at the other, not supporting activities, wishes, or the other’s uniqueness and needs, undermining by not keeping agreements, setting up interactions not conducive to the task at hand, and controlling by “owning” the other.
Manipulation to get own way or not allow the other to get theirs, passive-aggressiveness in not showing up and being accountable, criticism, banter and jokes at the other’s expense, constant complaining and whining, gossiping about others and leaking energy out of the relationship, lies, cover ups and secrets, resentment, anger and lack of resolution to concerns, not allowing each other to express feelings, not allowing each other to be their own person, being self absorbed
If any of these are a part of your relationship, it can stand to have a little Spring Cleaning.
Pick a couple of items from above to address and get rid of them pronto!
Don’t let them accumulate and deprive you of a healthy, thriving, joyful, satisfying relationship and its benefits!
Happy Cleaning!
Copyright (c) 2016 Emma K. Viglucci. All rights reserved.
Want to Use this Article in Your Own Website or Publication?
Be our guest! Here is how, you MUST include: Emma K. Viglucci, LMFT is the Founder and Director of Metropolitan Marriage & Family Therapy, PLLC, a private practice that specializes in working with couples, she is the creator of the MetroRelationship™ philosophy and a variety of Successful Couple™ content that assist couples succeed at their relationship and their life. Stay Connected™ with Emma and receive weekly Connection Notes in your inbox with Personal Growth and Relationship Enrichment insights and strategies, visit: www.metrorelationship.com.
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Emma K. Viglucci, LMFT has been in the mental health profession in varying capacities for the past 20+ years. She is the Founder and Director of metrorelationship.com a psychotherapy and coaching practice specializing in working with busy professional and entrepreneurial couples who are struggling getting on the same page and feeling connected. The work helps couples create a radiant and successful relationship and meaningful life by becoming a strong partnership and increasing their connection, intimacy, and fun. Emma is the creator of the MetroRelationship™ philosophy and the Successful Relationship Strategy™.
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