At least once a year I get all excited about my “trashcan” exercise in helping you find out your totally embedded behaviors that are probably keeping you from being easily effective, on time and relaxed. If you are wanting to get back on track with your effectiveness and to find out where your “stops” are for getting easily back on track, you certainly want to do the trashcan exercise this week. Oh yes, this can also help reduce all those icky stressors.
It is simple.
Move your trashcan to another location in the room that it is in. I suggest if you have more than you in the household, you might want to move a more personal trashcan. Otherwise, you are going to have everyone in the family involved and it can get testy.
Why move the trashcan you ask? It is an easy, fast, and fully reliable way of showing you how embedded your current behaviors are. How rigid you have become about simple changes or issues with your boss, team, family, colleagues, clients.
When prospective clients ask about coaching and what is the benefit having a coach to help direct their change…which they could probably do themselves…I suggest they do the trashcan moving exercise for one week.
February is the perfect time to do this exercise. We are far enough into the new year and far enough away from the new year’s resolution decisions to have this take on real significance for those of you who want to make such changes and are not making the changes for whatever the reason.
Exercise: Decide the trashcan you want to move. (Again I don’t suggest moving the kitchen trashcan, if you have a family, as it can become messy.) Keep track of the 7 days you moved the trashcan and then evaluate your behavior around this exercise. It’s that easy. Also that hard at the same time. You can start today. Most of my potential clients moved their office/cubicle trashcan. Some moved their bathroom trashcan. One brave soul decided to move all the trashcans in their home to show me that this exercise was foolish and would not work.
Even if you move your office trash 2 feet and not across the room, this exercise will work.
What you will find out:
- You do not like change
- You do not remember to stop throwing your trash in the wrong place
- You do not like the reminder that you are habitual and cannot remember this exercise
- You get cranky easily – my goodness it is only a trashcan
“My God Natalie, whatever. Seriously.”
My highly successful and bright coaching clients and audiences are dismayed with how embedded their “trash throwing away” behavior is and how that relates to making other changes in their lives.
Most of us want to get back on track to creating:
- Success without pain
- Planning that works
- Completion of projects on time
- Strategies that are valuable
- Time management skills that serve us
It is not that we are completely lost and out of line…or off track. But we are wavering pretty closely to just not getting things done well, effectively and on time. The excuse list gets longer and the recovery time to creating effectiveness gets clouded with too much to do.
“ I can get that done easily and quickly” might have been your method in the past, but with more responsibilities and that #$%^&*() email filling up your box, life has gotten complicated.
Ok, so now you have done the 7 day trashcan exercise and have found out that you really have some embedded behaviors you would like to change. You have discovered some habits that do not serve you in the least.
Getting you back on track is what I do. You as a highly successful, bright and talented person deserve to get out of your own way and create some easy and fast effectiveness. Sometimes we are moving too quickly to notice that we can do it better, faster and easier with a bit of direction, help and support. Let’s have a call.
Also, I will hear you cursing my name this week with the trashcan test. I forgive you.
2015 is remarkable already. How are you doing?
Natalie